Diamonds were her Downfall! Marie Antoinette was innocent of the bizarre scandal that destroyed her name (it really DID involve an actress and a bishop…) But the French Queen’s hunger for jaw-dropping jewellery helped doom her just the same
- Marie Antoinette was executed 230 years ago this week
- Her appetite for gems worth millions helped destroy the monarchy itself
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The most famous story about Marie Antoinette is false. She never said ‘let them eat cake’, a sentiment first recorded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau before she had ever left Austria and written, in any case, about a Spanish queen.
Yet extravagance, hers and that of the French court, were very much a part of Marie
Antoinette’s downfall, and nothing about her was more extravagant than her jewellery.
A 1775 portrait of Marie-Antoinette, her hair adorned and braided with jewels
The Archduchess Marie Antoinette as a child. She was just 14 when betrothed to the future Louis XVI of France. Her new life would be filled with jewellery – but this would contribute towards her downfall
There were no gems to be seen when Marie Antoinette was guillotined in 1793
Of course, the gems were nowhere to be seen in October 1793, when the Austrian-born Queen stepped from the cart to the scaffold for the guillotine – 230 years ago this week.
Glittering jewels became a part of Marie Antoinette’s life and a symbol of her status from the moment she arrived in France 23 years earlier.
The daughter of Austria’s Holy Roman Empress, Marie Antoinette was betrothed to the Dauphin, heir to the French throne, and travelled from Vienna to Paris at the age of just 14.
When she arrived at a wooden pavilion constructed on a sandbank in the Rhine for her ‘handover’ to the French Bourbon monarchy, the girl’s belongings and retinue, including clothes, ladies-in-waiting and pet pug were sent back to Austria.
All except her jewellery, which included a remarkable 5.46 carat blue diamond ring.
She hardly needed it. Louis XV, then king and grandfather to the Dauphin, ordered the delivery of a sumptuous diamond parure as a personal present.
She also received the spectacular jewels that once belonged to the previous Dauphine, mother of her fiance Louis Auguste, later Louis XVI.
Vincent Meylan, a French jewellery historian, suggests that the new Dauphine was given in the region of two million livres of jewellery on her marriage to the dauphin, estimated to have been worth more than £20m today.
It didn’t stop there.
When Marie Antoinette’s husband Louis XVI ascended the throne in 1774, the French Crown Jewels were already among the most magnificent of all of Europe.
He wanted his queen to act as a showcase for the best jewellers in Paris, however, and proceeded to have many of the important diamonds recut and reset in new designs by houses such as Aubert and Boehmer & Bassange.
Like his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, he saw grand displays of jewellery as statements of power and prestige.
Marie Antoinette was happy to play her part.
In one case she purchased a pair of diamond bracelets by Boehmer when she was already in debt to twice her yearly allowance. (Her husband, the King, ‘lent’ her the money to buy them.)
Among those selling to the Queen was Mellerio, still to this day the oldest jeweller in the world having started in 1613 serving Marie de Medici, former Queen of France.
Mellerio’s pieces included a bracelet composed of seven ruby floral and foliage motifs engraved with the profiles of seven Roman emperors.
Like his wife Marie-Antoinette, Louis met his end on the scaffold. Pictured: A portrait of King Louis XVI painted in the 1770s
Antique fancy-cut ring, the blue-grey diamond weighing a staggering 5.45 carats and once owned by Marie Antoinette
The astonishing diamond necklace was at the heart of a scandal which did huge damage to Marie Antoinette, even though she was completely innocent
Marie Antoinette purchased a pair of diamond bracelets by Boehmer when she was already in debt to twice her yearly allowance
Queen Marie Antoinette’s Pearl, diamond and natural pearl pendant, three row natural pearl and diamond necklace, single-strand natural pearl necklace, a pair of natural pearl and diamond pendant earrings, diamond double ribbon bow brooch, and a monogrammed ring
The Marie-Antoinette pearls displayed at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris,
Yet when it came to the episode which did her reputation the greatest harm – and helped damage the Bourbon monarchy itself – Marie Antoinette was blameless.
Playing out from 1784-5, this was the extraordinary Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which Marie Antoinette and a figure called Cardinal de Rohan fell victim to a female confidence trickster .
Not long before he died in 1784, Louis XV commissioned Boehmer and Bassange to make a necklace of ‘incomparable beauty’ for his mistress, Madame du Barry.
By the time the jewellers had sourced and set the diamonds at an immense cost of 1.6 million livres, however, the king was dead and Madame du Barry banished from court – leaving Boehmer and Bassange in great difficulty.
The jewellers tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette and her husband, now King Louis VI, but twice the piece was rejected.
RINGS INSPIRED BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO BE AUCTIONED
One of the ‘Rings of Heaven’ made to celebrate Marie Antoinette’s first child
A selection of rings and a brooch made to celebrate Marie Antoinette’s first child are to be auctioned next week at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury.
Worn by royalist well-wishers in France and Georgian England, they were inspired by rings the Queen had herself worn in an act of thanksgiving for the news that she was expecting after eight childless years of marriage.
Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was born in 1778.
Her mother wore several of these ‘Rings of Heaven’, as they were known, designed to represent a celestial sky.
The shanks of the ring supported a foiled plaque of cobalt-blue enamel, or glass, studded with diamonds.
Boehmer and Bassange were astounded. The extraordinary necklace was designed with 2,800 carats of diamonds, including 647 old brilliant-cut – seventeen of which were as large as hazelnuts and set in rows from which were suspended pear-shapes in various sizes; tasselled festoons of diamonds, made popular in 1775 by the Prince of Monaco, hung dramatically below.
Failure to sell it threatened ruin.
Boehmer even went to Marie Antoinette begging her to buy it, saying he would kill himself if she did not. She told him to stop being a fool, break it up and sell it in several pieces.
This is where Jeanne de la Motte makes her appearance. She had met and become the mistress of Cardinal de Rohan, a former French ambassador to Vienna, who was disliked by Queen Marie-Antoinette for spying on her.
The cardinal was keen to rekindle his relationship with the Queen and on discovering this, Jeanne de la Motte encouraged him to write – which he did. But the Queen’s increasingly affectionate ‘replies’ had been written by the fraudster, Jeanne de la Motte herself.
Believing, preposterously, that Marie Antoinette was in love with him, the Cardinal was induced to meet and converse with a woman he thought to be the queen. This was, in fact, a prostitute hired to play the part.
So when the Cardinal eventually received a letter from the ‘Queen’ asking him to organise the purchase of the diamond necklace for her, he was happy to do so, showing Boehmer and Bassange the correspondence as proof.
The jewels were handed over, Madame de la Motte, removed the diamonds from their settings and sold them on the black market in Paris and London. And when Boehmer sought payment, Marie Antoinette duly confirmed that she knew nothing.
Jeanne de la Motte was convicted, whipped, branded and jailed.
Yet in the court of public opinion, the Queen remained guilty of fraudulent behaviour, not to mention extravagance stretching credulity. Her reputation was badly damaged – dangerously so, in fact.
Beyond the gates of Versailles, people were starving. The French harvest had already failed several times in preceding years when, notoriously, it failed catastrophically in 1788. One of the harshest winters in living memory then followed.
The contrast could not have been more striking when in May 1789 the king and queen opened the Estates General ostentatiously dressed in gold and silver cloth.
A diamond ring bearing the initials MA for Marie Antoinette and containing a lock of her hair
Pictured: Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in the 2006 Sophie Coppola film of the same name
Pictured: Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI and Kirsten Dunst in the title role in Sophie Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette
Louis VI wore the Order of the Golden Fleece, set with the famous French Blue (now known as the Hope Diamond in the Smithsonian).
Marie Antoinette wore her diamonds – the de Guise and the Mirror of Portugal with the Sancy in her hair and two of the 18 Mazarins, surrounded by smaller diamonds, suspended from her ears.
The king proclaimed that he needed more money – and wanted to raise taxes.
Two months later, the Bastille was stormed. The Revolution had begun
- Josie Goodbody is a jewellery expert and novelist
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