Jeanne de Valois was a notorious French adventuress and thief. She was an impoverished descendant of the Valois royal family
through an illegitimate son of King Henry II. She is known for her prominent role in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, one
of many scandals that led to the French Revolution and helped to destroy the monarchy of France.
Jeanne was the third of six children. Three of her siblings died in infancy, and the three surviving children, Jacques,
Jeanne, and Marie-Anne were neglected, went barefoot, tended the cows, and often found it necessary to beg for food. The family
moved to Boulogne, near Paris where a priest and one of his rich parishioners took care of them. Their Valois ancestry was
ascertained by a genealogist at Versailles, and as a result of legal dispositions set up to help children from poor nobility,
Jacques was granted a yearly stipend and a post in a military academy, while Jeanne and Marie-Anne went to a boarding school.
They were supposed to become nuns in the monastery, but instead chose to go back to civilian life. On 6 June 1780, Jeanne married
Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte. While the de la Motte family's claim to nobility was dubious, both husband and wife assumed the
title
comte and
comtesse de La Motte Valois. Of the three siblings, Jeanne would be the only one to achieve notoriety. Jacques died
on military duty on Saint-Louis Island; Marie-Anne went back to religious life.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace, as it would later be called, started in 1772 when Louis XV developed an infatuation for a woman
30 years his junior, Madame du Barry. Against the urging of his advisors, Louis commissioned the jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge
to procure the diamonds and undertake the not-inconsiderable work of assembling them into what is best described as a series of tasseled
diamond ropes. Needless to say, this put them both in debt up to their proverbial eyeballs. Louis would have helped with the debt, but he
died of smallpox shortly thereafter. The death of Louis XV passed the French throne to Louis XVI, who was married to Marie Antoinette of Austria.
This proved to be wildly unpopular with the French people who, their performance in certain 20th century conflicts notwithstanding, do not
generally prefer to be ruled by an Austrian. Further compounding things, XVI - despite being a 15 year old boy at the time of his marriage, was unable
to consummate the marriage for about seven years.
Boehmer and Bassenge seized upon the King's marital issues as a way out of their financial troubles. They offered him a the necklace as a way to endear
himself to Marie. Convinced, Louis XVI made the grand gesture in 1778 ,but the Queen was uninterested. Some say it was because Marie Antoinette didn't want
jewelry that was designed for another woman (and one she was none too fond of) but the reason she gave is somewhat more illuminating. Marie Antoinette said
that the money would be better spent equipping a Man O'War.
An aside into naval history: capital ships largely hold steady in terms of their cost as a percentage of GDP. In other words, countries generally spend
about as much (as a percentage) of their national wealth on their biggest and strongest ships as other countries regardless of how rich they happen
to be or what year it is. That means that one can usefully draw a parallel between what France would spend on a ship-of-the-line in 1778 and what the
United States would spend on an aircraft carrier in 2015. Given how difficult it is to assign value to an 18th Century currency which was manipulated
at the will of the crown, this provides a helpful guideline for establishing the cost of this necklace as a percentage of France's budget: think of it as
Michelle Obama turning down a necklace and suggesting that the Pentagon buy a carrier instead.
Enter Jeanne de Valois, who at this time was the mistress of a French Ambassador to the Austrian Court and Cardinal named Louis de Rohan who had
offended the Queen by speaking ill of her mother. Jeanne was also the mistress of a forger and gigolo named Retaux de Vilette. He managed to forge
letters from the Queen intimating that Jeanne had become a close friend and confidante of Marie Antoinette which Jeanne delivered to the Cardinal.
This formed the basis for an ongoing correspondence between the Cardinal and "the Queen" (really Vilette) with Jeanne as the intermediary which continued
for some time, becoming progressively steamier until Cardinal Rohan convinced himself that the Queen was in love with him and begged Jeanne to arrange
a secret late-night "interview" with the Queen of France.
So Jeanne bought the services of Nicole Leguay, a Marie Antoinette look-alike prostitute, smuggled her into the palace at Versailles and arranged for Rohan to meet
with her. Rohan exchanged words and a rose with the "Queen" who assured him that all of their disagreements were behind them. Jeanne took advantage of the
Cardinal's belief in her by borrowing large sums of money from him, telling him that they were for the Queen’s charity work. With this money, Jeanne was able to
make her way into respectable society. Because she openly boasted about her relationship with the Queen, many assumed the relationship was genuine. At this point
the highly indebted jewelers re-entered the scene. They still very much wanted to offload the diamond necklace and asked Jeanne to convince Marie Antoinette to buy
it from them (and offered her a commission for her troubles).
Jeanne and Villette forged up an order for the necklace in the Queen's hand which she passed off to Cardinal Rohan. Jeanne told the Cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted
to buy the necklace but, not wishing to purchase such an expensive item publicly during a time of need, the Queen wanted the Cardinal to act as a secret intermediary.
A little while later, Rohan negotiated the purchase of the necklace for 2,000,000 livres, to be paid in installments. He claimed to have the Queen's authorization for the
purchase, and showed the jewelers the conditions of the bargain in the Queen's handwriting. Rohan took the necklace to Jeanne's house, where Jeanne's husband, dressed
as a valet, came to fetch it. He then secretly took the necklace to London, where it was broken up to sell the large individual diamonds separately.
While they were not directly implicated and could have tried the swindlers without publicity, the King and the Queen insisted on a public trial to defend their honor. Nevertheless,
the trial actually had the opposite effect and destroyed the reputation of the Queen, because the public saw her as the guilty party. The Cardinal was found not guilty and acquitted.
King Louis XVI promptly had him exiled. Rétaux de Villette was found guilty of forgery and exiled. Nicole Leguay was acquitted. Jeanne was found guilty and sentenced to be whipped,
branded with a V (for
voleuse, meaning "thief") on each shoulder, and sent to life imprisonment. The public sympathized with her. She soon escaped disguised as a boy and made her
way to London where, in 1789, she published her memoirs, which attempted to justify her actions while casting blame upon her chief victim, Marie Antoinette.
Despite the findings to the contrary, many people in France persisted in the belief that the Queen had used Jeanne and her husband as an instrument to satisfy her hatred of Cardinal Rohan.
This led to a huge decline in the Queen's popularity and encouraged an image of her among the masses as a manipulative spendthrift, interested more in vanity than in the welfare of France.
She never recovered from the scandal and the fire of hatred for the royal family intensified until it culminated in the French Revolution.
Originally Posted by Funderfullness
