By Jonathan Beckman
John Murray, £20
In 1786, le tout Paris was transfixed by the sensational trial of Cardinal Rohan, accused not only of stealing a 2,800-carat diamond necklace but of implicating Marie Antoinette in the process. A rollicking tale of scheming mendacity, the affaire has long been considered a footnote to the last days of the ancien régime. But, according to Jonathan Beckman (echoing Napoleon who, holed up on Elba and pondering the vagaries of history, concluded that "the queen's death must be dated from the Diamond Necklace trial"), it was a pivotal episode in the years leading up to the Revolution.
Impoverished schemer and social climber Jeanne de la Motte dreamed of an aristocratic lifestyle. Rohan, frustrated in his ambition to be appointed chief minister of the realm by his sour relationship with the queen, was thrilled when Jeanne promised that she could effect a reconciliation.
Jeanne saw in Rohan's desperation a reflection of her own ambition and seized the opportunity to set in motion a ronde of deceit and greed. In the febrile atmosphere of 18th-century Paris, her ambitious machinations proved worthy of her determination. She persuaded Rohan to act as go-between for the Boehmers, creators of a gargantuan necklace of 647 diamonds (probably commissioned by Louis IV for his mistress, who died before it was delivered). Virtually ruined, they needed to persuade the queen - pretty much the only person who could afford it - to buy it, but Marie Antoinette despised such ostentatious jewellery and emphatically refused.
Jeanne, inspired by the royal taste for theatrical excess, hired a young courtesan to meet Rohan in the gardens of Versailles one moonlit night, costumed to resemble the queen. Persuaded as much by his own desperation as by the trick visited on him that this brief, non-verbal encounter with the queen meant she was ready to pardon him, Rohan fell in with Jeanne's plan.
She hired a courtesan to pretend, one moonlit night, to be the Queen
Using impressive acuity to exploit his vanity, Jeanne persuaded him to reply to a series of letters from the queen that she had forged; his replies became increasingly baroque if not outright amorous. Eventually he managed to convince the Boehmers to hand over the necklace, promising the first tranche of payment in six months. Jeanne pledged to convey the necklace to the queen. The Boehmers and Rohan waited on tenterhooks for Marie Antoinette to appear wearing the necklace; when this failed to transpire, the desperate jewellers were forced to beg the somewhat confused queen to honour their agreement. The plot soon unravelled; on the orders of the king, Rohan and Jeanne were arrested and sent to the Bastille. The subsequent trial lasted nine months, with Rohan eventually acquitted and Jeanne branded (V for voleuse) on both shoulders and imprisoned.
During the trial, extravagant details of the Versailles court were salaciously raked over and the queen's reputation irreparably damaged, ultimately leading, Beckman convincingly claims, to the bloody demise of the monarchy.
Peppered with notorious characters and digressions on 18th-century theatre and the novel and conveying the feverish, dramatic atmosphere of the court, How to Ruin a Queen, with its deftly managed cornucopia of detail, is a spirited retelling of a most improbable scandal.
