Jeanne de la Motte
Jeanne de la Motte was the adventuress who ran the diamond necklace affair, the swindle of 1785 in which a cardinal was made to believe he was buying a 1,600,000-livre necklace on the queen's behalf, the necklace was broken up and sold in London, and the trial that followed left Marie Antoinette, who had known nothing of it, disgraced in the public mind four years before the Revolution. She was born in 1756 into a ruined family that could prove its descent from a bastard of Henry II, was a beggar-child in the road at Passy when a marquise took her up, and had a pension, a title and a husband, a gendarme officer who called himself a count, by the time she came to Versailles to petition for the return of the family lands. She got nothing there and found a protector in Cardinal de Rohan, the Grand Almoner, who had been in disgrace with the queen for years and wanted a way back. She told him she was the queen's intimate, forged letters from the queen in a secretary's hand, and in August 1784 arranged a night meeting in the gardens of Versailles at which a prostitute who resembled the queen handed the cardinal a rose. In January 1785 she brought him the jewellers' necklace, which the queen had twice refused as too dear, and a forged authorisation signed Marie Antoinette de France, which no queen of France would have signed; Rohan bought it on credit in the queen's name and gave it to her to deliver, and her husband took the stones to London. The jewellers went to the queen for payment in August 1785, the king had the cardinal arrested in the Hall of Mirrors in his vestments, and the Parlement of Paris tried the case. In May 1786 it acquitted Rohan, which was read as a verdict against the queen, and sentenced Jeanne to be whipped, branded on the shoulder with a V for voleuse, and imprisoned for life in the Salpetriere. She fought the executioner and was branded on the breast. She escaped in June 1787 in men's clothes, with help that was never explained, and in London published memoirs presenting herself as the queen's discarded lover, which sold in every edition. She died in August 1791 after falling or jumping from a window while hiding from bailiffs.
- Lived: 1756 CE – 1791 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: adventuress, swindler
