it's tacky and I hate it
Or, episode 95 of my hit tv show "Never Trust a Cardinal," starring Jeanne de la Motte
Hi friends!
I first heard the story I’m about to tell you on Vulgar History, the enormously entertaining women’s history podcast hosted by my friend Ann Foster. Ann is a fantastic storyteller and a delight besides, so give her podcast a listen if you like that sort of thing.
Our story this week has everything: Tacky jewelry! High-stakes heists! Fake nobility! Salacious cardinals! Cross-dressing! Defenestration! A scandal with a catchy name! (You know I love a scandal with a catchy name.)
So sit down, pour yourself a glass of fancy French wine, and enjoy the tale of…
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace!
(I’m aware this sounds like the name of an Agatha Christie novel. That only makes me love it even more.)
Our story begins in a little town in northeastern France, where our hero was born in 1756. Her name for sure was Jeanne, but literally that’s the only part I’m sure about. She went by “Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte” throughout her life, claiming to be a direct descendent of France’s King Henri II on her father’s side through a series of bastard children and other scandals.
This 18th-century version of ancestry dot com probably wouldn’t have held up in court, but did it stop Jeanne from swanning around her parents’ cow farm like she was the next heir to the throne?
Obviously not. Our girl Jeanne’s personality was made up of one thing, and that thing was the audacity.
Here’s an example. In her early twenties, Jeanne and her sister were supposed to become nuns at a monastery, because that was one of like four life paths for 20-something French women at the time. I’ll give you exactly one guess what Jeanne did instead.
If you guessed “Ran away from the monastery, hid in some guy’s house, hooked up with the army officer who was temporarily staying there like she’s Lydia goddamn Bennet, and then persuaded him to marry her to preserve her reputation,” you would be correct.
Honestly, I respect her hustle. Jeanne would have been the worst nun of all time.
PSA: Don’t Trust a Cardinal
Being the wife of an army officer was a step up from being a cow farmer, but Jeanne had her eye on something grander. She liked the good things in life: flashy clothes, fun nights on the town. Jeanne was the 1780s embodiment of “TiK ToK” by Ke$ha: she was born 300+ years before P. Diddy, but she still woke up in the morning feeling like him.
And there was only one place on earth for a girl with vibes like that: the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Jeanne desperately wanted a piece of that sweet sweet Versailles lifestyle, and so she did what any aggressively upwardly mobile Frenchwoman would do. She lurked around Versailles in her best dresses, hoping the queen would see her, become friends with her, and give her money.
I’ve read about worse ideas in history, to be fair.
But Marie Antoinette had heard stories around town about Jeanne “P. Diddy” de la Motte, and she wanted to stay as far away as possible from our scandalous heroine. So this particular strategy wasn’t going to work out.
Never fear, though! If there’s one thing Jeanne always had, it’s a backup scheme! The queen might not be on her side in her quest for glory and riches, but do you know who was?
Both of her lovers, that’s who!
Middle-Class Militiaman had been a good stepping-stone husband for Jeanne, but it definitely wasn’t a love match—more of a “I would strongly prefer not to be a nun right now” match. So in Paris, Jeanne started hooking up with Rétaux de Villette, her husband’s fellow militiaman and by all accounts a real piece of shit.
And then, to keep things spicy, Jeanne also started hooking up with Cardinal Louis de Rohan.
Now, I shouldn’t even need to tell you that Rohan is an asshole. Literally nothing good has ever happened to anyone who started sleeping with a cardinal. Read Dumas. Read Webster. Watch The Borgias. It has never ended well for anybody, not once, ever.
DO NOT SLEEP WITH CARDINALS. I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BE CLEARER ABOUT THIS.
Anyway, Cardinal de Rohan was an ambitious, horny sonofabitch, and de Villette was also an ambitious, horny sonofabitch, and Jeanne came up with a plan to use both of them to her own social advantage.
And that plan…
Was a GODDAMN HEIST.
Oceans Eight(eenth Century)
OK, so a quick zoom out, for context-setting. At this point, it’s 1784, and the big scandal among the Parisian nobility has to do with what might actually be the world’s ugliest necklace.
Louis XV, the current king’s dad, had it commissioned for his favorite mistress, Madame du Berry. It required so many diamonds and so much craftsmanship that Louis XV literally died before it was finished. And this was a problem for the craftsmen for two reasons:
Dead kings usually don’t pay the bills for the jewelry they’ve commissioned
This necklace was worth the modern-day equivalent of FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS
So the jewelers had to find something to do with the necklace. They were hopeful that Marie Antoinette might buy it, but for some reason the queen wasn’t particularly interested in shelling out 15 million bucks for an ugly necklace made for her husband’s dad’s side piece.
(Sidebar: it is important to me that you understand exactly how ugly this necklace is.
Can you imagine wearing this in public. The sheer amount of tit diamonds one would have to contend with. This tacky disaster probably weighs like 40 pounds and it looks like a reasonably-ugly diamond necklace got into a fight with a pair of curtains. I hate it.)
What does this hideous piece of jewelry have to do with anything, you ask? Well, Jeanne de la Motte knew about this necklace. And she had come up with a way to use her two boy toys to steal it. Because if she couldn’t be besties with the queen, she could at least be filthy fucking rich.
Here’s how the plot went down.
Step One: Convince Cardinal de Rohan that Marie Antoinette was in love with him.
Cardinal de Rohan was out of favor with Marie Antoinette, probably because he was a sleazy dirtbag and Marie Antoinette knew better than to trust a cardinal. Jeanne made the cardinal believe she was best buds with Marie Antoinette—remember: she was not—and offered to carry his letters directly so that he could beg for the queen’s favor.
Instead, Jeanne took these letters back to de Villette, who was apparently a master forger as well as a horny asshole. They wrote their own replies to the cardinal, making him believe that the queen had not only forgiven him, but had fallen in love with him.
This was great fucking news for Cardinal de Rohan, who is getting Malvolio-ed so hard in this story I can’t even stand it. But the cardinal wasn’t a total dupe: he asked for Jeanne to arrange a meeting between him and the queen, so he could be sure he was really communicating with the queen of France.
Which brings us to…
Step Two: Hire a prostitute-slash-Marie-Antoinette-impersonator.
This is pretty self-explanatory. Cardinal de Rohan exchanged some loving words with a prostitute that looked a lot like Marie Antoinette, his suspicions were allayed, and the scheme could continue.
Step Three: Send the cardinal out on a little shopping trip.
After the fake relationship had been going for a while, Jeanne sent the cardinal a letter that basically said:
Hey, Cardinal de Rohan, my dearest love,
It would be super great if you could stop by the jeweler’s and pick up that hideous necklace my husband’s dad made for his mistress. I’d go get it myself, but, you know, I feel like that might piss off my starving subjects, so it’d be way better if you could do it. Tell them I’ll send the money by later.
Kisses,
Marie Antoinette The Totally Real Queen of France
Historians look at it now as the fakest forgery ever forged, but Cardinal de Rohan was ready to do anything for his imaginary girlfriend, so he did as he was asked and picked up the $15 million necklace.
Which, of course, he brought back to Jeanne’s house.
Step Four: Profit.
Jeanne stripped the necklace of its diamonds and sold them on the black market. Money for days. Everyone wins.
OK But. Hang On.
If you’re asking yourself, “OK, but what are the jewelers gonna do when Marie Antoinette doesn’t come by the shop next week with $15 million? Are they gonna…ask follow-up questions? Shouldn’t she have had a contingency plan for that?”
Congrats! You’d have run a better heist than Jeanne de la Motte.
Because obviously that’s what happened next. The next week, the jewelers sent a chill note to Marie Antoinette that said “Excusez-nous, can we have that $15 million?” She told them she’d never asked for the necklace. And it took about two additional questions for the royal guard to figure out what had happened.
The Fallout
The trial for the famous Affair of the Diamond Necklace went just about as you’d expect. Cardinal de Rohan was sent to the Bastille for betraying the trust of the queen. (Although he got out soon after and avoided further punishment by roaming around the countryside vacationing at some hot springs, then…became a very successful bishop in Germany somehow?)
De Villette was banished for his role in forging the letters.
And Jeanne de la Motte and her militiaman husband were both convicted and sent to prison. Which really seems very unfair to Militiaman Husband, if you ask me, unless there’s some part of this story I’m not aware of.
Jeanne ended up serving less than a year in prison for her crimes before she dressed up like a boy, escaped from prison, and fled to London, where she lived a relatively comfortable life publishing pamphlets talking shit about Marie Antoinette.
That is, until she tried to jump out a window to escape her debt collectors and smashed into the pavement, losing an eye and eventually dying of her injuries.
God, I love her. She died as she lived: dramatic, and temperamentally incapable of thinking more than one step ahead. RIP, you messy queen.
Author Corner
If you’re new to Dirtbags Through the Ages this week, welcome! I’m very happy to have you. You can expect this kind of nonsense roughly every two weeks.
If you have a suggestion of a dirtbag for me to research, please do leave it in the comments! I have a running list but am always delighted to expand my horizons. Extra bonus points if you have a non-European historical dirtbag to share, because I know the newsletter has been lacking in that regard and I really, really want to learn more.
If you’d like to read a piece of writing that I’ve worked on for longer than the 90 minutes I usually spend putting this newsletter together, my first novel, A Tip for the Hangman, is out in hardback, audiobook, and ebook right now, with a paperback edition coming in January. It’s an Elizabethan historical fiction novel slash spy thriller starring the poet Christopher Marlowe, and if you like having some fun with your history I think you’d enjoy it.
I also might be able to tell you a fun publishing secret in the next issue or two? So…stay tuned for that? Eventually? (Consider this the least-specific tease of all time.)
Until then, be well and beware of cardinals,
-Allison
I just love how you recount history. As for new dirtbags to suggest, I Could probably come up with a number of them but they would be mostly American, British or Irish. A couple early American ones might be good, though. Let me see what I can do. :-)