Diamonds & Bourbons

THE QUEEN'S NECKLACE (620 pp.)--Frances Mossiker--Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

The 18th century citizen wrote memoirs much as his 20th century descendant writes income tax returns--as a matter of course, and with considerable imagination. Author Mossiker has made clever use of these circumstances in retelling the story of the famed diamond necklace theft that threw France into an uproar during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The reader is invited to discover the truth of the affair--something never established beyond doubt--from a crosscutting of contradictory memoirs and trial briefs, most of them entertainingly libelous. The puzzle is a good one, although the passages selected by the author are sometimes overlong, and most attempted solutions leave the theorizer with pieces that do not fit.

Treasure Chest. The necklace contained 647 diamonds weighing some 2,800 carats in all, and to duplicate it today would cost $3,855,500--including, Historian Mossiker notes helpfully, the 10% federal excise tax. This grotesque ornament was invented by the crown jewelers to tempt Madame du Barry, who would probably have bought it if her protector, the goatish Louis XV, had not died of smallpox before the diamonds could be assembled. Antoinette, the new Queen, then seemed the ideal purchaser: her husband had the money, and she, possessing a 43 1/2-inch bust, could set off 647 diamonds properly. But the Queen, exercising restraint for perhaps the only time in her career, said the necklace was too expensive.

So things stood until Cardinal-Prince Louis de Rohan, France's ranking church official and an illustrious member of one of the nation's great families, told the jewelers that the Queen wanted to buy the necklace surreptitiously, through him. It was delivered to the cardinal and passed on to the Queen's messenger.

And then it vanished. When the jewelers pressed for payment, Marie Antoinette said she had never received it, never sent a messenger, and had not uttered a word to Cardinal Rohan since he had fallen into court disgrace several years earlier. The cardinal, it appeared, had tried a desperate swindle to extricate himself from debts even more enormous than his income. He was ushered to the Bastille.

One for All. Rohan pleaded that the Queen had signed a contract, and that he had been in constant communication with her through an intermediary, the beautiful Countess de la Motte, who was thrown into the Bastille too. Although she protested her innocence, she seemed to be the key to the affair. The cardinal was one of her lovers--and so was almost every other man mentioned in the story except Louis XVI, who had trouble with sex. She had spent her childhood in rags, and at the time of the necklace theft was spending money with wild ostentation. But there were holes in the cardinal's story, which was that the countess had persuaded another lover to forge notes in the Queen's name and sign her name to the contract. The conspirators, it appeared, had even hired a prostitute to masquerade as the Queen and hand a rose to the gullible cardinal at midnight in Versailles' Grove of Venus.

Rohan was let off with what amounted to a reprimand for believing that the Queen would agree to a midnight rendezvous--the most believable part of the whole charade. Although the countess defended herself spiritedly, biting the turnkey, and seducing (in all probability) the governor of the Bastille, she was found guilty. Her punishment was to be stripped naked in public, beaten with rods, branded on both shoulders and then imprisoned for life. But probably with official connivance, the countess escaped from jail. She traveled to England (where her husband, with or without Rohan's knowledge, seemed to have sold part of the diamonds in London), had a few love affairs, and twice wrote her memoirs, livening the second edition with an account of her seduction by, of all people, Marie Antoinette.

By her own portrait and others, the countess was an incurable cocotte. But she was a likable one, and also never let guilt or bitterness interfere with gaiety. In London, she wrote, she was able to look at it all and laugh sufficiently to "dampen her dress." She died at 35, having fallen from a third-story window during a carouse. Or was she pushed by French revolutionary agents? The book leaves that question, and most others, tantalizingly open.

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