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The whole affair had been a trick. All the messages from the queen had been false ones, the written documents being prepared by a seeming valet, who was skilful in the imitation of handwriting. Throughout the whole business the cardinal had been readily deceived, infatuation closing his eyes to truth.

Such was the first act in the drama. The second opened when the jeweller began to press for payment. M. de La Motte sold some of the diamonds in England, and transmitted the money to his wife, who is said to have quieted the jeweller for a time by paying him some instalments on the price. But he quickly grew impatient and suspicious that all was not right, and went to court, where he earnestly inquired if the necklace had been delivered to the queen. For a time she could not understand what he meant. The diamond necklace? What diamond necklace? What did this mean? The Cardinal de Rohan her security for payment!–it was all false, all base, some dark intrigue behind it all.

Burning with indignation, she sent for Abbe de Vermond and Baron de Breteuil, the minister of the king’s household, and told them of the affair. It was a shameful business, they said. They hated the cardinal, and did not spare him. The queen, growing momentarily more angry, at length decided to reveal the whole transaction to the king, and roused in his mind an indignation equal to her own. The result we have already seen. De Rohan and La Motte were consigned to the Bastille. M. de La Motte was in England, and thus out of reach of justice. Another celebrated individual who was concerned in the affair, and had aided in duping the cardinal, the famous, or infamous, Count Cagliostro, was also consigned to the Bastille for his share in the dark and deep intrigue.

The trial came on, as the closing act in this mysterious drama, in which all Paris had now become intensely interested. The cardinal had renounced all the privileges of his rank and condition, and accepted the jurisdiction of Parliament,–perhaps counting on the open enmity between that body and the court.

The trial revealed a disgraceful business, in which a high dignitary of the church had permitted himself to be completely gulled by a shameless woman and the equally shameless Cagliostro, and into which not only the name but even the virtue of the queen had been dragged. Public opinion became intense. The hostility to the queen which had long smouldered now openly declared itself. “It was for her and by her orders that the necklace was bought,” said the respectable Parisians. Those who were not respectable said much worse things. The queen was being made a victim of these shameless and criminal adventurers.

The trial went on, political feeling being openly displayed in it. The great houses of Conde and Rohan took sides with the cardinal. Their representatives might be seen, dressed in mourning, interviewing the magistrates on their way to the tribunal, pleading with them on behalf of their relative. The magistrates needed little persuasion. The Parliament of Paris had long been at sword’s point with the crown; now was its time for revenge; political prejudice blinded the members to the pure questions of law and justice; the cardinal was acquitted.

Cagliostro was similarly acquitted. He had conducted his own case, and with a skill that deceived the magistrates and the public alike. Madame de La Motte alone was convicted. She was sentenced to be whipped, branded on each shoulder with the letter V (for voleuse, “thief”), and to be imprisoned for life. Her husband, who was in England, was sentenced in his absence to the galleys for life. A minor participant in this business, the girl who had personated the queen, escaped unpunished.

So ended this disgraceful affair. The queen was greatly cast down by the result. “Condole with me,” she said, in a broken voice, to Madame Campan; “the intriguer who wanted to ruin me, or procure money by using my name and forging my signature, has just been fully acquitted.” But it was due, she declared, to bribery on the part of some and to political passion on that of others, with an audacity towards authority which such people loved to display. The king entered as she was speaking.

“You find the queen in great affliction,” he said to Madame Campan; “she has much reason to be. But what then? They would not see in this business anything save a prince of the Church and the Prince of Rohan, whereas it is only the case of a man in want of money, and a mere trick for raising cash, wherein the cardinal has been swindled in his turn. Nothing is easier to understand, and it needs no Alexander to cut this Gordian knot.”

Cardinal Rohan was exiled to his abbey of Chaise-Dieu, guilty in the king’s opinion, a dupe in the judgment of history, evidently a credulous profligate who had mistaken his vocation. The queen was the true victim of the whole affair. It doubled the hostility of the people to her, and had its share in that final sentence which brought her head to the block.