ious room provided
for her in the prison, in a loose robe, conversing gayly with some
friends, and surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, an attendant
appeared to conduct her into the presence of the judges. Totally
unprepared for the awful doom impending over her, she rose with careless
alacrity and entered the court. The terrible sentence was pronounced.
Immediately terror, rage, and despair seized upon her, and a scene of
horror ensued which no pen can describe. Before the sentence was
finished, she threw herself upon the floor, and uttered the most
piercing shrieks and screams. The tumult of agitation into which she was
thrown, dreadful as it was, relaxed not the stern rigor of the law. The
executioner immediately seized her, and dragged her, shrieking and
struggling in a delirium of phrensy, into the court-yard of the prison.
As her eye fell upon the instruments of her ignominious and brutal
punishment, she seized upon one of her executioners with her teeth, and
tore a mouthful of flesh from his arm. She was thrown upon the ground,
her garments, with relentless violence, were stripped from her back, and
the lash mercilessly cut its way into her quivering nerves, while her
awful screams pierced the damp, chill air of the morning. The hot irons
were brought, and simmered upon her recoiling flesh. The unhappy
creature was then carried, mangled and bleeding, and half dead with
torture, and terror, and madness, to the prison hospital. After nine
months of imprisonment she was permitted to escape. She fled to England,
and was found one morning dead upon the pavements of London, having been
thrown from a third story window in a midnight carousal.

Such was the story of the Diamond Necklace. Though no one can now doubt
that Maria Antoinette was perfectly innocent in the whole affair, it, at
the time, furnished her enemies with weapons against her, which they
used with fatal efficiency. It was then represented that the Countess
Lamotte was an accomplice of the queen in the fraudulent acquisition of
the necklace, and that the Cardinal de Rohan was their deluded but
innocent victim. The horrible punishment of Madame Lamotte, who boasted
that royal blood circulated in her veins, was understood to be in
contempt of royalty, and as the expression of venomous feeling toward
the queen. Both Maria Antoinette and Louis felt it as such, and were
equally aggrieved by the acquittal of the cardinal and the barbarous
punishment of t