elt to please your Majesty misled me, and he drew from his pocket the
pretended letter from the queen to Madame de la Motte. The king took it,
and, casting his eye over the signature: "How could a prince of your
house and my grand almoner suppose that the queen would sign Marie
Antoinette de France? Queens sign their names quite short. It is not
even the queen's writing. And what is the meaning of all these doings
with jewellers, and these notes shown to bankers?"

[Illustration: Cardinal Rohan's Discomfiture----470]

The cardinal could scarcely stand; he leaned against the table. "Sir,"
he stammered, "I am too much overcome to be able to reply." "Walk into
this room, cardinal," rejoined the king kindly; "write what you have to
say to me." The written explanations of M. de Rohan were no clearer than
his words; an officer of the body-guard took him off to the Bastille; he
had, just time to order his grand-vicar to burn all his papers.

The correspondence as well as the life of M. de Rohan was not worthy of a
prince of the church: the vices and the credulity of the cardinal had
given him over, bound hand and foot, to an intriguing woman as adroit as
she was daring. Descended from a bastard of Henry II.'s, brought up by
charity and married to a ruined nobleman, Madame de la Motte Valois had
bewitched, duped, and robbed Cardinal Rohan. Accustomed to an insensate
prodigality, asserting everywhere that a man of gallantry could not live
on twelve hundred thousand livres a year, he had considered it very
natural that the queen should have a fancy for possessing a diamond
necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres. The jewellers had,
in fact, offered this jewelry to Marie Antoinette; it was during the
American war. "That is the price of two frigates," the king had said.
"We want ships and not diamonds," said the queen, and dismissed her
jeweller. A few months afterwards he told anybody who would listen that
he had sold the famous collar in Constantinople for the favorite sultana.
"This was a real pleasure to the queen," says Madame Campan; "she,
however, expressed some astonishment that a necklace made for the
adornment of Frenchwomen should be worn in the seraglio, and, thereupon,
she talked to me a long while about the total change which took place in
the tastes and desires of women in the period between twenty and thirty
years of age. She told me that when she was ten years younger she loved
diamonds madly,