How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (65 page)

A chaste child, under Cagliostro’s direction, sees visions of the future within a vase of purified water

Love Letter
by Jean-Honoré Fragonard from
The Progress of Love

A seventeenth-century painting by Jeanne Cotelle the Younger of the Labyrinth, a planted maze at Versailles that would be pulled down to make way for the Grove of Venus, where the Cardinal de Rohan was convinced he met the queen

The Cardinal de Rohan, sketched by Philibert Louis Debucourt two years before the Diamond Necklace Affair broke: though charming, witty and generous, Rohan was brought low by his oceanic credulity and sense of entitlement

Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target: the moral conscience of the Parisian Bar and the mastermind of Rohan’s defence, he refused to represent Louis XVI when he was put on trial by the National Convention during the Revolution

Bust of Cagliostro by Jean-Antoine Houdon: his gaze bore into people ‘like a gimlet’ and his voice sounded ‘like a trumpet muted with a crepe veil’

‘The Leap of the Royal Family from the Thileries to Montmédy’: a print mocking the failed escape attempt by Louis and Marie Antoinette in 1791. The diamond necklace descends from the queen’s petticoats to Jeanne and Rohan, who are looking up them

A fan depicting characters involved in the affair: plates decorated with the necklace, straw hats with cardinal-red ribbons, even dolls of Jeanne and Rohan coupling were also available