The Diamond Necklace
In 1772, the infatuated Louis XV requested that Parisian jewellers Boehmer & Bassenge create an elaborate and spectacular jeweled necklace for du Barry, one that would surpass all known others in grandeur, at an estimated cost of two million livres. The necklace, still not completed nor paid for when Louis XV died, would eventually trigger a scandal involving Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, in which Queen Marie Antoinette would be wrongly accused of bribing the Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Strasbourg in the Alsace, to purchase it for her, accusations which would figure prominently in the onset of the French Revolution.
Read more about this topic: Madame Du Barry
Famous quotes containing the words diamond and/or necklace:
“The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I remember meeting you in a dark dream
Of April, you or some girl,
The necklace of wishes alive and breathing around your throat.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)