The Diamond Necklace Affair
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France from 1770 to 1797 was despised by the people of France. Their hatred of her and the monarchy in general led to the French Revolution. Many issues led to the unpopularity of Queen Maria Antoinette, her vanity, her disregard for the people, but perhaps the most significant was the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
In 1785, the court jewelers, Bohmer and Basange, constructed a necklace with five hundred and forty diamonds of varying sizes in an ugly arrangement that resembled the collars worn by circus animals. They hoped that King Louis XV would purchase it for his favorite, Madame du Barry. Unfortunately, the king died before the necklace was completed. So, naturally the jewelers tried to sell the piece to the newly crowned Queen, Marie Antoinette, because she was known for her extravagant spending and taste. They priced the jewelry at and equivalent of two million dollars in modern money. The Queen declined the offer. She did not like the necklace and the price was even too high for her. Knowing that they would be ruined if the Queen didn’t buy their product the jewelers continued to plead with her for ten years. Each time she turned them down. Then, one day the Queen received a note signed by Bassange which said, “We have real satisfaction in thinking that the most beautiful set of diamonds in existence will belong to the greatest and best of Queens.” Puzzled by the message, the Queen, put the note to flame by a candle sitting on a nearby table (Komroff 85).
Weeks later, when the jewelers received no answer to their letter Bohmer paid a visit to Madame Campan, one of the Queen’s ladies-in waiting. He told her that he had rece...
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...the galleys for life. She was flogged and branded with a “V” to show that she was a thief and imprisoned for life in the Bastille, from where she later escaped (Affair).
For the first time, the French population got an inside look into the intrigue, deceit and corruption of the court and the church (98). And while the Queen was an innocent bystander to the whole plot, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace turned the people against the monarchy and especially the Queen which eventually led to the French Revolution.
Bibliography:
"Affair of the Diamond Necklace". Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia. Microsoft corporation. 1993-1996. CD-ROM
Komroff, Manuel and Oddette Komroff. Marie Antoinette. New York: Julian Messner, 1967
Zweig, Stefan. Marie Antoinette. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc. 1932
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Ten years of suffering is the cost of having pleasure for only one night! In “The Necklace,” by Guy de Maupassant presents Mathilde Loisel, an attractive, charming but vacuous and selfish middle class lady transforms to selfness, poor, satisfied and hard-working lady. Even though, Mathidle owns a comfortable home and married to a faithful and kind husband, Monsieur Loisel, who seeks her happiness and satisfaction; she was ungrateful to the things that she had been given, because her greed and desire of wealth had captured her thoughts and blurred the real meaning of happiness in her perspective. Mathidle spends most of her time surfing in her day dreams of being wealthy and suffering from accepting the reality, because her imagination was more than she could not afford. One day Mathidle’s husband brought his wife an invitation for a fancy party, but as a result of their low income, Mathidle’s was ashamed to wear flowers as decoration, so she decided to borrow an expensive looking necklace from a friend of her, Madame Forestier. After attending the fabulous party and spending a memorable great time looking stunningly beautiful, Mathidle discovers that she had lost the expensive necklace that she borrowed, so she decides to buy a similar copy of the necklace to her friend after loaning an enormous amount of money and narrowing the house outcome. The author surprises his readers with a perfectly detailed twist at the end of the story. Losing the necklace was a turning point in Mathidle’s life and the best thing that ever happened to her.
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The French Revolution was spread over the ten year period between 1789 and 1799. The primary cause of the revolution was the disputes over the peoples' differing ideas of reform. Before the beginning of the Revolution, only moderate reforms were wanted by the people. An example of why they wanted this was because of king Louis XIV's actions. At the end of the seventeenth century, King Louis XIV's wars began decreasing the royal finances dramatically. This worsened during the eighteenth century. The use of the money by Louis XIV angered the people and they wanted a new system of government. The writings of the philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot, were critical of the government.
Antoinette was born in a time period that she did not belong in but overall the people of France chose her fate for the actions and consequences that Fraser mentioned within the book. Fraser in the book sympathizes for Marie Antoinette but at the end of Antoinette's story she dies by the guillotine. In fact Fraser mentions that Marie Antoinette could be blamed for the French Revolution and the starvation of the french people. Although I disagree, where in Louis place he could of done some actual work and try to comprehend the people of