PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The great scandal of the Diamond Necklace, which to the clear vision of Goethe presaged the coming Revolution, and in which the quick-witted Talleyrand saw the overthrow of the French throne, possesses an interest akin to that of the French Revolution itself. The story is one of which the world does not seem to tire, for it has been told scores upon scores of times, and more or less recently, by historians, biographers, essayists, memoir-writers, anecdotists, novelists, and dramatists, and in well-nigh every European language. In the form in which it appears in the Memorials and Judicial Examinations of the parties accused of complicity in the fraud, it has been pronounced “the greatest lie of the eighteenth century,” and numerous active brains have essayed to unravel its tangled web of truth and falsehood; nevertheless, there are many persons who still think that a certain mystery envelops the transaction which all the research hitherto bestowed upon it has failed to satisfactorily clear up.

The writer of the present work has diligently studied all the contemporary evidence, bearing in the smallest degree on the subject, which an active search enabled him to discover, and the bulk of which he has availed himself of in the course of the subjoined narrative. This includes, for example, unpublished autograph letters and documents, written either by actual actors in the drama, or else by persons intimately associated with it, and derived chiefly from the valuable collection of M. Feuillet de Conches; the official records of the judicial proceedings to which the affair give rise; the various memorials put forth on behalf of the accused, and the memoirs subsequently issued by them, including the exceedingly scarce Mémoire by Rétaux de Villette, which the present writer is the first to quote from, and the curious Autobiography written in his old age by Count de la Motte; the discussions in the Paris Parliament; and the numerous memoirs penned by persons living at the time, some of which, and these of the highest importance—such as the interesting Memoirs of Count Beugnot—having been only recently made public, were not at the command of previous writers. In addition to the foregoing sources of information may be mentioned the different biographies, and the various critical disquisitions of historians and essayists in which the subject has been so exceedingly fruitful, and of which considerable use will be found to have been made.

With such materials at his command, the writer has been able to tell the story for the first time in all its fulness, and as he believes more in accordance with the truth, in small matters as well as great, than any previous narrative of the transaction. He conceives that he has completely exonerated the French queen from the slightest suspicion of complicity in the miserable fraud. He has made a point of supplying missing dates to the more trivial as well as to all the more important incidents, of vouching every statement of the smallest consequence, and of giving the very language of the witnesses to the various facts which they are called upon to prove. He has, moreover, visited most of the scenes with which the chief incidents of the story are mixed up, and has described them with more or less minuteness in the course of his narrative.

It is proper to mention, with regard to some few of the authorities referred to in the following pages, such as Madame Campan’s and Weber’s “Memoirs of Marie-Antoinette,” Madame de la Motte’s “Mémoires Justificatifs,” and the “Mémoire pour le Comte de Cagliostro,” that the French and English versions of these works have been indiscriminately used, and that the references given, if they do not apply to the one, will be found to belong to the other edition of the works in question.