were answered by assurances of forgiveness from the Queen. The result of
this correspondence was represented to be the engagement of the Cardinal
to negotiate the purchase of the necklace secretly, by a contract for
periodical payments. To the forgery of papers was added, it was
declared, the substitution of the Queen's person, by dressing up a girl
of the Palais Royal to represent Her Majesty, whom she in some degree
resembled, in a secret and rapid interview with Rohan in a dark grove of
the gardens of Versailles, where she was to give the Cardinal a rose, in
token of her royal approbation, and then hastily disappear. The
importunity of the jewellers, on the failure of the stipulated payment,
disclosed the plot. A direct appeal of theirs to the Queen, to save them
from ruin, was the immediate source of detection. The Cardinal was
arrested, and all the parties tried. But the Cardinal was acquitted, and
Lamotte and a subordinate agent alone punished. The quack Cagliostro was
also in the plot, but he, too, escaped, like his confederate, the
Cardinal, who was made to appear as the dupe of Lamotte.

The Queen never got over the effect of this affair. Her friends well
knew the danger of severe measures towards one capable of collecting
around him strong support against a power already so much weakened by
faction and discord. But the indignation of conscious innocence
insulted, prevailed, though to its ruin!

But it is time to let the Princesse de Lamballe give her own impressions
upon this fatal subject, and in her own words.]

"How could Messieurs Boehmer and Bassange presume that the Queen would
have employed any third person to obtain an article of such value,
without enabling them to produce an unequivocal document signed by her
own hand and countersigned by mine, as had ever been the rule during my