The Last Known Whereabouts of the Diamond Necklace

UPDATED AUGUST 7, 2013 (see below)

The diamond necklace that went missing in 1786–created by the royal jewelers, intended for the late king’s mistress, but never actually commissioned by anyone–had stones measuring 2,800 carats and was worth 1.6 million francs.

The choker of the necklace was made up of seventeen diamonds of five to eight carats each. From the choker hung six pear-shaped diamonds, one of nine carats, two of eleven carats, two of twelve and a half carats, and two that were at least thirteen carats each. There were also two clusters of fourteen diamonds that totaled ten carats each, and another cluster of eight diamonds that totaled twenty-four carats. There were festoons and tassels, as well, that added to the total weight of 2,800 carats. According to Frances Mossiker, the necklace was comprised of 647 diamonds.

So where did all those six-hundred-plus diamonds go?

Well, the short answer is that no one quite knows where they went. There are conflicting stories about the ultimate fates of the diamonds themselves. What is known is that the necklace is gone: it was definitely broken apart.

[If you don’t know much about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, you might want to read The Short Story.]

It would appear that after she got hold of the necklace, Madame de La Motte gave some diamonds to her husband to sell in London and some to her erstwhile friend (and lover, we can assume), Retaux to Villette. [Maître Target, lawyer for Cardinal Rohan in the forthcoming trial, reports that Villette was arrested in Paris “on the subject of a considerable number of diamonds found upon his person”; Mossiker, 1961.] To whom the diamonds went and where they subsequently ended up is anyone’s guess. The diamond market, like all other markets, wasn’t closely regulated in the late 1700’s. Even legitimate businessmen weren’t necessarily going to ask questions about the origin of the goods brought to them for sale. Besides which, there were then (as there are now) plenty of ways to unload stolen goods.

The Interrogation of Nicole d’Oliva part 1

In 1785, it was discovered that a diamond necklace was missing. The Royal Jewelers said they had handed it over to the Queenand that she owed them for it. The Queen said she

The Palais-Royal, where Nicole d’Oliva met Nicolas de La Motte.

had never made such a purchase, in fact had turned down this very necklace because it was too expensive, and had no idea where the jewelers’ necklace had gone. That summer, an adventuress made Jeanne de La Motee-Valois was arrested, followed shortly by various of her associates, including Nicole d’Oliva. Nicole had been friends with Jeanne, and in fact had taken part in a peculiar midnight meeting in the parks of Versailles. Nicole was in Brussels with her amour when she was arrested for having taken part (however unwittingly) in Jeanne’s schemes. She was clapped in the Bastille, where she gave birth to a son, and then was moved to the Conciergerie. Below is a translation of a transcript I happened across during a Google Book search. As I mention in this post, I really don’t know French, but I made a go at translating this because I wanted to know whether there was any new information to be mined. The answer is no, not really. It makes interesting reading, anyway.

This is part 1, perhaps the more interesting of the two parts (part 2 will come shortly), as it concerns the Grove of Venus scene. Parts quoted in French were impossible for me to decipher properly. Anything in brackets in my input. If you aren’t familiar with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, I suggest starting with The Short Story; this might not make sense otherwise. I took some small liberties with wording. I apologize that it’s somewhat stilted; I attempted as literal a translation as possible. I was tripped up in a few places. Maybe there is someone out there with a better command of French who can help with those phrases.

From Thursday, January 19, 1786

Before us, Jean Baptiste Pierre Maximilien Titon, advisor to the King in Parlement, in the halls of the government of the castle of the Bastille, has been led by M. Losme, major adjoint,  Marie-Nicole Leguay d’Oliva or Designy.

We asked her name and nicknames, age, station [ie social position], and residence. She said she was named Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva or “Designy”, thirty-four [sic–she was 22-23] years old, bourgeois, from Paris, residing on the Rue Thiroux, Chaussée [Carriageway] d’Antin.

We asked if she did not know of a woman named Madame de La Motte-Valois. She said yes.

A Real Fake Countess–Jeanne de La Motte-Valois’s Lineage

The woman who I usually refer to on this blog as Jeanne de La Motte may have been a liar and a cheat, but like many lies there was a grain of truth in the fabrications.

By the time of the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, Jeanne referred to herself as Comtesse. She and her husband had, shortly after they married, assumed the titles of Comte and Comtesse de La Motte-Valois (or just de La Motte for brevity). Neither Jeanne nor her husband, Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Motte, were entitled to be called comte or comtesse.

Clearly, this didn’t stop them from assuming the titles anyway. It wasn’t just delusions of grandeur. Having a title at that time didn’t just mean you spoke with a posh accent or had a lot of money. In the late 18th century in France, to have a noble title was to have power, or at the very least the possibility of power. It carried its own weight. It especially came in handy when, as Jeanne did, one wanted to pretend to be the Queen’s fiend. Why would Jeanne pretend to be the Queen’s friend? That’s perfectly simple: Jeanne wanted to convince people to give her, Jeanne, money in exchange for peddling her “influence”. Say you were a young noblewoman looking for a place in the Queen’s household. Jeanne, a comtesse, tells you that she has the Queen’s ear and that she can get you the job. This kind of scam was hardly new.

The two biggest victims of Jeanne’s plot were the Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan and the royal jewelers, Boehmer and Bassenge. You could add Marie Antoinette (the queen in question, of course) to that list, as well. Jeanne convinced Cardinal Rohan not only that she was a comtesse, but that she could reconcile him with the queen after decades of disfavor. All he had to do as help “the Queen” with some financial difficulties she was having. Later, Jeanne parlayed this trust into the theft of an extraordinarily expensive diamond necklace. The short version of the story is available if you look above and click “the short story”.

But Jeanne, at the least, would have probably felt herself thoroughly justified in calling herself a comtesse, even if it was a false title. Why? Because, adventuress though she was, Jeanne had royal blood in her veins and was one of the last living descendants of the royal Valois.

Jeanne, born in Fontette in 1756, was the daughter of an impoverished scion of the royal house of Valois and one of his family’s housemaids. She was not illegitimate; but her ancestor, the first Baron de Fontette, was illegitimate. He was the son of Henri II and Nicole de Savigny, his mistress. His name was also Henri, and he lived 1557-1621. The first Baron would have been powerful and wealthy, having been given a good apportionment of land by his father, the king. The men of the family tended to render military service to the crown, but over the two centuries between the first Baron’s birth and the birth of Jeanne de Valois de Saint-Remy (Saint-Remy was another appellation of the first Baron), the family sunk deeper and deeper into poverty.

Jeanne’s father was a nobleman without money or land. The family had sold off most of its holdings. They were left with the old, leaky castle, which Jeanne describes as having leaky roofs. Some accounts have Jeanne and her siblings (she had an older brother and two younger sisters) living like animals in a shed. When Jeanne was still quite young, her father took the entire family to Paris to see if their fortunes could be repaired. He died shortly thereafter. Jeanne’s mother, the former housemaid, abandoned her children, who were left to beg. One of Jeanne’s ways of begging was to tell people she had a royal ancestor and was one of the last of the Valois line. This eventually got her the attention of the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, who would provide the young Jeanne with some protection.

Jeanne de La Motte-Valois de Saint-Remy

Jeanne was particularly keen on her royal ancestry as her siblings weren’t. Her brother Jacques went into the navy and her sister went into a nunnery. With some help from noble friends, starting with the Marquise, Jeanne’s family were recognized to a point by the crown. The king ranted Jacques the title Baron de Fontette, Jeanne was entitled to call herself Mademoiselle de Valois, and her sister Marianne was to be called Mademoiselle de Saint-Remy. They received a small annuity, which Jeanne viewed as an insult. From the point of view of the crown, it was fair enough; Jeanne was related to the king, but it was a distant relation and she came from the illegitimate branch of the family.

No one, of course, can say for sure, but it seems likely that it was delusions of grandeur instilled in Jeanne by her father that made her long for a lifestyle that was out of her means in ancien regime France. Every bit of money she had went through her fingers like water. When she got hold of some 120,000 francs from Cardinal Rohan, she was suddenly seen living in ostentatious grandeur with lovely new carriages and gold-encrusted everything. This kind of behavior wasn’t uncommon of nobles of the time, who were almost invariably in debt. Jeanne, however, was living so far beyond her means that she was stealing enormous amounts of money to acquire the lifestyle she felt she deserved. She and her husband were known to defraud jewelers by purchasing jewelry on credit (a comtesse could pay for such jewelry, surely?) and then sell it for ready cash.

There is, of course, an element of simple human greed in Jeanne’s story. But it’s also a story of desperation, pride, and a deep feeling of injustice. Jeanne certainly suffered during her childhood. Combined with the stories she was told by her father and his final words to her–to never forget that she was a Valois–this meant that she must have developed a deep, insatiable need to match her outer trappings with what she felt she deserved. She might have gone about it in unethical ways (bribery, probably sexual favors, and out-and-out conning) but to the end, she probably felt she deserved what she took. That is, of course, presuming that she didn’t believe her own stories, most of which are almost certainly at least half lies.

Click HERE for a very nice run-down of Jeanne’s lineage, from the first Baron de Fontette (son of Henri II) down to Jeanne and her family. With Jeanne, this royal line died completely.

The Memoirs

This is a list of the many memoirs of the people directly involved in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. There was a widespread penchant for writing memoirs at this time, so everyone involved wrote their version of events and had it published. Since the scandal made such a major impact, the memoirs sold well, though the writers didn’t necessarily see much profit due to copyright laws of the time. However, these would have proved juicy readings for the public, as well as for the historian. Although they’re wonderful fist-hand accounts, it’s difficult to decipher fact from fiction, especially in the case of the Affair od the Diamond Necklace. Some are available in various forms in various places. In her fabulous book The Queen’s Necklace, France Mossiker conveniently and brilliantly wove together these memoirs and other primary sources. If you want to read some of these various memoirs, your best bet is to find this book, which isn’t hard to do. If, however, you want to read the entire memoirs, these are the titles of them, and a few links to those that can be found via Google Books.

The Memoirs

Boehmer and Bassenge:

Memoires des joailliers Boehmer et Bassenge, du Août 12, 1785.

Cagliostro:

Mémoire pour le Comte de Cagliostro, accuse, contro M. le Proceureur-général, accusateur, en presence de M. Le Cardinal de Rohan, de la Comtesse de La Motte et autres, co-accusés.*

Jeanne de La Motte-Valois de Saint Rémy:

Mémoires justicatifs de la comtesse de La Motte-Valois. London 1789.

Memoirs of the Countess de Valois de La Motte. Dublin 1790.

Vie de Jeanne de Saint-Rémy de Valois. London, 1791, Paris 1792.

Nicole d’Oliva:

Mémoire pour la demoiselle le Guay d’Oliva, fille mineure, émancipée d’âge, accusée, contre M. le Procurer-général.*

Jacques Claude Beugnot:

Mémoires, Paris 1823

Madame Campan [Queen’s confidante]:

Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette. Paris 1823

Nicolas de La Motte:

Mémoires inédits du comte de La Motte-Valois (ed. Louis Lacour). Paris, 1858).

Retaux de Villette:

Mémoires historiques des intrigues de la cour, Venice 1790.

*Not personal memoires

Links to memoirs on Google Books for your edification

Count Cagliostro [FRENCH]:

Nicole d’Oliva [FRENCH]

Jacques Claude Beugnot [ENGLISH] volume 1  . volume 2

Madame Campan, confidante of Marie Antoinette

Abbe Georgel, servant of Cardinal Rohan

The Palais Royal

The last major stop in my whistle-stop tour of Diamond Necklace sites was the Palais-Royal.

Visiting the Palais

The itinerary for my final morning in Paris was: the Rue du Jour, the Palais-Royal, and finally the Louvre. It was an extended morning and we got going early, so this wasn’t pushing it, really. I’ve posted already about the Rue du Jour. The Louvre, while amazing, isn’t especially pertinent to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.

Aside from nearly getting run into by a guy on a motorbike, the walk from the Rue du Jour was fairly quick. It was actually longer than it looked on the map, but what else is new? I can see that, if I were Nicole d’Oliva going from my house on the Rue du Jour to the Palais-Royal, where she plied her trade (so to speak), she might have chosen to take a cabriolet if she could afford it. The roads would have been messy and muddy. They weren’t paved and all kinds of trash and refuse (think horses taking dumps) of all kinds were mixed into the mud. There were no sidewalks, and the lighting, while extent, was poor at night. For all these reasons, it would have been a matter of safety and hygiene to take some form of conveyance.

That’s assuming that one could afford that. The accounts given by Nicole of herself make it sound as though she was fairly hard off. I’ve given my fictional Nicole a bit of class, but the real Nicole probably would have scraped by on the takings she got from working the men at the Palais-Royal. It would have been a very hand-to-mouth existence. It’s entirely likely that she wouldn’t have had the money to take a cabriolet. My fictional Nicole doesn’t mind the walk, but then again, she’s a little crazy.

In any case, the Palais-Royal was still closed when we got there quite early in the morning. I should say, the shops were closed. Sadly, they were doing work on the building, so the logia was boarded up. The courtyard was perfectly open. There is a modern installation of black-and-white-striped columns of varying heights here. It could come off as pretentious, but it is actually really pretty.

The shops weren’t open, but the gardens were. They’re really lovely, and since it was early spring, everything was just coming into bloom. I can’t vouch for the statue (I would guess it’s Victorian), but it would have probably looked similar at the time of the Affair of the Necklace. After looking around the gardens, there wasn’t much to see, and we still had lots to see at the Louvre before heading off to the airport to fly back to London.

The Palais-Royal, where Nicole d’Oliva met Nicolas de La Motte.

The Palais in the 18th Century

The Palais-Royal that Nicole knew was a mixture of the refined and the crude. Having been a palace for many years (it was first built by Cardinal Richelieu), it was a grand building and retained some high culture: it housed the magnificent art collection of the Orleans family (who owned the place after Richelieu) and the Comédie-Française (a theater).

Mercier was not positively impressed by the Palais. His account of it in the Tableau de Paris is seething with moral indignation. He says, “Vice holds sway here.” This is a (not so) veiled reference to the women of vice who, just like Nicole, used the Palais as their base of operations. There were some hours during which respectable women could be found in the Palais: before 11:00 in the morning and around 5:00 in the afternoon. Aside from this, Mercier mentions that the place kept the police very busy, meaning it was rife with crime; there would have been a great deal of petty crime like pickpocketing.

The Palais, though originally the private residence of the Orleans family (cousins to the king), had been opened up to the public about the time that Nicole d’Oliva would have known it. Part of the palace was still the private residence of the Orleans, but the gardens and a series of shops were a public shopping mall. There were cafes (that were the hotbed of Revolutionary fervor; it was here that Desmoulins encouraged the crowd to attack the Bastille), boutiques, and hair salons. The gardens were beautiful, and the ladies and gentlemen would have walked here freely.

Nicole d’Oliva and the Palais

Mademoiselle Nicole d’Oliva was born in the Saint-Eustache section, near the Palais. As a young woman, she lived nearby on the Rue du Jour. This was her haunt. She was going about her business in 1784 at the Palais-Royal when she noticed a man looking at her.

At first, Nicole didn’t think much of it at first, but she noticed this man several times. Their eyes met, they would come across each other; they tried to pretend not to know each other. I can imagine the situation. One day, while Nicole was sitting at a cafe with a child friend (who was this child, anyway?), he finally came to speak to her. This probably was not unusual, as she was a prostitute. She may have been too embarrassed to bring up the fact that she had noticed him watching her.

Later that night, Nicole reports that he showed up at her door, and they started to be . . . friends? One wonders exactly what the relationship was, though it isn’t hard to imagine. In any case, this was Nicolas de La Motte, the self-styled Comte. He had been making cautious advances because he wanted something out of Nicole. It wasn’t immediately evident that what he wanted was for her to help in his and his wife’s plot to on a Cardinal of the Church out of huge sums of money. He and his wife, the Comtesse de La Motte, pulled her into the plot a little at a time.

It turns out that the Comtesse had heard of Nicole’s resemblance to the Queen, and she had sent her husband to start reeling in the young whore. It worked; the rest, as they say, is history. And it all began at the Palais-Royal.

Resources on the Palais Royal

A detailed look at the history of the Palais-Royal, including information about how the palace was used during its many stages.     http://eng.archinform.net/projekte/16288.htm

A brief look at visiting the Palais-Royal today. http://www.aviewoncities.com/paris/palaisroyal.htm

If you happen to read French, here is a book on the history of the Palais courtesy Google Books: Histoire du Palais-Royal

A first-hand account of Paris in the 18th century. Panorama of Paris. Louis-Sebastian Mercier.

The Epilogue-Part 1

The Conciergerie prison, where the Comtesse de La Motte was briefly imprisoned.

When the verdict was given on May 31, 1786, it’s unlikely that anyone could have foreseen what was about to befall France. These were the waning years of the ancien regime, and the verdict in the Affair of the Necklace was one of the warning bells of the monarchy’s demise. That the Parlement had effectively reproved their Queen for her wanton behavior was extraordinary.

So what became of some of our main characters?

Jeanne de La Motte-Valois, having been sentenced to be whipped, branded, imprisoned for life, and stripped of all her possessions, was led out into the Cour du Mai early on a June morning in 1786. Even though it was early, there was a massive crowd. Jeanne was branded twice with a V, for voleuse (thief), though she surely thought of it as V for Valois. She struggled so hard that instead of being branded on both shoulders, one brand was on her shoulder and the other was on her breast. After this ordeal, she fainted. When she recovered, she was transferred to the Salpetrière prison. After about a year of imprisonment, she made her escape in June 1787. She makes quiet a harrowing tale out of it in her memoirs. Despite an upswelling of sympathy for her, even from a staunch friend of the Queen’s like the Princess de Lamballe, Jeanne could not stay in France, so she went to London, where she was assured a warm welcome. The English were more than willing to take in someone who had so successfully discomfitted the French king and queen. They might ot have been so pleased with her if they realized how badly she had undermined the position of the monarchy and the social order it symbolized. In London, she published a series of tell-all memoirs, which are entertaining but exaggerated in some places and simply not credible in others. Two years later, the Bastille, where Jeanne had been imprisoned briefly, was taken by a mob on July 14, 1789. This must have given her great satisfaction. But she wasn’t to live long enough to see Marie-Antoinette, whom she considered to be her enemy, beheaded. Jeanne died August 23, 1791, about two years before the death of Marie-Antoinette. There were reports that police had come to arrest Jeanne or that she was pushed by sympathisers of the French monarchs. She may have fallen, or even jumped. No one can really be sure, but conspiracy theories abound. On July 20, 1792, the revolutionary court reversed the conviction of Jeanne de La Motte.

Nicolas de La Motte

Nicolas de La Motte threatened to publish an exposé about the Queen and Breteuil (one of her chief ministers) from London. He had gone to London as soon as his wife was arrested and clearly wasn’t about to go back and be arrested and suffer the same fate as his wife. When his wife escaped from prison and arrived in London, they found themselves at loggerheads. She was emotionally unstable, attempting to throw herself from a window at least once and attacking Monsieur de Calonne, her lover who mocked her over a game of cards. Nicolas returned to Paris from London in August 1789, one month after the Bastille fell. He became adept at extorting money for doing nothing. He played the dying monarchy off of the rising revolutionary government and was able to live very well off of the proceeds. He was paid off by the Rohan family to not publish all he knew about the Affair of the Necklace.

Nicole d’Oliva was let out of the Conciergerie prison on May 31, 1786, and was given a place to live by her lawyer, Blondel. After spending some time there, she moved in with Toussaint de Beausire, the man whom she had been arrested with in Brussels and whose child she gave birth to in the Bastille. Beausire was a very sordid character. He’d been in trouble since he was a child, but came from a respected family of architects. It isn’t clear whether he actually married Nicole (or when, if he did), but he kept her in very conditions while he lived it up. He abused her and purposefully kept her and her child in squalor. She retreated to a convent and died in 1789, at the age of only 28. Toussaint lived on, made it through the Revolution, remarried, and lived until 1818. Real life isn’t always fair.

Cardinal Rohan was nominated to the Estates-General, then took his seat at the National Assembly (the revolutionary body). He refused to be held up as a martyr to royal tyranny. He objected to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made the French Church subordinate to the French government and eradicated the monastic roders. Rohan withdrew from the National Assembly and left France for his estates in Ettenheim, in what is now Germany. As French priests fled from the Revolution, he sheltered them. The remainder of his life was far more respectable than it had been, and he died in 1803 in his bed. His niece’s husband, the Duke d’Enghien, wrote, “Cardinal Rohan, fully conscious as he took the last sacraments, died a death so noble as to be truly edifying to all present–a fact that may astonish you as much as it did me.” [from Mossiker’s The Queen’s Necklace pg. 547]

Count Cagliostro left France and continued to wander the world. He ran afoul of the Papacy in Italy and in 1789 was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Cardinal Rohan remained loyal to him, but the Cardinal’s letter of recommendation didn’t help Cagliostro. He was put on trial under the Inquisition for the crime of being a Freemason, which was punishable by death. The trail dragged on for two years, but he was naturally found guilty (this was the Inquisition). His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. His wife, too, was sentenced to life in prison, where she probably died in 1794. He was transferred to the Castel San Leo, a more secure prison, and was dead by the time French troops invaded papal lands in 1797, though a newspaper had reported him dead in 1795 (was he really dead at that time, or did he die sometime between the article and the invasion by the French?).

There are more characters to follow. Next time, I will be exploring their fates.

The Verdict

*SPOILER ALERT*

If you don’t want to know what happened to whom, then please don’t read on! If, however, you’re curious about what happened to all these characters who I have bringing to you one by one, then please read on.

Early on the morning of Mary 31, 1786, the courtyard of the Palais de Justice and all of the surrounding streets and byways were filled with people waiting to hear the verdict in the trial of the century, a trial that had captured the imagination on the entire French kingdom. A Cardinal of the Church was accused of theft, forgery, and lèse-majesté(criminal disrespect for the person of the monarch, in this case Marie-Antoinette); a young, pretty adventuress was accused of masterminding a plot to steal a necklace worth a large fortune and tricking the Cardinal; a mystic, Rosicrucian, and fraud was accused of–sort of, somehow–being involved in the theft; and a young prostitute was accused of impersonating the queen in the gardens of the Chateau de Versailles.

Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan had a very large, very powerful family. As court was opened very early on May 31st, 19 powerful members of his family (from the Soubise, Guéménée, and Lorraine) arrived in mourning. It was a show of support for their relative and respect for the Parlement de Paris, the court hearing the case.

Before this trial began, many witnesses had been examined. It was something of a parade, including everyone from a clockmaker to the Du Barry herself. The Prosecutor General, Monsieur Joly de Fleury, wrote down his recommendations to the court before the accused were brought before it. The recommendations were sealed, to be opened after the accused persons were questioned by the lords of the Parlement. Once this was done, the seal would be broken and the recommendations read and the voted on.

Nicolas de La Motte

The Characters #6: Nicolas de La Motte

Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Motte was “homely but a man of splendid physique” according to Jacques Claude (late Comte) Beugnot. Monsieur de La Motte married a young lady by the name of Jeanne de Valois de St Remy. She was a member of an impoverished (and illegitimate) arm of the Valois royal line of France; her family was descended from Henri II the entire inheritance had been squandered. He was a gentleman and a cavalry officer in the Gendarmerie. According, again, to Beugnot (who may have not been well-disposed towards La Motte), La Motte was adroit at “Wrangling credit” and had poor behavior so that he never advanced within the cavalry.

He lived in Bar-sur-Aube where his uncle was one of the most prominent citizens. He met Mademoiselle de Valois (later Madame or Comtesse de La Motte) at his uncle’s house. He was a lively, powerful character, and she was an impetuous, wild character. They hit it off immediately. Mademoiselle de Valois is rather tight-lipped about the lead-up to her marriage to La Motte on June 6, 1780, and no wonder. Beugnot, who was something an admirer of Mademoiselle in his own right, says that he received letters from Bar-sur-Aube telling him that a romance had begun between Mademoiselle de Valois and Monsieur de La Motte. “All in the same month,” he says,” they wrote me, first, that there seemed possibility of an engagement; in the next letter, that the engagement had been announced . . . and then, in almost no time at all, that the marriage had been celebrated.” The marriage was sanctioned by Mademoiselle de Valois’s foster mother (the Marquise de Boullainvilliers) and the Bishop de Langres, an old friend (and perhaps lover) of Mademoiselle. Beugnot’s “astonishment” at the rapidity of the romance was relieved when Madame de La Motte gave birth to twins a month later.

Nicole d’Oliva

The Characters #5: Nicole d’Oliva

I’ve come across some varying versions of Nicole d’Oliva’s name, but from what I can gather, her true name was Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva. She was also christened “Baronness [‘Barone’ in French] d’Olisva” by the Comtesse de La Motte. She was also known around the Palais Royal and to the police as Mlle de Designy. Most descriptions give her name as Nicole d’Oliva, however (many people at this time had two or more first names and used the second, in this case Nicole).

Young Nicole was  born in Paris in 1761, “of honest if humble family. She says in her memoirs that her “first misfortune was to be orphaned at too tender an age, deprived of parents’ care and vigilance which would have warded off the dangers inevitable to an unprotected girlhood”.

Nicole did not have any guidance or opportunities in her life. Like many women before and since, she was given very options and turned to prostitution. The oldest profession has many different levels, from the cheap hooker on the corner to the well-kept maitresse en titre, a woman who had a semi-official role and title as the mistress of the king. During Nicole’s childhood, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry were the first ladies in the land, the mistresses of Louis XV. Nicole may have looked to their example of what even an uneducated, unprivileged young woman could accomplish. No doubt she aspired to creating a comfortable life for herself. However, she was still pretty far down on the ladder of life.