y of the ornament,
and for her payment of the price by installments.

This was strange enough to have excited the suspicions of most men. What
followed was stranger still. Not content with forging the queen's
handwriting, Madame La Mothe had even, if one may say so, forged the queen
herself. She had assured the cardinal that Marie Antoinette had consented
to grant him a secret interview; and at midnight, in the gardens of
Versailles, had introduced him to a woman of notoriously bad character
named Oliva, who in height resembled the queen, and who, in a conference
of half a minute, gave him a letter and a rose with the words, "You know
what this means." She had hardly uttered the words when Madame La Mothe
interrupted the pair with the warning the Countesses of Provence and
Artois were approaching. The mock queen retired in haste. The cardinal
pressed the rose to his heart; acted on the letter; and protested that he
had never doubted that he had seen the queen, and had been acting on her
commands in obtaining the necklace from Boehmer and delivering it to
Madame La Mothe, though he now acknowledged that he had been imposed upon,
and offered to pay the jeweler for his property.

There were not wanting those who advised that this offer should be
accepted, and that the matter should be hushed up, rather than that a
prince of the Church should be publicly disgraced by a prosecution for
fraud. But Louis and Marie Antoinette both rightly judged that their duty
as sovereigns of the kingdom forbade them to compromise justice by
screening dishonesty. It was but two years before that a great noble, the
most eloquent of all French orators, had singled out Marie Antoinette's
love of justice as one of her most conspicuous, as it was one of her most
noble, qualities; and the words deserve especially to be remembered from
the melancholy contrast which his subsequent conduct presents to the
voluntary tribute which he now paid to her excellence. In 1783, the young
Count de Mirabeau, pleading for the restitution of his conjugal rights,
put the question to the judges at Aix before whom he was arguing, "Which
of you, if he desired to consecrate a living personification of justice,
and to embellish it with all the charms of beauty, would not set up the
august image of our queen?"

She and her husband might well have felt they were bound to act up to such
a eulogy. Some of their advisers also, and especially the Baron de
Breteuil and the Ab