ed
an impression that much more could be said for the course he urged.

The King hesitated, considering. Noting this, the prudent, far-seeing
Miromesnil ventured to develop the arguments at which Rohan had hinted,
laying stress upon the desirability of avoiding scandal.

Louis was nodding, convinced, when Marie Antoinette, unable longer to
contain her rancour, broke into opposition of those prudent measures.

"This hideous affair must be disclosed," she insisted. "It is due to me
that it should publicly be set right. The Cardinal shall tell the world
how he came to suppose that, not having spoken to him for eight years,
I could have wished to make use of his services in the purchase of this
necklace."

She was in tears, and her weak, easily swayed husband accounted her
justified in her demand. And so, to the great consternation of all the
world, Prince Louis de Rohan was arrested like a common thief.

A foolish, indiscreet, short-sighted woman had allowed her rancour to
override all other considerations--careless of consequences, careless of
injustice so that her resentment, glutted by her hatred of the Cardinal,
should be gratified. The ungenerous act was terribly to recoil upon her.
In tears and blood was she to expiate her lack of charity; very soon she
was to reap its bitter fruits.

Saint-Just, a very prominent counsellor of the Parliament, one of the
most advanced apostles of the new ideas that were to find full fruition
in the Revolution, expressed the popular feeling in the matter.

"Great and joyful affair! A cardinal and a queen implicated in a forgery
and a swindle! Filth on the crosier and the sceptre! What a triumph for
the ideas of liberty!"

At the trial that followed before Parliament, Madame de la Motte, a
man named Reteaux de Villette--who had forged the Queen's hand and
impersonated Desclaux and a Mademoiselle d'Oliva--who had used her
striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette to impersonate the Queen in the
Grove of Venus were found guilty and sentenced. But the necklace was not
recovered. It had been broken up, and some of the diamonds were already
sold; others were being sold in London by Captain de la Motte, who had
gone thither for the purpose, and who prudently remained there.

The Cardinal was acquitted, amid intense public joy and acclamation,
which must have been gall and wormwood to the Queen. His powerful
family, the clergy of France, and the very people, with whom he had ever
been