The Queen S Necklace

"The Queen's Necklace" dramatizes an unsavory incident in the 1780s at the court of King Louis XVI of France involving the King's wife, Marie Antoinette. Her reputation was already tarnished by gossip and scandal, and her implication in a crime involving a stolen necklace became one of the major turning-points of public opinion against the monarchy, which eventually culminated in the French Revolution.

The French queen Marie Antoinette had gained a bad reputation – she used too much money and arranged too many parties. But the real scandal started in 1785 when she was suspected to have bought an extremely expensive diamond necklace – even though she was a victim of a complex conspiracy. ‘The Queen’s Necklace’ is Alexandre Dumas’s exciting novel about these very happenings in the 1700’s French Monarchy. It is part of ‘The Marie Antoinette Romances’. The series also includes the novels ‘Balsamo the Magician', ‘Storming the Bastille’, ‘The Countess of Charny’ and ‘The Knight of the Red House’. Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was a French writer. He is best known for his novels ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and ‘The Three Musketeers'. Dumas is considered as one of the most significant French writers of the 19th century. Dumas’s background was exceptional in 1800’s France as his grandmother was a black slave – and also Dumas faced a lot of racism. Many of Dumas’s books have been filmed into movies.

Four years before the French Revolution some priceless diamonds - they cost 1.8m francs, 'the price of a battleship' - were purchased in elaborate secrecy from the court jeweller of France, presumably for Marie Antoinette and at her own instructions. The necklace - not yet paid for - was delivered into the hands of Cardinal Prince de Rohan, first prelate of the Church of France. He in turn gave it to the Countess de La Motte-Valois, who claimed to be acting for the Queen. Although essentially an innocent bystander amidst this chicanery, Marie Antoinette became embroiled in a scandal which fatally weakened the monarchy.

"A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey, Independent In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled—and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died.