The La Motte Woman
Grasping, greedy, manipulative, and scheming, Jeanne de Saint-Remy-Valois, daughter of an illegitimate and impoverished descendant of Henry II and self-styled the Comtesse de Valois after her marriage to Nicolas La Motte, led a life of adventure, extravagance, and fraud in pre-Revolutionary France. Granted a pension by the French king Louis XVI and obsessed with being a princess, she craved luxurious living but was constantly strapped for cash. When the Paris jewelers Bassenge and Bohmer create the world’s most fabulous diamond necklace and Jeanne learns Queen Marie Antoinette desires it, she sees an opportunity. Taking advantage of her lover Prince Cardinal Louis de Rohan’s wish to return to the Queen’s good graces, Jeanne concocts a devious plan to commit a great heist. Acting as the Cardinal’s agent and with his money, she uses forgery, blatant lies, and an imposter to obtain the necklace for herself, but when the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” is exposed, everyone ensnared in her web (including herself) must publicly face the consequences.
Devlin’s meticulous research is evident, but she has loaded the novel with too many characters, too much description, and not enough action. Multiple narrators and slow pacing kept me from being fully engaged. Jeanne, with her witty quips and outrageous lies, is a fascinating character, but she’s too selfish and unlikable to draw much sympathy. Most of the male characters seem either dimwitted or weak or hysterical; the jewelers in their attempts to sell their necklace were almost like a comedy duo. Occurring at a time of extraordinary wealth and terrible poverty, this fiasco further discredited the already unpopular queen and accelerated the monarchy’s downfall and should be remembered, but this account lacks energy and fervency.
