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Updated: June 29, 2025
I can testify that I have seen in the hands of the Queen a manuscript copy of the infamous memoirs of the woman De Lamotte, which had been brought to her from London, and in which all those passages where a total ignorance of the customs of Courts had occasioned that wretched woman to make blunders which would have been too palpable were corrected in M. de Calonne's own handwriting.
Some of Calonne's colleagues strongly urged the king to re-appoint Necker, whose recall would have been highly popular with the nation.
It was during Calonne's administration that occurred the famous affair of the diamond necklace. It was a vulgar swindle worked on the Cardinal de Rohan by an adventuress, Mme. de La Motte Valois. Trading on his credulity and court ambitions, she persuaded him to purchase a diamond necklace, which the Queen, so he was told, greatly wished but could not afford.
"This, however, was soon officially disproved by the exhibition of a written proposition of Calonne's to the Queen, to supply an additional hundred thousand francs that year to her annual revenue, which Her Majesty refused.
He called to the ministry M. Fourqueux, councillor of state, an old man, highly esteemed, but incapable of sustaining the crushing weight of affairs. The king himself presented M. de Calonne's last projects to the Assembly of notables; the rumor ran that the comptroller-general was about to re-enter the cabinet.
"This, however, was soon officially disproved by the exhibition of a written proposition of Calonne's to the Queen, to supply an additional hundred thousand francs that year to her annual revenue, which Her Majesty refused.
In this the Notables were not factious; they merely had enough sense of the gravity of the situation to perceive that a real remedy was needed, and that Calonne's proposal did not supply it.
To whom succeeds Loménie-Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse adopting Calonne's plans, as Calonne had proposed to adopt Turgot's; and the notables are, as it were, organed out in kind of choral anthem of thanks, praises, promises. Loménie issues conciliatory edicts, fiscal edicts. But if the Parlement of Paris refuse to register them? As it does, entering complaints instead.
It adds new force to my observations: and, indeed, M. de Calonne's work supplies my deficiencies by many new and striking arguments on most of the subjects of this letter. It is this resolution to break their country into separate republics which has driven them into the greatest number of their difficulties and contradictions.
This, I hope, Your Majesty will now be able to contradict! "The King all this time was looking over the different pages containing M. de Calonne's additions on their margins. On recognising the hand-writing, His Majesty was so affected by this discovered treachery of his Minister and the agitation of his calumniated Queen that he could scarcely articulate.
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