Excerpt from The Story of the Diamond Necklace, Vol. 1 of 2: Told in Detail for the First Time, Chiefly by the Aid of Original Letters, Official and Other Documents, and Contemporary Memoirs Recently Made Public These include, for example, unpublished autograph letters and documents, written either by actual actors in the drama, or else by persons intimately associated with it, and derived chicfly from the valuable collection of M. Feuillet de Conches; the official records of the judicial proceedings to which the affair gave rise; all the memorials put forth on behalf of the accused and the memoirs subsequently issued by them, including the exceedingly scarce M emoire by Retaux de Villette, which the present writer is the first to quote from, and the curious Autobiography written in his old age by Count de la Motte; the discussions in the Paris Parlia ment; and the numerous memoirs penned by persons living at the time, some of which, and these of the highest importance - such as the interesting Memoirs of Count Beugnot - having been only recently made public, have not been at the command of previous writers. In addition to the foregoing sources of information may be mentioned the different biographies, and the various cri tical disquisitions of historians and essayists in which the subject has been so exceedingly fruitful, and of which considerable use will be found to have been made. With such materials at his command, the writer has been able to tell the story for the first time in all its fulness, and as he believes approximating more closely to the truth, in small matters as well as large, than any previous narrative of the transaction. He conceives that he has completely exonerated the French queen from the slightest suspicion of complicity in the miser able fraud. He has made a point of supplying missing dates to the more trivial as well as to all the more important incidents, of vouching every statement of the sm allest consequence, and of giving the very language of the witnesses to the various facts which they are called upon to prove. It is proper to mention, with regard to some few of the authorities referred to in the following pages, such as Madame Campan's and Weber's Memoirs of marie-antoinette, Madame de la Motte's Memoires J ustificatifs, and the Memoire pour le Comte de Cagliostro, that the French and English versions of these works have been indiscriminately used, and that the references given, if they do not apply to the one, will be found to belong to the other edition of the works in question. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.