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DIAMONDS IN FASHION: I
sailles, a golden-haired girl arrived from Austria to be educated as the future queen of France. Marie Antoinette was as dainty as a porcelain shepherdess and quite as im­practical. Married at the age of fifteen, queen before she was twenty, all the coffers of royal treasure were open to her. A peculiar mixture of magnificence and simplicity, at one period of her life her very existence seemed to de­pend on a feverish love of change in fashion, and elabora­tion in her gowns and jewels became excessive. Indeed, Louis, anxious to pique the interest of the frequently languid queen, introduced Mlle Rose Bertin, an obscure little milliner but one with inexhaustible ideas, into the Louvre, the Corinthian colonnaded castle on the banks of the Seine later to become a museum of art and public offices. Mlle Bertin produced some new foible every day, her specialty being coiffure arrangements with jewels. Fashions changed overnight in the literal sense and the queen was happily busy keeping up with them.
It was the queen's almost passionate love of diamonds that indirectly led to the notorious affairs of the diamond necklace. This, says the French historian Frantz Funck-Brentano in his book, The Diamond Necklace, among all trials recorded in history "is the one which has exercised deepest influence on the destinies of our country." Cer­tainly it damaged the prestige of French royalty, possibly contributing later to the Revolution and the downfall of the monarchy.
On a spring morning in 1784 there came to the queen a Parisian jeweler named Bohmer with a necklace of rare diamonds painstakingly collected over a period of years. Bohmer offered it to her for a price of more than 1,500,000 francs. In spite of the king's usual generosity, Marie well knew that she could not afford such a price. Bohmer could
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