The Queen's Necklace by Antal Szerb

Author:Antal Szerb [Antal Szerb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908968784
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2012-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

A few days later he received a letter edged with blue. Its illustrious writer requested him to take himself off to Saverne and, in the interests of the business just transacted, not to show his face for while. With his usual passivity he obeyed this instruction too. We find him reposing “deep inside” his wonderful mansion, “dozing on down cushions, far inwards,” in Carlyle’s words, “with soft ministering Hebes, and luxurious appliances, with ranked heyducs, and a valetaille innumerable, that shut out the prose world and its discord; thus lies Monseigneur, in enchanted dream.” Let us leave him to dream; he still has a little time left for that.

The La Mottes spent rather less time dreaming. They had to solve the difficult question: how could you secretly realise an asset of which there was only one example in the world—an item of jewellery as conspicuous as the sun?

The wisest course would of course have been to hide it in some safe place, and, after a long, long wait, when the storm had blown over, start turning it into cash, very circumspectly, in some completely different part of the world.

But that was not what Jeanne did. She couldn’t, because she needed money urgently and she did not have a long, long time. Creditors were pressing her, as, with equal urgency, was the life of greatness, the Valois destiny. Besides, just two days earlier she had not given it a moment’s thought—so much is clear from the whole story. If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn’t be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

So she did the next best thing—she broke the necklace up into its constituent parts to sell individually. Naturally, this reduced their value. The diamonds were separated by a nervous, unskilled hand and suffered extensive scratching; the mounting was lost, and so was the value of the craftsmanship; all that remained was the raw value of the stones.

Then she eagerly set about selling them.

A few days later Réteaux de Villette was reported by a jeweller whose suspicions were aroused by his having a pocket full of diamonds. Réteaux declared that the stones did not belong to him but had been entrusted to him by a lady of noble birth, and he actually named Jeanne de la Motte. Thus the great project almost foundered at the outset.

However, because of the nature of her profession, Jeanne had been subject to police surveillance for some time. That now proved her good fortune. Thinking she had the diamonds merely in her protection, the police disregarded the report and took no further interest in the matter.

But it taught Jeanne that she would have to be a lot more careful. She gave a large number of the stones to her husband to take to England for sale there. A second lot she kept herself, and a third was entrusted to Réteaux.

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