and was found one morning dead upon the pavements of London, having been thrown from a third story window in a midnight carousal. Such was the story of the Diamond Necklace. Though no one can now doubt that Maria Antoinette was perfectly innocent in the whole affair, it, at the time, furnished her enemies with weapons against her, which they used with fatal efficiency. It was then represented that the Countess Lamotte was an accomplice of the queen in the fraudulent acquisition of the necklace, and that the Cardinal de Rohan was their deluded but innocent victim. The horrible punishment of Madame Lamotte, who boasted that royal blood circulated in her veins, was understood to be in contempt of royalty, and as the expression of venomous feeling toward the queen. Both Maria Antoinette and Louis felt it as such, and were equally aggrieved by the acquittal of the cardinal and the barbarous punishment of the countess. Whether the cardinal was a victim or an accomplice is a question which never has been, and now never can be, decided. The mystery in which the affair is involved must remain a mystery until the secrets of all hearts are revealed at the great day of judgment. If he was the guilty instigator, and the poor countess but his tool and victim, how much has he yet to be accountable for in the just retributions of eternity! There were three suppositions adopted by the community in the attempt to solve the mystery of this transaction: 1. The first was, that the queen had really employed the Countess Lamotte to obtain the necklace by deceiving the cardinal. That it was a trick by which the queen and the countess were to obtain the necklace, and, by selling it piecemeal, to share the spoil, leaving the cardinal responsible for the payment. This was the view the enemies of Maria Antoinette, almost without exception, took of the case; and the sentence of acquittal of the cardinal, and the horrible condemnation of the countess, were intended to sustain this view. This opinion, spread through Paris and France, was very influential in rousing that animosity which conducted Maria Antoinette to sufferings more poignant and to a doom more awful than the Countess Lamotte could by any possibility endure. 2. The second supposition was, that the cardinal and the countess forged the signature of the queen to defraud the jeweler; that they thus obtained the rich prize of three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, intending to divide the spoil between them, and throw the obloquy of the transaction upon the queen. The king and queen were both fully convinced that this was the true explanation of the fraud, and they retained this belief undoubted until they died.