Physical description

Hard cover book. The Queens Necklace
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Co Author: Auguste Maquet
Editor: Alfred Thomas Baker
Translator: Henry Llewellyn Williams
Illustrator: Paul Hardy
Publisher: Collins Clear Type Press
Date: 1910-1920s
Further Information: Black embossed patterning Cloth hardcover with lettering and patterning to spine in gilt. The spine has a Library label with an inscription.

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with the typed text PAT 843 DUM
Paste down front end paper has a stamp from Warrnambool Public Library
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute and Free Library
Front loose end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Flyleaf has a stamp from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute

Summary

The novel is loosely based on the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a fraud and royal scandal at the court of Louis XVI in the 1780s. It was published in 1849–50, just after the French Revolution of 1848, and first appeared as a serial in La Presse. The story is set in 1784–85 and follows the impoverished Countess Jeanne de La Motte, a descendant of the Valois dynasty, who catches Queen Marie-Antoinette’s attention. Jeanne senses that the queen secretly wants a necklace made by the jewellers Boehmer and Bossange, and persuades Cardinal de Rohan that giving it to her would win the queen’s favour. The cardinal, believing himself the queen’s secret admirer, is drawn into the deceit. The mysterious Count Cagliostro pulls the strings behind the fraud and intrigue. The prologue is borrowed from La Harpe’s ‘Prophétie de Cazotte’, but Dumas gave it much more life. The book is a sequel to Joseph Balsamo (Memoirs of a Physician) in Dumas’s Marie Antoinette cycle.