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In May 1786, Louis was informed of the heist and ordered Rohan, Motte and the charlatan Cagliostro^* arrested. ‘Sire, I’ve been tricked,’ Rohan told Louis. The mess should have been examined secretly by a commission of the council. But ‘the public assumes I got the necklace without paying for it’, said Antoinette, who pushed for a public acquittal in the Paris parlement. Motte was flogged naked and branded – though she bit the executioner. Yet the parlement was filled with Antoinette’s enemies, who on 31 May 1786 acquitted Rohan of disrespect to the sovereigns. For the monarchs, calumnied then humiliated, it was a double fiasco.

A young artillery lieutenant, third son (out of eight children) of a prominent Corsican lawyer and his wife, impoverished nobles, whose worshipful love gave him an invincible self-confidence, followed the scandal closely, later seeing it as a grave step towards disaster. ‘The queen’s death must be dated from the diamond-necklace trial,’ concluded Napoleon Bonaparte, who believed that ‘Some little thing always decides great events.’

After Jefferson had been in Paris for a year, he summoned his younger daughter Polly, aged nine, who was to be accompanied on her transatlantic journey by her fourteen-year-old enslaved cousin, Sally Hemings. The girls travelled via London, where the priggish American minister John Adams and his wife Abigail were shocked that the beautiful Sally was joining Jefferson. ‘The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her,’ wrote Abigail to Jefferson, ‘was sick and unable to come; she has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her.’ They advised sending Sally back to Virginia. Jefferson overruled them.

In Paris, Sally joined Jefferson’s household. She was ‘very handsome’ and ‘mighty near white’, a fellow slave, Isaac Jefferson, recalled, with ‘straight hair down her back’. Unusually Jefferson paid wages to James and Sally Hemings, revealing both the different circumstances of Parisian life but also the special status of the Hemingses, siblings of his darling wife. As his affair with Maria ended, Jefferson paid for the expensive inoculation not just of his family but of the Hemingses too by a celebrity doctor to kings, Daniel Sutton. Jefferson also organized French lessons for Sally and bought her clothes.

Jefferson, aged forty-four, who had written on how racial intermixture delivered ‘improvement in body and mind’, now started a relationship with Sally, still only fifteen. ‘During that time,’ as their son Madison put it, ‘my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine.’

SAINT -GEORGES, DANGEROUS LIAISONS AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

In the spring of 1789, Jefferson, his daughters and surely the Hemingses attended a concert by a remarkable mixed-race violinist, the eleven-year-old George Bridgetower, marketed as ‘the African Prince’. Many African and mixed-race people lived in Paris, as they did in London. Just as British law was ambiguous about slavery, French law too was confused about whether slavery could exist in France itself. Slaves could register at the Admiralty court and could claim freedom.

Born in Poland, George was the brilliant son of a Barbadian servant of the Esterházy princes, patrons of Haydn. Jefferson and his household would also have followed the career of the most famous mixed-race man in Paris who was close to both political intrigue and the new French abolitionist movement: Joseph Bologne, chevalier de Saint-Georges, a champion fencer, violinist and composer. Saint-Georges was hired by the powerful Orléans family, the king’s cousins, to run their Masonic Concert Olympique which played at their Palais Royal. His opera L’Amant anonyme was successful and he premiered a new one just after Sally’s arrival. Saint-Georges was now friends with the young, liberal, rich Philippe, duc d’Orléans, first prince of the blood, who was not only conspiring against the king but a supporter of a radical cause: the abolition of slavery.

Orléans, his chief of staff Laclos, his adviser the philosophe Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his musician friend and homme de couleur Saint-Georges regularly visited London for politics and pleasure.^* Orléans, always juggling multiple paramours, was friends with Prinny, the prince of Wales, with whom he shared the Scottish courtesan Grace Elliott. After giving birth to a royal bastard, Grace accompanied the duke back to Paris. Laclos based the libertinism of his novel Les Liaisons dangereuses on Orléans’s complicated love life. Orléans admired Britain’s parliamentary monarchy and hoped, by replacing his cousin Louis as regent if not as king, to establish such a system in France. But all of them were also vehement opponents of slavery, now at its diabolical zenith for both Britain and France.