If you love stories of betrayal and missing jewels, you’ll adore one of the greatest mysteries in French history: the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace. In 1785, the court of Versailles was shaken when a fake countess managed to steal a set of 674 diamonds, plunging Marie Antoinette into a devastating scandal.
What if the ghost of this famous scam were haunting the capital of Gaul today? Stop looking for the culprit in history books, because it’s your turn to deliver justice. The Jury Experience invites you to take part in an extraordinary immersive experience and judge another equally thrilling story of a necklace theft.
26 June 2026 19:30 + more dates
A plot worthy of the greatest thrillers
At the heart of the story lies a necklace of colossal value that its creators are desperately trying to sell to Marie Antoinette, but she stubbornly refuses, deeming the item too expensive and out of fashion. That’s when Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, an ambitious noblewoman without fortune, enters the scene. She spots the perfect mark: the fabulously wealthy Cardinal de Rohan, desperate to regain the queen’s favor.
The countess leads him to believe that she is a friend of the queen and that the latter wishes to acquire the famous necklace. To perfect her trap, she recruits a forger to imitate the queen’s handwriting and hires a prostitute, a lookalike of Marie Antoinette, to grant him a brief, secret nighttime rendezvous in the gardens of Versailles.
Completely duped, the cardinal buys the necklace on credit in the queen’s name and hands it over to the countess. The jewel is immediately dismantled and the diamonds resold in London. The affair comes to light when the jewelers, having not been paid, demand their money directly from the crown.
A verdict with a whiff of revolution
Furious, Louis XVI had the cardinal arrested. The trial, entrusted to the Parliament of Paris in 1786, turned into a political disaster. While the countess was sentenced to be branded with a hot iron bearing the “V” for thief, Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted.
To public opinion, this verdict was a terrible humiliation for Marie Antoinette: the judges deemed it not implausible to believe that the queen might exchange love letters and buy jewelry in secret. Though innocent, the sovereign emerged from this crisis deeply despised, a scandal that would deal a fatal blow to the monarchy’s credibility on the eve of the Revolution.
