Palais Rohan

This guide to Palais Rohan in Strasbourg opens with a question: why did a future queen of France refuse, for the rest of her life, to speak the name of a man who once bowed to her inside these gilded apartments. It follows the fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess who spent her first night on French soil here in May 1770, and the young clergyman Louis de Rohan, already known across the city for his charm and his debts, who greeted her. You'll hear how he later offended her mother while serving as ambassador in Vienna, and how a con artist named Jeanne de la Motte drew him fifteen years later into a scheme built on forged letters and an outrageous, unchecked claim. Listen for the moment his belief in that claim catches up with him at Versailles.