The Bosquet de la Reine (Queen's Grove) is one of the woodland garden rooms in the south section of the gardens, near the Apollo fountain. It is a quiet, shaded enclosure of clipped hornbeam hedges with a central fountain basin — typical of the bosquet style — but it has an unusual historical weight.
It was here in August 1785 that the notorious Affair of the Diamond Necklace reached its climax. Cardinal de Rohan had been manipulated into believing he was meeting Marie Antoinette secretly in the gardens at night. The woman waiting in the bosquet was not the queen but a hired actress. The jewellery fraud was perpetrated by a con artist named Jeanne de Valois; the queen was entirely innocent but the scandal attached to her name and was never entirely removed.
The bosquet is worth a deliberate detour for this history alone. The setting — trees closing out the sky, the hedges making an outdoor room, no other visitors on a quiet afternoon — makes the scene easy to imagine. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace was one of the moments that made the old court seem not just arrogant but absurd.