Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (27 page)

Jeanne Bécu had literally been groomed for the position. But she was not schooled by her mother, Anne Bécu, a lowly seamstress. Nor did she receive her tutelage from her purported father, a monk, Jean-Baptiste Gomard, who went by the ironic name of Frère Ange (Brother Angel). Jeanne’s Pygmalion was a scoundrel and renowned pimp named Jean-Baptiste du Barry. He was a man well-known not only to the Paris police but among society as “the Roué.” Du Barry transformed the seamstress’s illegitimate daughter into, as he termed it, “
un vrai morceau du roi
”—a morsel fit for the king. But the phrase had a frank sexual connotation as well,
morceau
also being a synonym for “piece,” as in piece of ass.

Jeanne had enjoyed quite a checkered career before she crossed paths with the Roué. Her mother, who was also somewhat free with her favors, managed to liberate herself from the garrison town of Vaucouleurs in Lorraine by seducing Monsieur Dumonceaux, the visiting postmaster of Paris. She became pregnant and followed him back to the capital, with Jeanne in tow. At first they stayed with Anne’s sister Hélène, who was the housekeeper to the king’s librarian. Then Anne and Jeanne moved in with Anne’s lover, and—to her shock—his mistress Francesca, a notorious Italian demimondaine who went by the name of Madame Frédérique.

Anne was taken on as a cook, and Madame Frédérique, who loved children, indulged the five-year-old Jeanne, giving the child the run of her lavishly appointed apartments. The provincial child with the wide blue eyes and masses of blond hair had never seeen such luxuries—perfume bottles, gilded beds and hand mirrors, abundant jewels, and sumptuous gowns in the latest fashions. Madame Frédérique played dress-up with Jeanne as if she were a little doll. She
taught the child how to dance, while Monsieur Dumonceaux, an amateur artist, painted her as a nymph.

Anne got out of Dumonceaux’s kitchen by wedding a pockmarked valet named Nicolas Rançon. Dumonceaux supplemented Rançon’s income by giving him a plum assignment to the army detachment in Corsica.

Little Jeanne was placed in the convent of St. Aure in the heart of Paris. St. Aure was a school for “at risk” girls of modest means where they could learn a trade—a good way to avoid the paths of temptation. Jeanne spent nine years there, leaving at the age of fifteen with a fairly comprehensive education.

To keep her out of trouble, her aunt Hélène arranged for Jeanne to apprentice to a hairdresser. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but her employer, Monsieur Lametz, was so smitten with her that in short order they became lovers. When his mother showed up, she accused Anne Bécu of prostituting her underage daughter. Anne sued Madame Lametz for defamation of character, and Jeanne’s first love affair ended in tears. It also resulted in the birth of a daughter, Marie Josephine, nicknamed Betsi, who was raised in a convent, passed off as the daughter of Jeanne’s stepfather, Nicolas Rançon. Many years later, when lowly Jeanne Bécu was warming the bed of the king, Betsi would be married off to a marquis.

In 1761, her brief career in coiffures at an abrupt end, eighteen-year-old Jeanne spent several months as a lady’s maid for Madame de la Garde, the wealthy widow of a provincial finance minister. But when madame found out that her voluptuous domestic was sleeping with
both
of her married sons (and had clumsily fended off the advances of one of their wives), Jeanne was promptly sacked.

She had much better luck at her next job. In the spring of 1762, she became a grisette, or shopgirl, at Paris’s most exclusive fashion house, À la Toilette, owned by Monsieur Labille. There she regularly crossed paths with Labille’s posh clientele, which included both aristocrats and demimondaines, and was surrounded day in and day out by the finest textiles, ribbons, and laces.

The Prince de Ligne, a bon vivant of the era, described “the charms of the little grisette who worked at Labille’s, a girl who was
tall, well made and ravishingly blonde with a wide forehead, lovely eyes with dark lashes, a small oval face with a delicate complexion marked by two little beauty spots, which only made her the more
piquante
, a mouth to which laughter came easily and a bosom so perfect as to defy comparison.”

Working among luxury goods every day, Jeanne coveted such items for herself and had no qualms about doing what it took to secure them. Soon she was retailing more than ribbons and bonnets. She developed a discerning eye and knew what type of man would pay the most for her favors. Working her way up the social food chain, she rented herself to merchants, bankers, and financiers, and soon became well-known to the local police (although as Mademoiselle de Vaubernier). Police records of 1782 describe Jeanne as “a pretty little grisette ready to accept whatever came her way—in short, a kept woman living with various men to whom she was not married, but in no sense a prostitute or a
raccrocheuse
guilty of soliciting in the streets.”

That report would put the lie to the rumors that dogged Madame du Barry during her royal romance, namely that she had been a whore in the house of the notorious procuress Madame Gourdan. But Jeanne was indeed in the game for the material gain. Her heart had been broken by the coiffeur Monsieur Lametz. Now she just wanted to amass as many worldly goods as she could by casting the right sort of glances with her notorious
yeux fripons
—her mischievous, or roguish, eyes.

In 1763, at the unveiling of an equestrian statue to celebrate the inauguration of a public square named in the king’s honor, Jeanne’s vivacity attracted the attention of another spectator, one who always had an eye out for a fresh and pretty face and a pulchritudinous form. Jean-Baptiste du Barry (who styled himself as a comte, though he certainly did not behave like a member of the aristocracy) had noticed Jeanne at Labille’s shop, and recognized in her the answer to his greatest ambition. He had started out with more quotidian aspirations, but when his plan of becoming a foreign diplomat didn’t pan out, he turned to his fallback talents of debauchery and cardsharping. In time he developed a niche for himself, specializing in finding the perfect girl for his friends at court. His ultimate goal was to place
one of his protégées in the king’s bed, but for obvious reasons, Madame de Pompadour had been hell-bent on thwarting it.

In the weeks following the unveiling of Louis’ statue, Jean du Barry, having decided that Jeanne Bécu was the girl he’d been waiting for all his life, arranged with her mother and stepfather for her to move in with him. It was understood that she would be his mistress, and Jeanne does not seem to have put up much of a fuss. On Jean du Barry’s arm, she would always be impeccably gowned, coiffed, and jeweled, and would gain entrée into the world of sophisticated demimondaines and their aristocratic lovers—the sort of education she never could have gotten at St. Aure. She already possessed all the requisite natural talents of a courtesan: She knew how to amuse, flatter, and cajole; she could bestow her body while withholding her heart. With Jean du Barry, she had plenty of opportunities to observe how the nobility carried themselves: how they dressed, moved, and spoke—and not only
how
they spoke, but what they spoke
of
. In eighteenth-century Parisian salons, conversation was both an art and a skill.

Jean-Baptiste du Barry’s activities were well-known to the Parisian police force. “When he begins to weary of a woman he invariably sells her off. But it must be admitted that he is a connoisseur and his merchandise is eminently salable,” read one report.

Sure enough, the comte du Barry also retailed Jeanne to other men, and she did not protest. On the contrary, every experience was a teachable moment, and every client was another contact, another potential friend. One of them, the sixty-seven-year-old duc de Richelieu, a crony of the king’s, would become a lifelong champion. At the age of twenty Jeanne became the duc’s lover as part of a business transaction. She was his fee (plus fifty gold louis) for securing a position at court for du Barry’s fourteen-year-old son, Adolphe.

From 1765 to 1766, Jeanne rented her own house in the rue de la Jussienne, setting up shop as a courtesan in order to afford her lavish lifestyle. Alternately calling herself Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, Mademoiselle Beauvarnier, and Mademoiselle l’Ange (an ironic nod, perhaps, to her alleged father, the so-called Frère Ange), she entertained poets and courtiers, ministers and other influential men of the day so that she could learn how to converse with them. Jean du Barry
had found a diamond in the rough. He realized he might have only one shot to dangle her tantalizingly before the king; he couldn’t risk blowing it. It was four years from the time they had serendipitously met on the Place Louis XV until du Barry deemed Jeanne ready to present to the king.

She was first dispatched to Versailles on an errand that would appear innocuous enough: pleading a matter before the powerful duc de Choiseul, who held several ministerial offices simultaneously. In the spring of 1768, Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, dressed like a country lass in a beribboned straw hat and a simple muslin gown that revealed her famous décolletage, entered the duc’s office with a sob story. Choiseul was unimpressed by her looks and her tale of woe (that she’d given all of her money to an army contractor in charge of supplies for Corsica and now needed help collecting it). He fobbed her off on an underling, but Jeanne remained undeterred and requested a second meeting a few days later. The subsequent meeting didn’t go well either. Jeanne made the mistake of mentioning du Barry’s name, and Choiseul quickly curtailed the interview, suspecting that her real motives in coming to see him were to ask him for money or to seduce him.

It was a matter of being in exactly the right place at the right time for the wrong reasons. Or not. After all, du Barry’s intention had always been for Jeanne to catch the king—and hold him. As she was headed out of the palace she locked eyes with His Majesty as he strode through the Hall of Mirrors on his way to Mass. She gave Louis one of her dazzling smiles and he was smitten for life.

Soon he was making inquiries about the luscious blonde. He had to meet her, to possess her. To the Roué, Jean du Barry, it must have felt like shooting fish in a barrel.

The queen of France died on June 24, 1768. That same week, Jeanne Bécu, alias Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, a.k.a. Mademoiselle l’Ange of the rue de la Jussienne, spent her first night in the king’s arms. The following morning, so the story goes, Louis cornered the randy old duc de Richelieu and told him, “I am delighted with your Jeanne. She is the only woman in France who has managed to make me forget that I am sixty.” (He was fifty-eight).

So delighted was His Majesty with his new toy that he kvelled
about Jeanne’s remarkable talents to anyone who would listen. When he marveled about some of her amatory skills to the duc d’Ayen, the duc bluntly replied, “That, Sire, is because you have never been to a brothel.”

There was, however, a slight hitch: the brothel aspect of the whole business. Louis had been given a whitewashed version of Jeanne’s background. Although she had never been a prostitute (despite the propaganda the duc de Choiseul would eventually, and anonymously, disseminate against her), she had certainly been around the block more than a few times. In any event, Jeanne had been both euphemistically and erroneously represented to the king as a married woman who had dallied with a few powerful men here and there, primarily in the world of finance, but otherwise she was a lady of sound repute—in other words, she was no better or worse than most wives of the eighteenth-century French bourgeoisie.

Except that Jeanne was no one’s wife, nor ever had been. Although her married name had been presented as “du Barry,” it was common knowledge, as gossip was currency at Versailles, that comte Jean du Barry already had a wife living back in Languedoc, so he could not be this mythical husband of the king’s new inamorata.

Louis’ ever-faithful valet Lebel, who summoned Jeanne to Versailles for her royal trysts and guided her up the secret stairs to the king’s bedchamber with extreme frequency, began to realize that she was no passing infatuation. It was therefore becoming hard to conceal her past from his boss. Sooner or later Louis was bound to find out the truth for himself. The more often she visited the palace, the greater the risk of her being recognized by the courtiers who frequented du Barry’s home as well as Jeanne’s salon in the rue de la Jussienne, some of whom may even have been her lovers.

Louis was so serious about Jeanne that he talked of installing her as his
maîtresse en titre
and shuttering the Parc-aux-Cerfs, as he no longer had the need for an on-call seraglio. It was Pompadour all over again—and then some. At least the marquise, although a bourgeoise, had enjoyed a more or less respectable background. And Jeanne, too, had the problem of not being a member of the titled aristocracy with a coat of arms dating back to the year 1400.

Lebel decided to set the record straight before things got completely
out of hand, so he confided Jeanne’s sexual résumé to the king. But he received a somewhat unexpected reaction. Anger, yes; Lebel had anticipated that. But Louis was not feeling duped or betrayed. He was livid that such aspersions should be cast upon this lovely and winsome woman, this fine specimen of femininity! How dared Lebel malign her so? But, just in case it was all true, Louis instructed his valet to begin making the necessary arrangements to recast his new mistress as a reputable woman. Lebel was so shocked that he dropped dead a few weeks later.

Jeanne’s former lover the duc de Richelieu assumed control of the project. The first step was to get Jeanne married for real. Conveniently, Jean-Baptiste du Barry had a brother languishing in Languedoc named Guillaume, fat, paunchy, and provincial—but unwed. Guillaume was summoned from the du Barrys’ hometown of Lévignac and instructed to show up for a proper church wedding that autumn, well advised that his wife would never warm his bed.

In the interim, Jeanne remained in a twilight zone of respectability. She was unmarried, but not as yet Louis’ formal mistress. Oh, how times had changed since the Sun King’s reign! Where Louis XIV had been vilified for choosing married mistresses, what irony—and hypocrisy—now attended the era of his successor. The new, unwed paramour of Louis
le Bien-Aimé
, a man who was now a widower, had to get herself legally hitched to a man she’d never met, didn’t love, and would never sleep with or see again, just so her adulterous romance with the sovereign could be formally recognized at a court hidebound by arcane etiquette. In the interim, Jeanne could not socialize at court with the other women, regardless of her relationship with the king.