Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (30 page)

The comtesse was able to use her position to save lives. She famously became involved with the case of the destitute comte and comtesse de Louesne, who, facing eviction from their château, stood their ground and killed a bailiff and a mounted policeman. For these murders they were sentenced to death by beheading, and even their daughter’s entreaties could not induce Louis to clemency.

Madame du Barry then tried her best. She prostrated herself before her lover, yet he remained unmoved. But the comtesse proved just as inflexible, refusing to rise until Louis granted her boon. Finally, with all that was at stake—the outcome of a major judicial decision already in the balance, two lives already lost, and two more perhaps to follow—the king was the first to blink.

Brimming with love, he told his mistress, “Madame, I am delighted that the first favor you should ask of me should be an act of mercy.” As a direct consequence of du Barry’s plea, Louis spared the
lives of the Louesnes, an act that brought many of the nobility who had previously shunned and disdained her flocking to her side. She had obeyed her instincts and at the same time was able to seize an opportunity to turn a nationally notorious situation to her advantage. Had the comtesse du Barry been compassionate, canny, clever, or a combination of all three?

Among other unfortunates whom she interceded for early in her tenure was a mother charged with infanticide because she failed to register the stillbirth of her child, thus saving an already distraught, and innocent, woman from being executed for murder.

If the Louesnes incident was any indication, the king could deny his love nothing. With gifts of real estate and clemency came an allowance. Every month 200,000 livres was paid to her by the court banker. In 1771, two years after she became Louis’
maîtresse en titre
, the sum was raised to 250,000 livres. And yet she always overspent, no matter how much she received. She gave generously to her mother and her aunt, but that wasn’t where the lion’s share of her money went. Given her passion for fashion, the comtesse was perpetually in debt to her dressmakers—first Madame Sigly, and later Mademoiselle Rose Bertin, the same modiste who would transform Marie Antoinette into a fashionista. Jeanne’s dresses cost more than a thousand livres apiece, and were invariably embellished with gemstones and costly lace. One particular bodice was covered entirely with diamonds that had been fashioned into flowers, ribbons, and bows, and cost the king a whopping 450,000 livres. Not content to let the bodice speak for itself, she accessorized it with a diamond necklace of ostentatious proportions. Even in the rococo age, for Madame du Barry, excess was never enough. She was also mad about jewelry. The comtesse was the only woman at court to wear stones of more than one color at a time. Whether such a fashion was considered daring, outré, or vulgar, she didn’t seem to care.

Additionally, Madame du Barry’s household was so large that it couldn’t all be accommodated at the palace of Versailles, and some of her retinue had to be housed in her
hôtel
(the word for a mansion, not a hostelry) in the rue de l’Orangerie in the town. Her former procurer had a difficult time getting his invoices reimbursed as well. Jean-Baptiste du Barry had an understanding with the king (although
Louis hated the unpleasant reminder of Jeanne’s provenance) that the gowns, jewels, and carriages the comte had provided for her and had continued to fund before she became the king’s property, so to speak, would be repaid.

In mid-May 1770, the youngest archduchess of Austria, Marie Antoinette, came to France to marry Louis’ grandson, the shy and shambling dauphin Louis Auguste. Dinner on the day before the wedding was held at the royal hunting lodge of La Muette on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The twenty-seven-year-old
maîtresse en titre
dressed with the utmost care for this special event. Her gown was constructed of silver tissue spun with gold, and embellished all over with rubies. Even her detractors had to admit that she was the most beautiful woman in the room. By comparison, despite her freshness and wholesome prettiness, Marie Antoinette was just a charming little girl.

At first the fourteen-year-old dauphine was intrigued by the vibrant Madame du Barry, inquiring of her
dame d’honneur
the comtesse de Noailles what the beautiful woman’s role was at court. Taken aback by the question, the head of the dauphine’s household diplomatically informed her that the lady’s job was “to amuse the king.”

“Then I shall be her rival!” the naive and virginal teenager declared, the euphemism utterly lost on her. Yet as soon as she learned that Madame du Barry was the king’s
maîtresse en titre
, and that her origins and background were lowly and rather sordid, she refused to countenance the woman, despite repeated entreaties from her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, to do what it took to please the king, because the Franco-Austrian alliance hung in the balance.

Insisting to her mother that “it is pathetic to see how weak [the king] is with Madame du Barry, who is the silliest and most impertinent creature imaginable,” Marie Antoinette stubbornly refused to compromise her morals by speaking even one word to the king’s whore. Her recalcitrance blossomed into an international incident. It mushroomed even further when Austria needed France to turn a blind eye to her cooperation with Prussia and Russia in the invasion and partition of Poland, carving up an innocent commonwealth for their own gain.

However, Louis was disinclined to look the other way while his
granddaughter-in-law publicly snubbed his lover. Pulled in two directions, Marie Antoinette was too naive to understand that she was being used to promote a plethora of secret agendas. Her mother, pious though she was, stood to gain a substantial amount of territory if her daughter said a few nice words in public to Madame du Barry. Louis’ daughters, Mesdames, who were always intriguing because they had nothing else to occupy their hours, had been manipulating the young dauphine ever since she arrived in France, in the guise of being her mentors. By virtue of her marriage to the dauphin, Marie Antoinette was now the highest-ranking woman in the kingdom. This meant that she would soon cultivate her own coterie of courtiers and ministers keen to gain her favor, as one day she would be queen. If Mesdames could use her as their tool to snub du Barry, they might be able to accomplish the fall of the mistress without soiling their own hands.

It worked for a while. But finally the Austrian ambassador explained to Marie Antoinette why her mother wished her to speak to Madame du Barry. With great reluctance, the dauphine conceded, and after an aborted attempt (interrupted by Madame Adélaïde, the oldest of Louis’ daughters) in July 1771, Marie Antoinette finally spoke to the comtesse on New Year’s Day, 1772. “
Il y a bien du monde aujourd’hui à Versailles
”—“There are a lot of people at Versailles today,” she said. Louis heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. Madame du Barry was exultant. And the crisis was over.

The comtesse won that round, and she also scored another victory against Marie Antoinette. The duc de Choiseul had been one of the prime architects of her marriage to the dauphin and the Franco-Austrian alliance; consequently, Marie Antoinette was deeply indebted to him, and it was in her best interests for him to remain at the head of the government. But Madame du Barry convinced the king to dismiss Choiseul based upon a number of issues, not least of which was his dissemination of scurrilous propaganda against her. She claimed to be aware of documents that proved the duc was trying to drag France into a conflict with Britain (and Louis had a natural reticence to go to war) over the Falkland Islands.

The story goes that du Barry herself dictated Louis’ letter to his cousin the king of Spain (with whom France would have been siding
in the Falklands hostilities), informing him that he had no interest in becoming involved in another military conflict. In truth, if the comtesse participated at all in Louis’ letter, she had likely memorized something that had been ghostwritten either by Chon or by Jean du Barry, both of whom were renowned for their sophisticated correspondence. The king’s letter was sent to Spain on December 23, 1770, and the following day Louis signed a
lettre de cachet
exiling Choiseul to his country estate of Chanteloup and demanding his resignation of the offices of secretary of state and superintendent of the post office.

By the spring of 1771, Louis was more dependent than ever on Madame du Barry. Without her he felt very much alone. He had dismissed Choiseul and suppressed the Parlements, exiling the magistrates and defanging the assembly. The move was so autocratic that his cousins, the princes of the blood, and several ducs refused to appear at the
lit de justice
where Louis, reclining on a throne covered with a purple cloth embellished with fleurs-de-lis, commanded the new Parlement, formed by his chancellor Maupeou, to follow his orders. The highest-ranking men in the land may have protested the event by absenting themselves, but Madame du Barry was right there to support her lover, and many believed that she was behind the king’s political vision.

Hapsburg Austria’s ambassador to France, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, was amazed, writing to his sovereign Maria Theresa, “The authority of the countess is such that nothing like it has ever been seen before.”

Mercy wasn’t quite right, however. Louis refused to allow du Barry to pressure him into appointing her pal the duc d’Aiguillon as Choiseul’s replacement. Six months later, however, he capitulated.

Yet even in exile Choiseul remained popular, entertaining all his old friends. And his sister, the duchesse de Gramont, as one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, remained free to spread her jealous vitriol about the royal favorite. Allegedly, she continued to circulate nasty verses about the comtesse containing lies that were as improbable as they were salacious: that Madame du Barry entertained the grand almoner of France and the papal nuncio at a
lever
“as naked as Venus coming out of the sea”; that she asked another cleric to hold
her golden chamber pot while she relieved herself; and that she spanked one of her ladies in the king’s presence, which greatly amused him. Those who knew the comtesse would have been aware that such conduct was not in keeping with her personality, but her enemies delighted in repeating these anecdotes, and undoubtedly they have contributed to the lasting image of Madame du Barry as bawdy and irreverent.

What she did have was extraordinary input into the lives of the royal family. Louis asked her to coordinate the respective wedding plans of his two younger grandsons, the comtes de Provence and d’Artois, to a pair of homely sisters from Savoy. The boys’ mother was long dead by then, so the selection of flowers, music, and other entertainments was awarded to the comtesse. The king’s lover made sure that the receptions were as lavish as could be, a deliberate slap to Marie Antoinette, whose wedding to the comtes’ oldest brother the dauphin was the greatest spectacle of its kind in generations.

From 1772 to 1773, Madame du Barry was at her zenith, for all intents and purposes the uncrowned queen of France. Louis could deny her nothing, and the lovers scarcely spent time apart. He was very needy, whether it was for sex or a sympathetic ear. Her own bed was an altar to love surrounded by four columns that supported a baldachin entwined with carved garlands of ivy, myrtle, and roses. The comtesse seemed to be the air the king required in order to breathe, and she became afraid to stray too far from her rooms when he was around, in case he might need her. Except when he requested privacy and wanted her all to himself, she was always surrounded by a lavish train that included a Bengali page boy named Zamor, a gift Louis bestowed upon the comtesse when the youth was eleven years old. Madame du Barry was waited on like a queen, and her rooms were a hive of humanity. Thirteen matching upholstered chairs were set out for those who witnessed her
lever
, or morning toilette, as if she were a member of the royal family. Her makeup table was wheeled to the area of the room where the light was the harshest and most unforgiving, and it was there that she would apply her rouge and complete her morning ablutions.

Supplicants and sycophants from all walks of life, from bankers to ministers, sought her out, parking themselves in her antechamber.
Many curried favor in unusual ways: A merchant launched a new ship bearing the cribbed du Barry motto,
Boutez en avant,
on the prow; the king of Sweden sent her a box of perfumed gloves; and Voltaire, who resided in voluntary exile in Switzerland, wrote a poem thanking the comtesse for the two kisses (one for each cheek) she had sent via a visiting friend. Louis was delighted by all these tributes to his mistress, viewing them as encomiums to himself.

In one of his dispatches to Empress Maria Theresa during the autumn of 1773, Comte Mercy wrote, “King Louis is so completely given up to Madame du Barry that he is becoming more and more isolated from his children who can give him neither consolation nor advice, while he can expect no attachment of fidelity from the bizarre kind of people by whom he is surrounded and who are the friends of Madame du Barry.”

Louis celebrated his sixty-third birthday in February 1773. Faced with his own mortality, he began to think about the future of his immortal soul. After her father fell for Madame du Barry, the princesse Louise-Marie, Louis’ youngest daughter, had quit Versailles and entered the Carmelite convent at Saint-Denis. As Soeur Thérèse-Augustine she had been praying for the salvation of Louis’ soul ever since, and now she encouraged him to remarry. Her candidate was the princesse de Lamballe, a young widow less than a third the king’s age. Nevertheless, she was beautiful and devout and would make an excellent queen.

Madame du Barry panicked.

But her sister-in-law, Chon, told her to buck up and dry her tears. She reminded the comtesse that her job was to amuse the king, and that the surest way to lose Louis was to be a Debbie Downer. Speaking of which, the princesse de Lamballe always looked like she was on the verge of tears, and in that respect hardly had the requisite temperament to please a man like Louis. Consequently (according to Chon), there was nothing to worry about!