Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (31 page)

In fact, there was good news on the horizon. The duc de Richelieu reminded Louis that his great-grandfather had contracted a morganatic marriage with Madame de Maintenon, and suggested that he do the same with du Barry. In a morganatic marriage, the wife would not be queen; nor would she have any rights of a queen, and their
children would have no rights of succession, but at least Louis in his waning years could make his peace with God. However, there was one major obstacle to this plan: Guillaume du Barry. The comtesse remained very much married.

As if on cue, the chevalier arrived in Paris to remind his estranged wife of that very fact. Guillaume was handsomely paid to turn around and head back to Toulouse, but it didn’t solve the problem of finding a bishop who would be willing to divorce the royal mistress. None of them wanted to be responsible for the fact that it would mean Madame du Barry would be queen, even unofficially, should she ever wed the king.

In addition, it was clear that Louis wasn’t going to live forever. He was becoming increasingly frail and tired. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of the future monarchs Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette by appearing to support the ambitions of the comtesse du Barry.

She co-opted the role of the queen anyway at every opportunity. During the marriage celebration of Louis’ youngest grandson, the comte d’Artois, to Princess Marie-Thérèse of Savoy in November 1773, it was the party planner who stole the show from the homely bride and even from the vivacious dauphine. The comtesse had booked the most famous performers of the era for the reception, but everyone was looking at
her
. One wedding guest described Madame du Barry as “shining like the sun in a dress of cloth of gold covered in jewels worth over five million
livres
[an exorbitant sum]. She and King Louis appeared to be entirely absorbed in each other, giving each other loving looks, smiling and making signs, His Majesty occasionally pulling a comic face as if by this extraordinary behavior he wanted to prove that, despite all rumors to the contrary, the comtesse du Barry was still the reigning favorite.”

Her ego was usually center stage. At Louveciennes, the château that Louis had bestowed upon the comtesse a few years earlier, and into which she had sunk a fortune of his money, the walls were covered with her portraits. She metaphorically bathed in her own praise—verses to her beauty and generosity. “All that she wants is flattery. She can never have enough,” Chon du Barry tattled to her lover, the duc d’Aiguillon. Her own beauty was the central theme
even at her lavish parties, where, it was rumored, for the voyeuristic delectation of the king, she would import blond peasant girls to pleasure her page boy Zamor—or so said the Austrian ambassador, Comte Mercy. More than her vanity met Mercy’s critical eye. In his view, the comtesse’s soirees “were carried to such an indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people.”

Madame du Barry was indeed living life to the max, and she never dared show her lover her doubts or fears. As his official mistress, part of her job was to play the court jester, to perennially amuse and soothe the royal temper. She could never permit her energy to flag in Louis’ presence or she would risk losing him to any number of potential rivals. After all, given his generosity, as well as his reputation as the handsomest man in France, what wouldn’t any woman give to warm the bed of the king, if only for a night, even if he weren’t as virile as he once was? But by now there were other rivals as well—the influences of his daughters and that of the Catholic Church, in addition to Louis’ own tortured conscience about living in sin with her.

The comtesse was equally superstitious. Fond of reading almanacs and horoscopes, in the beginning of 1774 she read in the
Almanach de Liège
that “a great lady of a certain court will play her last role in the coming April.” It says much about du Barry’s megalomania that she assumed the prediction applied to her. With a sense of foreboding and dread she purchased as many copies of the almanac as she could and had them burned, figuring that if she destroyed the source, it would therefore destroy the prophecy.

Madame du Barry was present during a Holy Week Mass in 1774 when a firebrand preacher, the Abbé de Beauvais, thundered from the pulpit, “In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed.” No doubt she recalled the words of the
Almanach de Liège
and shivered at this double dose of unpleasant prognostication. Louis didn’t attend confession over Easter that year, once more choosing his mistress over the clerics. But then again, he hadn’t confessed in thirty years, ever since the debacle at Metz in 1744 had resulted in the dismissal of his then–
maîtresse en titre
, the duchesse de Châteauroux. Never again, Louis had vowed.

The lovers spent a good deal of time in each other’s company that spring, stealing away to the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles
for some privacy. Le Petit Trianon was a cozy little villa that Louis had originally commissioned as a gift for Madame de Pompadour, but anyone who has ever dealt with contractors knows that they never finish anything on time. Pompadour was dead before the Petit Trianon was finished, so Louis had bestowed it on Madame du Barry. It boasted some ingenious mechanical contraptions intended to obviate the need for hovering servants, such as a dining table that could rise, fully laden, from the subterranean kitchen.

Still, Louis begrudgingly acknowledged that he wasn’t the stud he once had been, admitting to one of the royal physicians, “I am growing old and it is time I reined in the horses.” He received the blunt and sobering reply, “Sire, it is not a question of reining them in. It would be better if they were taken out of harness.”

During the last week of April 1774, Louis became ill. He had spent the night of April 26 with Madame du Barry at the Petit Trianon and had insisted on going hunting the following day, even though he hadn’t felt well. His condition worsened and the royal surgeon determined, “
C’est à Versailles, Sire, qu’il faut être malade
”—“You must be ill at Versailles, Sire.” Louis was conveyed to the palace, and on April 28, the telltale pustules of smallpox were detected. Yet no one had the nerve to tell the king the truth about his condition. In any case, he believed he had contracted the disease when he was eighteen and therefore could not die from it. Unfortunately, the doctors had lied to him when he was a teen. His daughters insisted on nursing him ’round the clock. More important, so did Madame du Barry, whose face was her fortune and who also had never been exposed to the disease. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose by remaining by his bedside.

By May 4, it was clear that this was no Metz. This time Louis was dying, and in order for him to be shriven, he would have to dismiss his mistress. He told the comtesse, who was hovering beside him, “From now on I owe myself to God and to my people. Tomorrow you must leave. Tell [the duc] d’Aiguillon to come and see me at ten o’clock in the morning. You will not be forgotten. Everything that is possible will be done for you.”

And so they parted forever. Madame du Barry fainted in the doorway of the king’s bedchamber and had to be carried to her rooms,
where she wept uncontrollably. She had lived at Versailles for five years. The following day she was bundled into a closed carriage for the duc d’Aiguillon’s nearby estate of Rueil. Not two hours after her departure Louis asked to see her, but was told that she had quit the palace. “Where has she gone?” he asked hazily.

“To Rueil, Sire,” came the reply.

“What, already?” he said forlornly. Eyewitnesses noticed a large tear running down his cheek. “Gone,” he murmured, “as we all must go.”

Louis lost much of his powers of speech on May 7, and his public confession was made for him by the Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon. The cardinal also extracted something else from the dying monarch. He blackmailed the superstitious Louis, insisting that the king sign a
lettre de cachet
exiling his mistress to the abbey of Pont-aux-Dames as a prisoner of state. The cardinal must have warned the king that his soul would not enter the pearly gates of heaven unless his mistress’s body entered those of a convent.

At the time Louis promised the comtesse on May 4 that she would be well looked after, he never imagined the conversation he’d have the following day with his Chief Minister, the duc d’Aiguillon. Their secret discussion ultimately resulted in the drafting of the documentation that would ignominiously banish Madame du Barry—something the king had never intended to occur.

Louis died on May 10, 1774, and was scarcely mourned by his people, despite a reign of fifty-nine years. As a corpse the Well-Loved was the All-but-Ignored, and his disease-riddled body was swiftly transported with minimal fanfare to Saint-Denis for burial.

Two days later, on May 12, a pair of gendarmes arrived at Rueil to escort a stunned comtesse du Barry to Pont-aux-Dames. Guilty, presumably, of knowing the late king’s state secrets, she had no idea that her lover had consigned her to this chilly fate, and for years assumed that the
lettre de cachet
had been among the first orders of business undertaken by the new king, Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, as there had never been any love lost between them. No one had the heart to tell the comtesse the truth for several years. She remained in the convent until May 1775, but the conditions of her release mandated that she remain at least ten leagues away from
both Paris and Versailles. Louis XVI did not permit her to return to her beloved Louveciennes until October 1776. The comtesse maintained the château like a shrine to her late royal lover; it was filled with mementos and memorabilia of their liaison.

For the next several years she lived like a grande dame, entertaining friends from the old regime and playing Lady Bountiful for the villagers of Louveciennes. She was rarely at a loss for lovers, all of whom were married. When the French Revolution erupted, the woman who began her life at the very bottom of the social ladder didn’t have to think twice with regard to her allegiances. She was a royalist through and through, and deeply sympathized with—and feared for—the plight of the monarchs, even though she had been at odds with them during her tenure as a royal mistress. Madame du Barry allowed her property to be used as a location for secret royalist meetings, sold some of her jewelry, and made other dubious financial transactions, which are believed to have been deliberately roundabout contributions to the royalist coffers. Everything was watched by then, and the movements of a former royal mistress were particularly suspect. More than once, she risked her life to aid those among whom she had spent most of her adult life, even though many of them had never accepted her as one of their own.

Yet time had healed many old wounds. During the 1780s she became the mistress of the (married) duc de Brissac, the mayor of Paris. Women who had snubbed Madame du Barry at Versailles would visit her at Louveciennes and be surprised by her genuineness. She once asked a dinner guest why she had been so detested at court, and received the reply, “There was no hatred but we all wanted to have your place.”

Madame du Barry managed to elude the revolutionaries time and time again, but on September 21, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety issued a warrant for her arrest. She was first imprisoned at St. Pélagie, then transferred on December 4 to the Conciergerie, nicknamed “the vestibule of the scaffold.” On December 6, she was brought to trial, although she had also been interrogated a few times during her confinement. She was composed and poised during her trial, even shaving eight years off her age, testifying that she was forty-two. But the verdict was a foregone conclusion, and when she
was pronounced guilty on December 7, the comtesse fainted in the dock. Hoping to buy her way out from under the blade of the guillotine, she forestalled her execution for a few hours by telling her guards where she had buried countless treasures on the grounds of Louveciennes. They could dig them up and keep them, she proposed, if they would spare her life.

But she was only deluding herself. It was dusk on the afternoon of December 8 by the time she climbed the steps of the scaffold at the Place de la Révolution. She was hysterical, kicking and fighting to save her life with each consecutive tread. “You are going to hurt me! Oh, please don’t hurt me!” she exclaimed as she faced the bloodthirsty rabble, and begged the executioner for “one moment more!” But nothing availed. She was beheaded and her body was dumped along with those of countless other victims of the Revolution in the Cimitière de la Madeleine, the same ignominious location where less than three months earlier the headless corpse of her self-proclaimed rival Marie Antoinette had been unceremoniously tossed. Ironically, Madame du Barry, or most of her, ended up reposing among royalty after all.

C
ATHERINE
THE
G
REAT
(C
ATHERINE
II)

1729–1796

R
ULED
R
USSIA
: 1762–1796

C
atherine the Great of Russia was not named Catherine, nor was she from Russia. German-born, blond, and blue-eyed Sophie Friederike Auguste was the daughter of Christian Augustus, the prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, and his wife, Johanna Elisabeth, of the duchy of Holstein-Gottorp.

At the age of fourteen Sophie’s second cousin, the orphaned Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, was summoned to Russia by his aunt, the childless empress Elizabeth, who named the boy as her heir. Two years later, on New Year’s Day, 1744, Sophie was invited to Moscow. Although the journey was billed as a visit to distant relations, it was really an audition for the role of future empress of Russia.

She passed muster with the empress and began a crash course in the Russian language and religion. On June 28, the fifteen-year-old Sophie converted to Russian Orthodoxy in an elaborate ritual and took a new name: Grand Duchess Ekaterina (Catherine) Alexeyevna. A lavish engagement ceremony to her cousin Peter followed. But the more time the young couple spent together, the clearer it became to Catherine that the real prize was not her future husband but her future realm. Peter was not just immature; he was borderline insane, obsessed with his toy soldiers and military procedures. He especially loved drills and ceremonials, and not only compelled Catherine to march about with a rifle but once court-martialed a rat for insubordination. When the time would come to command actual troops, Peter would panic.