John Guy’s review of Alison Weir’s latest book, The Lady in The Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, has various criticisms to make, one of which I am going to deal with here.
If you look at the section in Weir’s book entitled ‘Notes on Some of the Sources’ you will find, listed separately, Lancelot de Carles: Epistre contenant le proces criminel faict a l’encontre de la royne Anne Boullant d’Angleterre and, a few pages on, Crispin, Lord of Milherve. Carles is described as ‘almoner to the Dauphin of France (the future Henri II), a renowned poet and man of letters, and the author of blazons and sacred poetry…who was present at Anne’s trial’ (p.338). Milherve is described, again, as a man of letters who was present at Anne’s trial (p.341). Both sources produced poetry describing Anne’s fall.
What’s the problem with all that? Well, according to Guy:
Weir believes that a separate poem by another Frenchman, an “eyewitness” at Anne’s trial, one Crispin de Miherve, corroborates de Carles and adds extra details. Unfortunately, “Crispin” is a phantom. A French scholar proved in 1844 that the text Weir is using had been doctored, and in 1927 it was shown by comparing all the genuine manuscripts that the two poems are identical and by de Carles. Weir has been duped.
When I read this I turned to the index of The Lady in the Tower to see if I could find a page where both de Miherve and de Carles were mentioned. I could – page 262. This page and the following one discuss who served Anne as ladies-in-waiting during her time in the Tower. The advantage of writing a book focussing on only part of a subject’s life is that there is room to discuss matters like this, which might go by the board in a full biography. It’s an interesting section which I will return to in a later post. Weir concludes that as a special favour to his disgraced queen, during her imprisonment in the Tower of London Henry VIII permitted Anne the company of four of her young maids of honour (in addition to four older women, two of whom departed after her condemnation). In the footnotes Weir cites, in total, six sources to support the fact that Anne was attended by young women at this time, not just her older ladies-in-waiting. Two of those sources are by Carles and Milherve – in other words, by the same person.
So the six sources Weir cites are reduced to five. Does that matter? To the general reader, no. Even without the Milherve corroboration, it’s still very likely that Anne was attended by maids of honour in the Tower. Five sources are ample to support a fairly minor point such as this one. But to the academic world, it does matter. Narrative history is a constant balancing act, a weighing up of one source against another, and every tip in the balance is crucial.
However. If Weir has slipped up, she’s not the only one.
Two otherwise excellent books dealing with fashion in Louis XIV’s France (an under-studied subject), Diana de Marly’s Louis XIV and Versailles and Pamela Cowan’s A Fanfare for the Sun King: Unfolding Fans for Louis XIV, cite the memoirs of the Marquise de Montespan, one of Louis XIV’s mistresses and the mother of several of his children. Here’s a quote from the Montespan memoirs, reproduced on page 90 of A Fanfare for the Sun King, describing a lottery held by Cardinal Mazarin. (Lotteries, in the seventeenth century, could be a means of entertaining guests at a party and distributing expensive gifts.)
The Queens distributed the tickets with every appearance of honesty and good faith. But I had reason to remark, by what happened to myself, that the tickets had been registered beforehand. The young Queen, who felt her garter slipping off, came to me in order to tighten it. She handed me her ticket to hold for a moment, and when she had fastened her garter, I gave her back my ticket instead of her own…My number won a portrait of the King set in brilliants, much to the surprise of the Queen Mother and His Eminence; they could not get over it.
Reading this left me puzzled. I had spent several years in the British Library, reading primary and secondary sources for exactly this period without ever, once, encountering any memoirs by Madame de Montespan. There was nothing obviously fake in the quote, in fact, quite the reverse: it is likely lotteries of this nature were fixed, with the biggest prizes going to those highest in rank, as they did at the lottery held at the festival of the Enchanted Isle, held by Louis XIV at Versailles in May 1664.
I checked the bibliography of the most authoritative biography of Montespan I knew to exist, Madame de Montespan by Jean-Christian Petitfils, Fayard, 1988. This did indeed include a two volume 1829 edition of the Memoires. But there was a note with it, which, translated, reads:
These memoirs, apocryphal but quite well written, have been attributed to Philippe Musoni. The same series includes the Memoires, equally apocryphal, of Mlle de La Valliere.
Of course, it could be that Musoni (supposing him to be the author) based his work on a genuine source, written by Montespan or someone close to her. But in the absence of any evidence, we have to assume he didn’t, which means the entire book must be completely discounted.
And here’s another book which has to be discounted:
I’ve saved the best till last. This is Madame du Hausset’s Memoires sur Louis XV et Madame de Pompadour, purporting to be an account of du Hausset’s time in Pompadour’s service, described by Alden R. Gordon, ‘The Longest-Enduring Pompadour Hoax: Senac de Meilhan and the Journal de Madame du Hausset‘ (Art and culture in the eighteenth century: new dimensions and multiple perspectives, ed. Elise Goodman, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001) as ‘one of the most successful literary fabrications of all time, enduring for eighteen decades…No single source has been so frequently used as the basis for anecdotal insight into the intimate life of Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV.’
Indeed. Some of Hausset’s most interesting passages concern Louis XV’s private brothel, and how Pompadour (who was no longer sleeping with the King) would arrange for the children of the King’s mistresses to be cared for.
Madame du Hausset was indeed employed in the household of Madame de Pompadour, but her so-called memoirs were written after the Revolution, probably by Gabriel Senac de Meilhan, the son of one of Louis XV’s doctors. He would have had inside knowledge of the royal court. But he wasn’t a lady-in-waiting to Madame de Pompadour.
Doubts were raised about the authenticity of the Madame du Hausset manuscript as early as October 1954 by Pierre Gaxotte. It has been reprinted (presented as almost entirely authentic) in a scholarly edition as recently as 2002. Why has it taken so long for it to be debunked? Well, hoaxes like this one, when they work, work because they’re good – they’re written by people who know what they are talking about and have access to authentic sources of information. The other reason? The Hausset memoirs filled a gap, providing details of Pompadour’s private life that are available nowhere else.
Gordon:
The anecdotes in Madame du Hausset are delightful and have seemed so necessary to the biographer because they are the only sustained intimate descriptions of the private life shared by Louis XV with Madame de Pompadour. And therein lies the gnawing sensation that the journal of Madame du Hausset is too good to be true. The anecdotes supply precisely the kind of voyeuristic intimacy about incidents, emotions, and personal quirks that people desperately want to know about any famous person. Having not existed in actuality they had to be invented to supply the lack.
Gordon also concludes that ‘In a scholarly generation given to interpretation, the need to vet primary sources for authentication has not been aggressively practiced.’
And now a confession: Miss Moppet is not clean on this. The dissertation I completed in the third year of my history degree, which looked at the lives of eighteenth-century French noblewomen through the medium of their memoirs, included extensive quotations from the Memoires de Madame de Crequy. What I didn’t know (and, presumably, nor did my tutors or examiners, because the dissertation got a high mark and no-one mentioned it) was that Madame de Crequy’s memoirs are a suspect source. The British Library catalogue attributes them to Pierre-Marie-Jean Cousin de Courchamps.
I will freely admit that even now I have not got to the bottom of this matter. I had taken it for granted that the memoirs were authentic because they were quoted in one of the seminal works on the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s 1976 The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment. But according to Will L. McLendon, ‘A Problem in Plagiarism: Washington Irving and Cousen de Courchamps’, Comparative Literature, Vol 20, No.2, Spring 1968, pp. 157-169, the Crequy memoirs were declared false as early as 1836.
One other fact makes me feel that some mystery surrounds the matter. One of the sources used to disprove the authorship of the Crequy memoirs happens to be Madame de Crequy’s authentic correspondence with none other than that supremely successful hoaxer…Senac de Meilhan.
Did the poacher turn gamekeeper? I’m not sure. But if I find out, you’ll be the first to know.
