Warning: major spoilers follow. So for those who don’t want to read further, I will say that I recommend both Jean Plaidy’s Madame du Barry and Joan Haslip’s Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty, although I would like to read a more scholarly biography of du Barry, and also think she is long overdue for revival as a fictional heroine. She had an amazing life, yet I can’t find any other novels about her, although there are two centred on members of her entourage: Eve Ruggieri, Le reve de Zamor, about her page; and Frederic Lenormand, Mademoiselle Chon du Barry, ou, Les surprises du destin, about her sister-in-law, who acted as her secretary and companion at Versailles.
Madame du Barry’s life in exile
Had Marie Antoinette only known it, Madame du Barry was her best friend. Over the past four years, when she had been Dauphine and Madame du Barry the official mistress, she had been wildly popular and Madame du Barry had been hated. Madame du Barry had given a great a deal to charity and also intervened many times for strangers and even former enemies to obtain a reprieve from the King when no-one else could. But the royal mistress was traditionally made a scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the current reign. Louis XVI, unusually, had no mistress, so the only person to blame was Marie Antoinette. According to her long-serving personal maid, Madame Campan, criticism of the Queen began within days of her accession. Within a few years she would have taken Madame du Barry’s place as Public Enemy No. 1.
In the meantime, Madame du Barry was imprisoned in a convent, then exiled to her chateau of Saint-Vrain, south of Paris. Eventually she was allowed to return to her country house of Louveciennes (pronounced Luciennes), close to the royal chateaux of Marly and Versailles.
Here she led a quiet life, although she was still considered a celebrity, and Marie Antoinette’s brother, Joseph II, insisted on paying her visit when he came to stay at Versailles, much to Marie Antoinette’s irritation.
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette’s favourite portrait painter, also painted Madame du Barry and was one of the few people to know both women well.
Portrait of Madame du Barry, by Elisabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun
Although the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which holds this painting, dates it as 1782, Madame Vigee-Lebrun states in her memoirs that she only met Madame du Barry in 1786:
It was in 1786 that I went for the first time to Louveciennes, where I had promised to paint Madame du Barry, and I was extremely curious to see this favourite, about whom I had heard such a lot. Madame du Barry would have been about forty-five at this time [she turned 39 in 1782, 43 in 1786]. She was tall, but not too tall; she was plump; the bosom rather full, but very beautiful; her face was still charming, her features regular and full of grace; her hair was ash-blonde and as curly as a child’s; only her complexion was beginning to spoil.
She received me charmingly, and I could not fault her manners; but although her conversation was very natural, she had some affectations: her glance was coquettish, for her almond-shaped eyes were always half-shut, and she pronounced words in a childish way no longer appropriate to her age.
Confession: when I was about thirteen I was fascinated by accounts of Madame du Barry’s heavy-lidded gaze and decided to imitate it. So I went round with my eyes half-shut for a day or two, until my family started to laugh at me. Then I stopped.
Vigee-Lebrun goes on to describe the loot Madame du Barry had acquired in her years as royal mistress, which she seems to have piled up much as dragons do their treasure:
Above my apartment was a gallery, not very well cared for, in which were placed, in no sort of order, busts, vases, columns, the rarest marbles and a quantity of other precious objects; so that one could have believed this was the house of the mistress of several sovereigns who had all enriched her with their gifts.
But Madame du Barry was generous with her wealth. Vigee-Lebrun says:
She did a lot of good at Louveciennes, where all the poor people were helped by her. We often went together to visit some unfortunates, and I still remember the fury into which she flew, one day, at the home of a poor woman who had just given birth and was in need of everything. “What is this,” said Madame du Barry, “you have been sent neither linen, nor wine, nor broth?” “Alas! nothing, Madame.” We returned immediately to the chateau; Madame du Barry summoned her housekeeper and the other servants who had failed to carry out her orders. I cannot tell you how she stormed at them, as she commanded them to make up a packet of linen in front of her, which she made them take to the sick woman immediately, with broth and Bordeaux wine.
Vigee-Lebrun met Madame du Barry’s new lover, the Duc de Brissac, and she makes a comment which shows how far Madame du Barry had assimilated the customs of the aristocracy:
The Duc de Brissac lived at Louveciennes like a permanent resident; but nothing, in his behaviour or in that of Madame du Barry, would have aroused suspicion that he was more than the chatelaine’s friend.
Madame du Barry remained deeply royalist, risking her own safety to care for some of the Queen’s bodyguards who had been injured during the attack on Versailles of 6 October 1789, when the royal family were forced to move to Paris. But Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette always saw her as, at best, a loose cannon; the Duc de Brissac, who was head of the King’s personal guard, was not told about the royal family’s projected escape from the Tuileries because he was known to confide in Madame du Barry. In 1792 Brissac was arrested for treason to the Nation, but never stood trial: he was murdered during the September Massacres, as Madame du Barry discovered when a mob turned up at Louveciennes with his head on a pike.
Like any rags-to-riches heroine, Madame du Barry had excellent taste, and the pride of her collection was her jewellery. Much of her collection had been stolen from her bedroom on the night of 10 January 1791, when she was in Paris. Unwisely, she published a detailed list of what had been stolen and offered a substantial reward for its recovery – which brought her back into the public eye at a time when most of the nobility were lying low or emigrating. Nevertheless, this theft might have saved her life, because the stolen jewels resurfaced in London, and she made several trips there in an attempt to reclaim them. But in March 1793 she returned to France. In April she was arrested.
Plaque commemorating Madame du Barry in Louveciennes. Photo by Henry Salome.
Madame du Barry had fallen foul of an English radical, George Grieve, who had made it his personal mission to destroy her. He was assisted by her Indian servant, Zamor, an ex-slave who had been in her household since childhood and now supplied Grieve with incriminating information such as the fact that her visitors were still addressed by their titles. Both Plaidy and Haslip think Grieve’s motive was sexual obsession, and Madame du Barry later referred to “the horrors and outrages which he perpetrated” in the course of her arrest. This may mean that he raped her either at Louveciennes or on the journey to prison.
Condemned to death in December 1793, on the morning the sentence was to be carried out Madame du Barry made a last ditch effort to save herself. Over the course of three hours, she listed all the hiding places of her treasures – money, jewels and objets d’art – which were buried all over the Louveciennes estate. All she succeeded in doing was postponing her execution. In the last hours of her life her aristocratic poise deserted her and she was carried to the guillotine screaming, “You are going to hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”
With her death the era of the powerful official mistress, which in France had endured for over three hundred years, finally came to a close.
Lady Moppet of Yorkshire on Madame du Barry as a royal mistress
Madame du Barry was the ideal royal mistress – beautiful, desirable, but also able to create a cosy domestic atmosphere for her King. She played to perfection a role she had hardly been trained for – that of a lady of the court – and contrary to the stereotype, probably much of the resentment of her stemmed from how well she fitted in. It’s very important for favourites to feather their nests – they have short careers, with little job security – and Madame du Barry didn’t neglect this. But nor did she forget to be charitable to those less fortunate and to use her influence with the King to help others.
Reading her story, it strikes me that there are so many parallels with Marie Antoinette. They both came to Versailles young and were used as political tools by forces beyond their control. They were both victims of calumny. People underestimated their inner resources and intelligence. They were extravagant, yet also kind and generous. They reigned in turn over the Petit Trianon. Even the grotesque episode of Brissac’s murder has a parallel in Marie Antoinette’s life: the murder of her friend the Princesse de Lamballe, whose head was paraded on a pike outside her prison windows. She and Madame du Barry were defended by the same lawyer and went to the same death in the same cause.
I’d like to think that somewhere, somehow, they made up their differences and right now they are sharing a pot of chocolate and chatting about old times.
***
Simone Bertiere, Marie-Antoinette l’insoumise
Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Souvenirs, 2 vols, ed. Claudine Herrmann
Read part one of this post here
