Encore une challenge: French Historicals Oh La La!

Could we resist?  We could not!!!

The French Historicals Challenge is being hosted by Enchanted by Josephine.  Here are the rules:

The reading Challenge will run from January 1st to December 15th 2010.

All you have to do is read any Historical Fiction or Non-fiction books based on French history or French historical figures.  Books can also overlap with other Challenges.

Reading Levels:

La Princesse: Read 3 books
La Dauphine: Read 6 books
La Reine: Read 9 books
L’Impératrice: More than 9 books

I’m going for La Princesse – read 3 books.  But which three?

There are quite a few Marie Antoinette books I’ve been wanting to read.  Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund.  Les adieux a la Reine by Chantal Thomas.  I’d like to re-read the Victoria Holt title which first interested me in French history, The Queen’s Confession.

Going further back, C.W. Gortner’s The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is one of the books I’m eagerly awaiting this year.  I also want to read La Reine Margot by Dumas.  Aimee du Roi, by Catherine Decours, about Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan, was already on my list for the Royal Mistress Challenge, as was Our Lady of the Potatoes by Duncan Sprott, a novel about one of Louis XV’s mistresses.  I also have a biography of Madame de Pompadour by Evelyne Lever to read.

I’ve yet to find anything Napoleonic I like as much as A Rose for Virtue by Norah Lofts, about Hortense, daughter of the Empress Josephine.  This might be the year to try Sandra Gulland’s Josephine trilogy.  Another 2010 release I want to read is Catherine Delors’ For the King, about the 1800 assassination attempt on Napoleon.

I would like to read something set during the Second Empire, especially focusing on the Empress Eugenie.  Any suggestions?

Royal Mistress Challenge: Jean Plaidy’s Madame du Barry (part one)

This is the first book I read for the Royal Mistress Challenge.  My copy, pictured above, is the 1996 reprint but the book was originally published in 1959.

The bodice: to rip or not to rip?

To put it in context, here are a few other things which happened in 1959:

• Top grossing films included Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Some Like It Hot, Pillow Talk and North by Northwest
• Mattel introduced the Barbie doll
• The Motown record label was founded
• Bestselling books included Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Sexuality as depicted in film tended to be very coy.  There was more latitude in print, and in the world of historical fiction, bodice-rippers like the Angelique series were flying off the shelves.  Jean Plaidy, despite having an entirely bodice-ripper-worthy subject, chose not to go there.  The sexiest passage in Madame du Barry is this one:

Jeanne held up her radiant face, and the blue beribboned gown which had caused the Comte du Barry such anxiety was crushed against the somewhat sombre garments of the self-styled Baron de Gonesse who, as though at the waving of a wand, had been turned into the King of France.

Mary Sue Litmus Test

Let’s get the Mary Sue Litmus Test out of the way first:

No surprise there.  Plaidy has her flaws, but she doesn’t write Sues.

Discovering French history with Jean Plaidy

It was a Jean Plaidy book (or rather a Victoria Holt, one of her pseudonyms), The Queen’s Confession, an novel about Marie Antoinette which sparked my interest in French history and led to my doing a history degree.  I remember how pleased I was to find the first of her French Revolution series, Louis the Well-Beloved, in a second-hand book sale.  (The sequels are The Road to Compiegne and Flaunting, Extravagant Queen; she also wrote a novel about the Diamond Necklace Affair, Queen of Diamonds).  Coming back to Jean Plaidy as an adult, I find her narrative voice a bit flat – she tells the story from a detached omniscient viewpoint which has gone right out of fashion.  But she still gives me that same urge to go to the non-fiction shelves in the library to find out if what she describes really did happen.  And here’s a coincidence: after reading The Queen’s Confession, I started what would become a very large personal library of books about French history with a biography of Marie Antoinette by Joan Haslip.  Looking to find out more about Madame du Barry, I found that the most recent biography (1991) was by Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty.

The two books read in a quite a similar way, because Jean Plaidy’s is solidly based on fact and Joan Haslip allows herself quite a few novelistic excursions.

A courtesan of the first quality

Madame du Barry is not a long book.  Jean Plaidy focuses on Madame du Barry’s five or so years as Louis XV’s mistress, summarising her early life and the years from Louis XV’s death in 1774 to the outbreak of the French Revolution.  The first two chapters play catch-up, setting the scene: Louis XV is approaching sixty, bored and lonely since the death of his beloved mistress Madame de Pompadour, whom he has not managed to replace.  Everyone around him is desperately trying to find a substitute mistress through whom they hope to rule the King.  So the book really begins with the introduction of Jeanne on page 47:

Her hair was thick and fell in golden curls about her shoulders; her skin ws fine and delicate, her eyes a dazzling blue and, because it seemed that Nature had wished to give her that kind of beauty which occurs but rarely, her brows and lashes were of dark brown in an entrancing contrast to her sparkling fairness.

We then backtrack through Jeanne’s childhood.  She was born the illegitimate daughter of Anne Becu, a seamstress whose relatives mostly worked as servants to the nobility.  Anne moved to Paris where her employer paid for Jeanne to have a convent education.  After various different jobs (hairdresser, paid companion, shopgirl) she drifted into high-class prostitution, living a life that sounds pretty much like that of Emile Zola’s fictional courtesan, Nana, one hundred years later.  And in fact, Nana and Jeanne seem to have shared so many characteristics – good humour, acquisitiveness, generosity, complete fecklessness with money, a desire for respectability – that I had wonder if Zola had based his character on her.  This is how a police inspector describes Jeanne at the age of twenty-one:

The Marquis du Barry appeared on Monday night with his new mistress, Mademoiselle Vaubernier.  She is a young woman of about nineteen years of age, tall, well-made with a noble carriage and the loveliest of faces.  He will certainly try to barter her to his own advantage, for it is what he always does when he begins to tire of a woman.  But one must admit him to be a connoisseur and his merchandise is always of the first quality.

With Jeanne, du Barry would make the deal of a lifetime, managing to sell her on to none other than the King himself.

Madame du Barry vs Marie Antoinette

For some time Jeanne lived a shadowy existence at the King’s side, following the Court from palace to palace but unable to appear in public in his company as she had not been presented.  The kerfuffle over her presentation is the first of three highly dramatic episodes in her life at Court which Plaidy chooses to focus on.

The presentation ritual had not existed in Louis XIV’s reign.  It was introduced along with the regulation that anyone presented had to be able to prove noble descent dating back to 1399, and can be seen as part of a larger aristocratic reaction that took place in France during the eighteenth century – at the very same time as ideas about equality and the brotherhood of man were gaining currency.  Presentation, requiring proofs of nobility which had to be checked by the Court geneaologist and lessons from a dancing master in curtseying and managing a train – plus magnificent clothes and jewels – was meant to keep people like Jeanne out, not let them in.  Louis XV had great difficulty finding someone to present Jeanne because most of the ladies at Court did not care to associate themselves with a woman whose relatives might be applying for a place in their household next week.  Jeanne was now married to du Barry’s brother, who was of genuine noble descent, but in the eyes of the Court, she could never be good enough.  This infuriated Louis XV:

She is very pretty, she pleases me, that must be enough.  Do they want me to take a young lady of quality for a mistress?

The answer was yes.  Few minded the King taking their daughter, sister or even wife as a mistress, as long as they reaped the benefits.  The powerful foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, became Madame du Barry’s arch-enemy partly because he had hoped that the post of official mistress would go to his sister.  Despite Madame du Barry’s best efforts to get along with everyone, the Court split into two parties: the Choiseulistes vs the Barriens.  And when Marie Antoinette arrived to marry the Dauphin in 1770, she automatically joined the Choiseulistes.  The reason: Choiseul had negotiated her marriage, and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresia, had dinned into her the necessity for gratitude to him.

One of Jean Plaidy’s great strengths is her ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and lots of her novels tell the same story from different points of view.  I’d already read about the Du Barry/Marie Antoinette showdown from Marie Antoinette’s perspective in The Queen’s Confession:

…Everyone realised that if they wished to remain in the King’s good graces they must please Madame du Barry.  But I was in his good graces.  I did not have to conform to ordinary standards – so I thought – and I made up my mind that I would never seek the friendship of a street-woman, no matter if she was the King’s mistress.  So I behaved as if I could not see her.  Often she would seek the opportunity to present herself before me but she could not speak to me until I spoke to her – etiquette forbade it, and even she had to bow the knee to etiquette.  So every time, I ignored her.

And from Madame du Barry:

Whenever she and Jeanne were in the same company, the Dauphine ignored the King’s mistress, thus making it impossible for Jeanne to speak.  Jeanne, who wished to please the King and had been warned many times by Chon [her sister-in-law] that it was advisable to bow to etiquette, found that even her mild temper was ruffled by these continual snubs.

Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry were renewing an age-old conflict based around the pecking order in a court.  In theory, this should have been straightforward: the Queen and her mother-in-law both being dead, the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was First Lady of France.  In practice, she found, as so many queens and princesses had found before her, that she was overshadowed by the royal mistress.  Other royal women had simply resigned themselves to the fact: she chose to fight back with the only weapon she had, silence.

Madame du Barry simply wanted Marie Antoinette to acknowledge that she existed.  But like many other royal mistresses, she wanted to have her cake and eat it (if you’ll pardon me mentioning cake in a Marie Antoinette context): she claimed to want to be treated as just another lady of the court, but no other lady of the court could have brought the pressure to bear on Marie Antoinette that she did.

What seems like a trivial catfight threatened to develop into an international incident.  Maria Theresia was negotiating the First Partition of Poland and was anxious not to annoy France, a Polish ally.  The last thing she wanted was Marie Antoinette alienating Louis XV with her coldness to his mistress. Her ambassador, the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, was summoned to discuss the matter with Louis XV and Madame du Barry, and his account of the visit gives us something surprisingly rare – a glimpse of a king and his mistress in private:

Although, living here, I see one extraordinary thing after another, they often seem like dreams to me.  I have seen the King in company with Madame du Barry, she calls him Monsieur and treats him as an equal.  He thoroughly approves and, even in my presence, he did not seem embarrassed that his favourite should behave this way.

Marie Antoinette finally spoke to Madame du Barry on New Year’s Day, 1772.  The choice of day may have been deliberate: it was a day on which people who had been presented, but did not usually attend court, came to Versailles to offer New Year greetings to the royal family.  It may have been less galling for Marie Antoinette to speak to the favourite on a day when she would be talking to many other people she did not normally speak to.  And although no-one seems to have suspected it at the time, there may have been a bitchy undercurrent to the words themselves: There are a lot of people at Versailles today.  Does that translate as: There are all sorts at Versailles today – even people like you?

The MA/DB confrontation has been dramatised several times:

Click on the image to go to YouTube.  Here are the clips in order:

1. Marie Antoinette (1938).  Norma Shearer plays Marie Antoinette, Gladys George plays Madame du Barry.  In this short scene, MA and DB probably exchange more words than they ever did in their entire lives.  DB makes MA a deep curtsey, which is the right way round, but of course she couldn’t begin the conversation – that was the whole point.
2. Madame du Barry (1954).  Martine Carol plays Madame du Barry, Isabella Pia plays Marie Antoinette.  The most realistic.  The dialogue goes like this:
   LOUIS XV (raising MA from her curtsey): What a pleasant surprise, Madame!
   MA (to DB): There are a lot of people at Versailles this evening.
3. Marie Antoinette, la veritable histoire (French TV, 2006).  The dialogue:
   MA (to DB): There are many people at Versailles today.
   MA (to the Dauphin): [can't work out all of it but she definitely finishes by saying that] people tell me she does a lot for poor people.
   The Dauphin: I can’t stand that woman.
4. Marie Antoinette (2006): Kirsten Dunst plays MA, Asia Argento plays DB.  Dialogue translated from the Italian it’s been dubbed into:
   MA: Fine. I’ll talk to her.
   MA (to DB): There are a lot of people at Versailles today.
   DB: Yes there are.
   MA (to the Dauphin): That woman will never hear the sound of my voice again.
   Note that MA makes a deep curtsey in front of DB who just stands there – as if!
5. Rose of Versailles (Japanese anime).  I think MA says to DB: Happy New Year, Countess.  I hope that now you will be satisfied.
   Then as MA runs down the staircase she is saying, “How humiliating!” and some other stuff I didn’t catch.

Du Barry was a lady

It’s a pity that most people will only know Madame du Barry through her portrayal by Asia Argento in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette.  I can’t fault Asia Argento’s performance and she bears a resemblance to Madame du Barry, except for her dark hair.  The problem is with the script, which suggests Madame du Barry had the manners of a guttersnipe.  In fact, as the Duc de Croy, a veteran of Louis XV’s court, attests:

Whereas the Marquise de Pompadour, in spite of her culture, would in speaking betray her bourgeois origins, the Comtesse du Barry had no difficulty in assimilating the accents peculiar to Versailles.

(This was no easy task – the courtiers spoke a kind of private language and even pronounced some words differently).

Is it really necessary to attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of one woman by perpetuating stereotypes about another?

Madame du Barry’s fall from power

Madame du Barry won the battle, but she couldn’t win the war.  Louis XV’s health was failing, and in May of 1774 he caught smallpox.  She stayed by his side to nurse him, although she had never had the disease which could have ruined her beauty and thus her means of survival.  The King was at first not told that he had smallpox, but eventually he realised it for himself.  Knowing how low were his chances of survival, he decided that he must make his confession.  But he could not be absolved from his sins unless he truly repented – which meant Madame du Barry had to go.  He dismissed her with these words:

If I had known what I know now, you would not be here.  I owe myself to God and to my people.  So you must go tomorrow.

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The Queen of Historical Fiction: Susan Higginbotham on the enduring appeal of Jean Plaidy

Jeanne du Barry is also a character in Plaidy’s The Road to Compiegne, which Markyza reviews here

Review of Madame du Barry (1954) by Markyza, with lots of stills

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My copy of Madame du Barry by Jean Plaidy was bought second-hand and my copy of Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty by Joan Haslip was borrowed from the library

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Additional source: Simone Bertiere, Marie-Antoinette l’insoumise

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This post counts towards the Alphabet in Historical Fiction Challenge:

 

letter B for du Barry

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In part two: why diamonds weren’t Madame du Barry’s best friend

Tuesday Teaser: Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week’s Tuesday Teaser is Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty by Joan Haslip.  Madame du Barry was Louis XV’s last mistress.

The treasures collected during five years as royal favourite – the lacquer cabinets, the satinwood and rosewood tables and writing desk inlaid with plaques of painted porcelain, the chairs and bed carved by Lanoix and gilded by Cagny, the golden clocks and rock-crystal chandeliers, the numberless pictures by Greuze and Drouais, Vernet and Fragonard – were all moved to Louveciennes or to the villa in the avenue de Paris of Versailles.  There they were carefully catalogued by Montvallier, the countess’s steward, with detailed lists for her lawyers, who already in the first weeks were being assailed by her creditors.

Royal Mistress Challenge: the allure of the mistress

Photo by John Cunliffe for Abigails Ateliers. All rights reserved.

When I began collecting the titles of novels for the Royal Mistress Challenge, I realised that this amounts to a sub-genre in itself. What is the perennial allure of the mistress? I think it comes down to five things:

1. Beauty
2. Power
3. Money
4. Sex
4. Mystery

Beauty first. We like reading about beautiful people, otherwise People magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  Mistresses were nearly always renowned for their beauty; the few who weren’t, like Mlle Choin, the mistress/secret wife of the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s son, don’t tend to get written about very much.

Power. Mistresses and favourites were hated figures, because they were blamed for the poor decisions made by the king.  One of the reasons Marie Antoinette was so unpopular for much of her husband’s reign was that he did not have a mistress, so when things went wrong, there was no-one to blame but her.

How much power the mistress actually had varied.  In the medieval period the mistress was a shadowy figure, there for the king’s convenience, and baronial families objected to their daughters being ‘despoiled’ by the king.  By 1500 the mistress was emerging as a power player, and during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries families backed potential mistresses like political candidates.  In return they expected their piece of the pie.  And that leads us on to:

Money. The early modern period was the heyday of the mistress, who, in addition to houses, jewels and art, gathered land, money, offices, privileges and pensions and redistributed them to supporters and relatives.  By the nineteenth century, with the decline of royal autonomy, the mistress was less rapacious, but still enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle.

Sex. By definition, a mistress is desirable.  We like reading about desirable people.  Otherwise InStyle magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  An aura of exciting sex hangs around the mistress.  Whether she was enjoying all this sex as much as the king is another matter, which merits further discussion.  When she was having sex with the king, that was.  Anne Boleyn held Henry VIII off for six years because she didn’t want a hit-and-run romance like the one he had with her sister Mary.  Madame de Pompadour made the transition from mistress to best friend and confidante of Louis XV without losing any of her influence over him.

Mystery. The mistress might be a public figure, but unlike her counterpart, the queen, she was not constantly on display.  She wasn’t crowned, she didn’t eat in public or have crowds of people trooping through her apartment.  Often surprisingly little is known about her relationship with the king.  While sources abound for the reign of Louis XIV – we know what he was doing every day for much of the time – almost no letters survive between him and his mistresses, none of whom wrote their memoirs.

And maybe there’s an X-factor that defies analysis.  One thing is certain: looking at reviews of royal mistress novels, a theme quickly emerges.  Major Mary Suedom.  Wikipedia is pretty good on popular culture, so I’ll leave the definition of a Mary Sue to them:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers.

And so I decided that the heroine of every one of these novels I read, and I mean every one, will have to undergo that most dreaded ordeal of any fictional character.

Yes.  You know what I’m talking about.

The Mary Sue Litmus Test.

Anyway.  Having decided this, Moppet felt she’d better put her own house in order before she started calling other people’s characters Mary Sues.  I.e.: make her own alter ego, Lady Moppet of Yorkshire, take the Mary Sue Litmus Test.

The phrase ‘alter ego’ should give everyone a clue that there was never much hope that Lady Moppet wasn’t a Mary Sue.  But there’s always some hope.  Isn’t there?

So, first, Miss Moppet did the Writers’ Mary Sue Test (squeaking with laughter all the way through).  The results:

Lady Moppet of Yorkshire isn’t a character: she’s you, or you as you’d like to be. She isn’t really very cool: she blends into crowds, she hangs out on the fringes at parties, and wearing shades after dark makes her run into things. She may have sometimes thought that she was special, or destined for greater things, but probably dismissed the idea as a fantasy. She’s come in for her share of hurt, but gotten off with minor damage. And you’ve been sparing with the free handouts: whatever she gains, she’s worked for.

You may have let yourself get a little too close to Lady Moppet of Yorkshire. Maybe she’s you as you wish you were, or maybe you’re just afraid no one will like her and are trying to give her a free ride. Have some confidence in your writing! Lady Moppet of Yorkshire is a good character. Give her room to be herself before you stifle her.

I’m not going to use this test for the Royal Mistress Challenge novels because there are too many questions that only the writer can answer, such as ‘do you frequently fantasise about being your character?’  I could have a guess, but it hardly seems fair.

So Miss Moppet found another test, The Original Fiction Mary-Sue Litmus Test.  And did the test again.  Hoping that maybe this one might come out differently!  The way you re-read Gone with the Wind!  Hoping that this time, everything will be okay!

And you were expecting?  She is a royal mistress, after all.

How Alison Weir was duped

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.