Royal Mistress Challenge: Jean Plaidy, Madame du Barry (part two)

 

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.

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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

 

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.