The queen of France died on June 24, 1768. That same week, Jeanne Bécu, alias Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, a.k.a. Mademoiselle l’Ange of the rue de la Jussienne, spent her first night in the king’s arms. The following morning, so the story goes, Louis cornered the randy old duc de Richelieu and told him, “I am delighted with your Jeanne. She is the only woman in France who has managed to make me forget that I am sixty.” (He was fifty-eight).
So delighted was His Majesty with his new toy that he kvelled about Jeanne’s remarkable talents to anyone who would listen. When he marveled about some of her amatory skills to the duc d’Ayen, the duc bluntly replied, “That, Sire, is because you have never been to a brothel.”
There was, however, a slight hitch: the brothel aspect of the whole business. Louis had been given a whitewashed version of Jeanne’s background. Although she had never been a prostitute (despite the propaganda the duc de Choiseul would eventually, and anonymously, disseminate against her), she had certainly been around the block more than a few times. In any event, Jeanne had been both euphemistically and erroneously represented to the king as a married woman who had dallied with a few powerful men here and there, primarily in the world of finance, but otherwise she was a lady of sound repute—in other words, she was no better or worse than most wives of the eighteenth-century French bourgeoisie.
Except that Jeanne was no one’s wife, nor ever had been. Although her married name had been presented as “du Barry,” it was common knowledge, as gossip was currency at Versailles, that comte Jean du Barry already had a wife living back in Languedoc, so he could not be this mythical husband of the king’s new inamorata.
Louis’ ever-faithful valet Lebel, who summoned Jeanne to Versailles for her royal trysts and guided her up the secret stairs to the king’s bedchamber with extreme frequency, began to realize that she was no passing infatuation. It was therefore becoming hard to conceal her past from his boss. Sooner or later Louis was bound to find out the truth for himself. The more often she visited the palace, the greater the risk of her being recognized by the courtiers who frequented du Barry’s home as well as Jeanne’s salon in the rue de la Jussienne, some of whom may even have been her lovers.
Louis was so serious about Jeanne that he talked of installing her as his maîtresse en titre and shuttering the Parc-aux-Cerfs, as he no longer had the need for an on-call seraglio. It was Pompadour all over again—and then some. At least the marquise, although a bourgeoise, had enjoyed a more or less respectable background. And Jeanne, too, had the problem of not being a member of the titled aristocracy with a coat of arms dating back to the year 1400.
Lebel decided to set the record straight before things got completely out of hand, so he confided Jeanne’s sexual résumé to the king. But he received a somewhat unexpected reaction. Anger, yes; Lebel had anticipated that. But Louis was not feeling duped or betrayed. He was livid that such aspersions should be cast upon this lovely and winsome woman, this fine specimen of femininity! How dared Lebel malign her so? But, just in case it was all true, Louis instructed his valet to begin making the necessary arrangements to recast his new mistress as a reputable woman. Lebel was so shocked that he dropped dead a few weeks later.
Jeanne’s former lover the duc de Richelieu assumed control of the project. The first step was to get Jeanne married for real. Conveniently, Jean-Baptiste du Barry had a brother languishing in Languedoc named Guillaume, fat, paunchy, and provincial—but unwed. Guillaume was summoned from the du Barrys’ hometown of Lévignac and instructed to show up for a proper church wedding that autumn, well advised that his wife would never warm his bed.
In the interim, Jeanne remained in a twilight zone of respectability. She was unmarried, but not as yet Louis’ formal mistress. Oh, how times had changed since the Sun King’s reign! Where Louis XIV had been vilified for choosing married mistresses, what irony—and hypocrisy—now attended the era of his successor. The new, unwed paramour of Louis le Bien-Aimé, a man who was now a widower, had to get herself legally hitched to a man she’d never met, didn’t love, and would never sleep with or see again, just so her adulterous romance with the sovereign could be formally recognized at a court hidebound by arcane etiquette. In the interim, Jeanne could not socialize at court with the other women, regardless of her relationship with the king.
During the summer of 1768, while the court frolicked at Compiègne, one of Louis’ favorite hunting lodges, although she swanned about in sumptuous gowns and rode in lavish carriages, Jeanne found herself particularly lonely. She was desired by her lover and sovereign, but unwanted by everyone else. She had no friends and had, in fact, through no fault of her own, made one very powerful enemy who would spend the rest of his career endeavoring to destroy her.
The duc de Choiseul was informed by a colleague “that there was a certain Madame du Barry at Compiègne with whom the king was said to have fallen in love and who was nothing but a prostitute kept by du Barry, who was now planning to marry her off to a brother with no other part to play than to give her his name and disappear at the earliest opportunity.” Choiseul was appalled that the young woman who had come to his office had risen so far so fast. After hearing the rumors that the king intended to make this soi-disant Madame du Barry his next maîtresse en titre, he just couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that “such a mediocrity could ever become a successor to the brilliant marquise.”
Choiseul didn’t even know Jeanne, apart from the encounters in his office, where, it was true, she had been trying to wheedle something out of him, and her presence at Versailles had indeed been an excuse to accidentally-on-purpose bump into the king. But there was a backstory to the duc’s words. He had first met the marquise de Pompadour when he was the comte de Stainville and had leveraged a serendipitous event into an opportunity to obtain the appreciation of both the king and the marquise. A grateful Pompadour had arranged for the comte to be made a foreign ambassador, jump-starting what would become an illustrious diplomatic career. So as far as Choiseul was concerned, no one could be as fabulous as Pompadour.
Another reason that the duc was disinclined to give Madame du Barry the benefit of the doubt (though it was true that she never had the intellectual gifts nor the cultural sophistication of the marquise) was that his sister, the duchesse de Gramont, had designs on becoming Louis’ next maîtresse en titre. She had even thrown herself at the king while Madame de Pompadour was dying, and had been rebuffed. Undeterred, Madame de Gramont kept trying, with the same negative result. She kept hoping that the king would come around, but the moment he spied Madame du Barry on the Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles, it was game over. From then on the duchesse de Gramont was determined to detest Madame du Barry, and pressured her brother to do so as well.
Choiseul was also livid to discover that, thanks to all the spies and gossips pervading the palace of Versailles, the foreign courts had already gotten wind of the king’s infatuation with a trollop of low birth. But Jeanne’s past, present, and future were rapidly becoming sanitized so that she could become Louis’ maîtresse en titre.
Guillaume du Barry was made “Gouverneur de Lévignac,” which was almost a joke, since the place was about the size of a postage stamp, populated mostly by livestock. Jeanne was henceforth known as the comtesse du Barry, even though it was Jean du Barry, Guillaume’s younger brother, who’d been passing himself off as a comte, while Guillaume was styled as a chevalier.
Jeanne’s coat of arms, however, was pure invention, having been cribbed from the Irish Barrymore family. Louis’ minions had even co-opted the Barrymore motto, “Boutez en avant”—“Push forward.” These armorial accoutrements were then blended with the thoroughly fictitious “Gomard” coat of arms, purportedly belonging to Anne Bécu, who, of course, had never wed the monk who’d fathered Jeanne.
Signed on July 23, 1768, the marriage contract itself contained so many fictions it’s amazing that it was legal, but it bore the king’s imprimatur. It shaved three years off Jeanne’s age, making
her only twenty-two. The document listed her father, “Jean-Jacques Gomard de Vaubernier,” as “deceased,” although the lecherous Brother Angel was not only a priest at the Church of Saint-Eustache, which was right in the neighborhood where Jeanne lived, but was in attendance at the ceremony, passing himself off as the bride’s uncle. Being the nearest and dearest of kin to the king’s mistress came with its perqs, and Frère Ange landed in clover, boasting that Louis had made him a royal almoner, although his claim may have been no more than hot air. Jeanne’s mother, Anne, and her stepfather, Nicolas Rançon, were also present for the shotgun wedding on September 1. By then, they, too, had reinvented themselves as the posh Monsieur and Madame de Montrabé.
Painfully aware that he was no more than a prop at his own wedding ceremony, Guillaume du Barry got drunk on brandy prior to the ceremony. But he was heartily thanked for playing and given a lovely parting gift: a handsome pension of five thousand livres. To everyone’s chagrin, Guillaume stuck around Paris for a few weeks after his wedding. He found himself a buxom blond mistress (the exact physical type as Jeanne Bécu) named Mademoiselle Lemoine and brought her back to Lévignac, where they raised a family.
But at least two people who were present at Madame du Barry’s wedding left the ceremony deliriously happy. Jean-Baptise du Barry, the groom’s baby brother, had reached the apogee of his ambition. And within an hour of the “I dos,” the bride was being driven about in a carriage emblazoned with the false heraldry and flaunting her new status as the king’s paramour.
Many of Louis’ courtiers were disgusted. But they had to admit that the king’s vigor and vim had returned. Madame du Barry’s presence, her luminosity, her vivacity, her kindness, and her myriad amorous talents, had lifted him from the doldrums. The duc de Croÿ, a Belgian nobleman who spent a good deal of time at the French court, observed that Louis “is more in love than he has ever been. He seems to be rejuvenated and I have never seen him in better spirits, extremely good-humored and far more outgoing than he has ever been.”
Jean du Barry sent for his sister Claire Françoise, known as “Chon,” to accompany Jeanne at court so she would have at least one friend there. Chon fit the stereotype of the gorgeous girl’s plain-but-amusing sidekick. Ironically, her clever wit, in a world where such an attribute was as great a blessing as beauty, rocketed Chon to the top of many guest lists, where the hosts would ordinarily have shunned her sister-in-law, the king’s trollop. Consequently, even the homely Chon never lacked for lovers. And it was she who would have to remind Jeanne to act like a lady at Versailles, and tone down her bawdy humor in public.
During the autumn of 1768, while the court was at Fontainebleau, a number of scurrilous verses were published and disseminated about the king and Madame du Barry. One of them was a parody of an old madrigal with the lyric rewritten to refer to a countess with humble provincial roots who had sexually serviced hairdressers and other tradesmen until she worked her way all the way up to Versailles.
The duc de Choiseul did nothing to stop the attacks. Perhaps it was because (unbeknownst to his boss) he had financed them. The king’s reaction to the defamatory verses was to insist that they surely didn’t depict his modest darling, she of the soft, almost baby-talking speech. The comtesse du Barry’s little-girl lisp was well-known. Had she perfected it as a courtesan, and then used it to seduce and soothe a sovereign, or was it the natural timbre of her voice?
Louis not only loved Jeanne’s voice; he thought the sun rose and set in her smile, and he couldn’t stand to be without her. The comtesse du Barry, both voluptuous and nurturing, could delight him with her jade’s tricks when he was randy, and smother him with her ample bosom when he needed a hug and someone to soothe him. Louis had already installed her in the tiny apartment (adjacent to the chapel, no less), that had housed his late valet Lebel. She could not be considered his official mistress, because she had yet to be presented at court. But he had to circumvent nearly a hundred years of court etiquette in order to find a loophole, as well as a sponsor who would be willing to overlook the fact that the comtesse was not only not a genuine noblewoman, but had a dodgy ancestry and a checkered past.
Factions had already formed, for and against her. It had not been a tough sell for the duc de Choiseul to enlist the king’s three thirty-something unmarried daughters, known as Mesdames, to his side. They had detested the marquise de Pompadour, and du Barry was even more vulgar. Additionally, even though their mother was now dead, it still made them queasy to watch their father, now pushing sixty, making a public fool of himself over a blowsy blonde who was nearly a third his age.
As a brief aside, some scholars disagree about the blowsy part, citing Jeanne’s experience among worldy men and women in Jean du Barry’s salon and in her own rooms in the rue de la Jussienne, as well as her convent school education. But she was hardly intellectual or cultured, even if she knew which fork or goblet to use, and all of that can coexist with a bawdy wit, depending on the crowd. Several years later, the renowned diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord propounded his opinion of the two royal mistresses, although he never knew either of them, but it offers the opposite perspective from the usual way of thinking: “Although Mme de Pompadour was brought up and lived in the financial society of Paris, which was then rather distinguished, she had common manners, vulgar ways of speaking…. Madame du Barry…although less well brought up, always managed to speak correctly…. She liked to talk and had mastered the art of telling stories rather amusingly.”
If the comtesse du Barry immediately made detractors of the king’s most powerful minister and his trio of backbiting virgin daughters, she found allies in an unlikely quarter, a religious faction at court known as les dévots (the devout ones). Les dévots had formed as a reaction to Choiseul’s support for the Parlements’ expulsion of the Jesuits, and they didn’t mind looking the other way when it came to Madame du Barry’s role at court, hoping that anyone who might also be an enemy of the duc wouldn’t mind aiding their quest to bring about his downfall.
Oddly, for a man who couldn’t spend enough time in Madame du Barry’s presence, and therefore couldn’t wait for her presentation at court, Louis dithered and delayed. Perhaps, despite his passion for her, he recognized how unsuitable she was for the official role, given the circumstances of her birth and background.
It had also become clear that finding a lady to sponsor her presentation was a difficult sell. The sponsor had to be a woman of quality who had herself been presented at court. And Louis needed someone who didn’t know or didn’t care about Jeanne’s origins or her entirely fictionalized noble credentials. After an exhaustive search, the ambitious duchesse d’Aiguillon, who was eager to see her son replace the duc de Choiseul, located the elderly comtesse de Béarn. The comtesse received a hefty compensation for the sacrifice of her reputation as Madame du Barry’s sponsor: Her extensive gambling debts would be discharged by the crown and her two sons would receive military promotions.
So the date was set for Madame du Barry’s formal presentation on February 25, 1769. The court was all atwitter in anticipation of the event. The eccentric Sir Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford and a noted English man of letters, who was a frequent correspondent with some of the women of the court of Versailles, wrote, “They say that tomorrow will be the day when a petticoat will perhaps determine the destinies of Europe…. But I refuse to believe in all that they say—they may overcome the greatest obstacles and in the end be held up by shame.”
Madame de Béarn indeed chickened out, pleading a sprained ankle, which would prevent her from performing the requisite trio of court curtsies, or reverences, required of the presentation ritual. A second delay occurred when the king severely injured his arm after a fall from his horse two days later, entailing several days of convalescence. Louis missed his concubine terribly during this period. As it was Lent, it would have been unseemly for Jeanne to have been hovering about his bedside. Besides, Mesdames had declared themselves his nursemaids, and
no one was about to conduct the former grisette into the presence of the princesses.
Jeanne remained at a tasteful distance in her apartment in the rue de la Jussienne, which she had never abandoned, hoping that the elderly duc de Richelieu, her former paramour and current champion, would escort her to the king’s rooms. But a summons never came.
Finally Louis recovered, and a new date was set for the comtesse du Barry’s presentation, April 22, 1769. There had been so many false starts that the wagering was fierce as to whether it would really take place. The old goat Richelieu was disparaged for getting himself mixed up in the whole sordid business, but most of the gossips had no idea how he’d come to know the luscious Jeanne in the first place.
Madame du Barry’s presentation at court, although she was not the only woman to be presented that evening, was nonetheless the event of the year. Even commoners thronged the courtyards, hoping for a glimpse of the king’s new love. Soon they grew anxious. She was late. This was unheard-of. Would the newly minted comtesse fail to arrive for her great triumph?
Finally, this eighteenth-century Cinderella courtesan arrived in state, having been outfitted by her fairy godfather, the duc de Richelieu, in a dazzling, and extraordinarily weighty, gown of cloth of silver and cloth of gold, with an enormous train. Her entire ensemble glittered with diamonds. All eyes were upon her, undoubtedly waiting for her to screw up the three deep curtsies, and then to reverse them, walking backward out of the king’s presence and kicking her lengthy train out of the way without a misstep. But her detractors were deprived of an opportunity to deride her. And even her sponsor, the old comtesse de Béarn, now fully recovered from her ankle sprain (whether real or dilatory), was impressed. The king was glowing.
Madame de Genlis, who was at Versailles for her aunt’s presentation the same day, wrote about the event in her memoirs. Her comments should be taken with a grain of salt, because by that time Madame de Genlis herself had become the mistress of the duc d’Orléans, who in turn had espoused the cause of the revolutionaries. Nevertheless it provides a colorful, if slightly snarky, portrait of the atmosphere.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 21