Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  “Then I shall be her rival!” the naive and virginal teenager declared, the euphemism utterly lost on her. Yet as soon as she learned that Madame du Barry was the king’s maîtresse en titre, and that her origins and background were lowly and rather sordid, she refused to countenance the woman, despite repeated entreaties from her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, to do what it took to please the king, because the Franco-Austrian alliance hung in the balance.

  Insisting to her mother that “it is pathetic to see how weak [the king] is with Madame du Barry, who is the silliest and most impertinent creature imaginable,” Marie Antoinette stubbornly refused to compromise her morals by speaking even one word to the king’s whore. Her recalcitrance blossomed into an international incident. It mushroomed even further when Austria needed France to turn a blind eye to her cooperation with Prussia and Russia in the invasion and partition of Poland, carving up an innocent commonwealth for their own gain.

  However, Louis was disinclined to look the other way while his granddaughter-in-law publicly snubbed his lover. Pulled in two directions, Marie Antoinette was too naive to understand that she was being used to promote a plethora of secret agendas. Her mother, pious though she was, stood to gain a substantial amount of territory if her daughter said a few nice words in public to Madame du Barry. Louis’ daughters, Mesdames, who were always intriguing because they had nothing else to occupy their hours, had been manipulating the young dauphine ever since she arrived in France, in the guise of being her mentors. By virtue of her marriage to the dauphin, Marie Antoinette was now the highest-ranking woman in the kingdom. This meant that she would soon cultivate her own coterie of courtiers and ministers keen to gain her favor, as one day she would be queen. If Mesdames could use her as their tool to snub du Barry, they might be able to accomplish the fall of the mistress without soiling their own hands.

  It worked for a while. But finally the Austrian ambassador explained to Marie Antoinette why her mother wished her to speak to Madame du Barry. With great reluctance, the dauphine conceded, and after an aborted attempt (interrupted by Madame Adélaïde, the oldest of Louis’ daughters) in July 1771, Marie Antoinette finally spoke to the comtesse on New Year’s Day, 1772. “Il y a bien du monde aujourd’hui à Versailles”—“There are a lot of people at Versailles today,” she said. Louis heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. Madame du Barry was exultant. And the crisis was over.

  The comtesse won that round, and she also scored another victory against Marie Antoinette. The duc de Choiseul had been one of the prime architects of her marriage to the dauphin and the Franco-Austrian alliance; consequently, Marie Antoinette was deeply indebted to him, and it was in her best interests for him to remain at the head of the government. But Madame du Barry convinced the king to dismiss Choiseul based upon a number of issues, not least of which was his dissemination of scurrilous propaganda against her. She claimed to be aware of documents that proved the duc was trying to drag France into a conflict with Britain (and Louis had a natural reticence to go to war) over the Falkland Islands.

  The story goes that du Barry herself dictated Louis’ letter to his cousin the king of Spain (with whom France would have been siding in the Falklands hostilities), informing him that he had no interest in becoming involved in another military conflict. In truth, if the comtesse participated at all in Louis’ letter, she had likely memorized something that had been ghostwritten either by Chon or by Jean du Barry, both of whom were renowned for their sophisticated correspondence. The king’s letter was sent to Spain on December 23, 1770, and the following day Louis signed a lettre de cachet exiling Choiseul to his country estate of Chanteloup and demanding his resignation of the offices of secretary of state and superintendent of the post office.

  By the spring of 1771, Louis was more dependent than ever on Madame du Barry. Without her he felt very much alone. He had dismissed Choiseul and suppressed the Parlements, exiling the magistrates and defanging the assembly. The move was so autocratic that his cousins, the princes of the blood, and several ducs refused to appear at the lit de justice where Louis, reclining on a throne covered with a purple cloth embellished with fleurs-de-lis, commanded the new Parlement, formed by his chancellor Maupeou, to follow his orders. The highest-ranking men in the land may have protested the event by absenting themselves, but Madame du Barry was right there to support her lover, and many believed that she was behind the king’s political vision.

  Hapsburg Austria’s ambassador to France, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, was amazed, writing to his sovereign Maria Theresa, “The authority of the countess is such that nothing like it has ever been seen before.”

  Mercy wasn’t quite right, however. Louis refused to allow du Barry to pressure him into appointing her pal the duc d’Aiguillon as Choiseul’s replacement. Six months later, however, he capitulated.

  Yet even in exile Choiseul remained popular, entertaining all his old friends. And his sister, the duchesse de Gramont, as one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, remained free to spread her jealous vitriol about the royal favorite. Allegedly, she continued to circulate nasty verses about the comtesse containing lies that were as improbable as they were salacious: that Madame du Barry entertained the grand almoner of France and the papal nuncio at a lever “as naked as Venus coming out of the sea”; that she asked another cleric to hold her golden chamber pot while she relieved herself; and that she spanked one of her ladies in the king’s presence, which greatly amused him. Those who knew the comtesse would have been aware that such conduct was not in keeping with her personality, but her enemies delighted in repeating these anecdotes, and undoubtedly they have contributed to the lasting image of Madame du Barry as bawdy and irreverent.

  What she did have was extraordinary input into the lives of the royal family. Louis asked her to coordinate the respective wedding plans of his two younger grandsons, the comtes de Provence and d’Artois, to a pair of homely sisters from Savoy. The boys’ mother was long dead by then, so the selection of flowers, music, and other entertainments was awarded to the comtesse. The king’s lover made sure that the receptions were as lavish as could be, a deliberate slap to Marie Antoinette, whose wedding to the comtes’ oldest brother the dauphin was the greatest spectacle of its kind in generations.

  From 1772 to 1773, Madame du Barry was at her zenith, for all intents and purposes the uncrowned queen of France. Louis could deny her nothing, and the lovers scarcely spent time apart. He was very needy, whether it was for sex or a sympathetic ear. Her own bed was an altar to love surrounded by four columns that supported a baldachin entwined with carved garlands of ivy, myrtle, and roses. The comtesse seemed to be the air the king required in order to breathe, and she became afraid to stray too far from her rooms when he was around, in case he might need her. Except when he requested privacy and wanted her all to himself, she was always surrounded by a lavish train that included a Bengali page boy named Zamor, a gift Louis bestowed upon the comtesse when the youth was eleven years old. Madame du Barry was waited on like a queen, and her rooms were a hive of humanity. Thirteen matching upholstered chairs were set out for those who witnessed her lever, or morning toilette, as if she were a member of the royal family. Her makeup table was wheeled to the area of the room where the light was the harshest and most unforgiving, and it was there that she would apply her rouge and complete her morning ablutions.

  Supplicants and sycophants from all walks of life, from bankers to ministers, sought her out, parking themselves in her antechamber. Many curried favor in unusual ways: A merchant launched a new ship bearing the cribbed du Barry motto, Boutez en avant, on the prow; the king of Sweden sent her a box of perfumed gloves; and Voltaire, who resided in voluntary exile in Switzerland, wrote a poem thanking the comtesse for the two kisses (one for each cheek) she had sent via a visiting friend. Louis was delighted by all these tributes to his mistress, viewing them as encomiums to himself.

  In one of his dispatches to Empress Maria Theresa during the autumn of 1773, Co
mte Mercy wrote, “King Louis is so completely given up to Madame du Barry that he is becoming more and more isolated from his children who can give him neither consolation nor advice, while he can expect no attachment of fidelity from the bizarre kind of people by whom he is surrounded and who are the friends of Madame du Barry.”

  Louis celebrated his sixty-third birthday in February 1773. Faced with his own mortality, he began to think about the future of his immortal soul. After her father fell for Madame du Barry, the princesse Louise-Marie, Louis’ youngest daughter, had quit Versailles and entered the Carmelite convent at Saint-Denis. As Soeur Thérèse-Augustine she had been praying for the salvation of Louis’ soul ever since, and now she encouraged him to remarry. Her candidate was the princesse de Lamballe, a young widow less than a third the king’s age. Nevertheless, she was beautiful and devout and would make an excellent queen.

  Madame du Barry panicked.

  But her sister-in-law, Chon, told her to buck up and dry her tears. She reminded the comtesse that her job was to amuse the king, and that the surest way to lose Louis was to be a Debbie Downer. Speaking of which, the princesse de Lamballe always looked like she was on the verge of tears, and in that respect hardly had the requisite temperament to please a man like Louis. Consequently (according to Chon), there was nothing to worry about!

  In fact, there was good news on the horizon. The duc de Richelieu reminded Louis that his great-grandfather had contracted a morganatic marriage with Madame de Maintenon, and suggested that he do the same with du Barry. In a morganatic marriage, the wife would not be queen; nor would she have any rights of a queen, and their children would have no rights of succession, but at least Louis in his waning years could make his peace with God. However, there was one major obstacle to this plan: Guillaume du Barry. The comtesse remained very much married.

  As if on cue, the chevalier arrived in Paris to remind his estranged wife of that very fact. Guillaume was handsomely paid to turn around and head back to Toulouse, but it didn’t solve the problem of finding a bishop who would be willing to divorce the royal mistress. None of them wanted to be responsible for the fact that it would mean Madame du Barry would be queen, even unofficially, should she ever wed the king.

  In addition, it was clear that Louis wasn’t going to live forever. He was becoming increasingly frail and tired. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of the future monarchs Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette by appearing to support the ambitions of the comtesse du Barry.

  She co-opted the role of the queen anyway at every opportunity. During the marriage celebration of Louis’ youngest grandson, the comte d’Artois, to Princess Marie-Thérèse of Savoy in November 1773, it was the party planner who stole the show from the homely bride and even from the vivacious dauphine. The comtesse had booked the most famous performers of the era for the reception, but everyone was looking at her. One wedding guest described Madame du Barry as “shining like the sun in a dress of cloth of gold covered in jewels worth over five million livres [an exorbitant sum]. She and King Louis appeared to be entirely absorbed in each other, giving each other loving looks, smiling and making signs, His Majesty occasionally pulling a comic face as if by this extraordinary behavior he wanted to prove that, despite all rumors to the contrary, the comtesse du Barry was still the reigning favorite.”

  Her ego was usually center stage. At Louveciennes, the château that Louis had bestowed upon the comtesse a few years earlier, and into which she had sunk a fortune of his money, the walls were covered with her portraits. She metaphorically bathed in her own praise—verses to her beauty and generosity. “All that she wants is flattery. She can never have enough,” Chon du Barry tattled to her lover, the duc d’Aiguillon. Her own beauty was the central theme even at her lavish parties, where, it was rumored, for the voyeuristic delectation of the king, she would import blond peasant girls to pleasure her page boy Zamor—or so said the Austrian ambassador, Comte Mercy. More than her vanity met Mercy’s critical eye. In his view, the comtesse’s soirees “were carried to such an indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people.”

  Madame du Barry was indeed living life to the max, and she never dared show her lover her doubts or fears. As his official mistress, part of her job was to play the court jester, to perennially amuse and soothe the royal temper. She could never permit her energy to flag in Louis’ presence or she would risk losing him to any number of potential rivals. After all, given his generosity, as well as his reputation as the handsomest man in France, what wouldn’t any woman give to warm the bed of the king, if only for a night, even if he weren’t as virile as he once was? But by now there were other rivals as well—the influences of his daughters and that of the Catholic Church, in addition to Louis’ own tortured conscience about living in sin with her.

  The comtesse was equally superstitious. Fond of reading almanacs and horoscopes, in the beginning of 1774 she read in the Almanach de Liège that “a great lady of a certain court will play her last role in the coming April.” It says much about du Barry’s megalomania that she assumed the prediction applied to her. With a sense of foreboding and dread she purchased as many copies of the almanac as she could and had them burned, figuring that if she destroyed the source, it would therefore destroy the prophecy.

  Madame du Barry was present during a Holy Week Mass in 1774 when a firebrand preacher, the Abbé de Beauvais, thundered from the pulpit, “In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed.” No doubt she recalled the words of the Almanach de Liège and shivered at this double dose of unpleasant prognostication. Louis didn’t attend confession over Easter that year, once more choosing his mistress over the clerics. But then again, he hadn’t confessed in thirty years, ever since the debacle at Metz in 1744 had resulted in the dismissal of his then–maîtresse en titre, the duchesse de Châteauroux. Never again, Louis had vowed.

  The lovers spent a good deal of time in each other’s company that spring, stealing away to the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles for some privacy. Le Petit Trianon was a cozy little villa that Louis had originally commissioned as a gift for Madame de Pompadour, but anyone who has ever dealt with contractors knows that they never finish anything on time. Pompadour was dead before the Petit Trianon was finished, so Louis had bestowed it on Madame du Barry. It boasted some ingenious mechanical contraptions intended to obviate the need for hovering servants, such as a dining table that could rise, fully laden, from the subterranean kitchen.

  Still, Louis begrudgingly acknowledged that he wasn’t the stud he once had been, admitting to one of the royal physicians, “I am growing old and it is time I reined in the horses.” He received the blunt and sobering reply, “Sire, it is not a question of reining them in. It would be better if they were taken out of harness.”

  During the last week of April 1774, Louis became ill. He had spent the night of April 26 with Madame du Barry at the Petit Trianon and had insisted on going hunting the following day, even though he hadn’t felt well. His condition worsened and the royal surgeon determined, “C’est à Versailles, Sire, qu’il faut être malade”—“You must be ill at Versailles, Sire.” Louis was conveyed to the palace, and on April 28, the telltale pustules of smallpox were detected. Yet no one had the nerve to tell the king the truth about his condition. In any case, he believed he had contracted the disease when he was eighteen and therefore could not die from it. Unfortunately, the doctors had lied to him when he was a teen. His daughters insisted on nursing him ’round the clock. More important, so did Madame du Barry, whose face was her fortune and who also had never been exposed to the disease. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose by remaining by his bedside.

  By May 4, it was clear that this was no Metz. This time Louis was dying, and in order for him to be shriven, he would have to dismiss his mistress. He told the comtesse, who was hovering beside him, “From now on I owe myself to God and to my people. Tomorrow you must leave. Tell [the duc] d’Aiguillon to come and see me at ten o’clock in the morning. Yo
u will not be forgotten. Everything that is possible will be done for you.”

  And so they parted forever. Madame du Barry fainted in the doorway of the king’s bedchamber and had to be carried to her rooms, where she wept uncontrollably. She had lived at Versailles for five years. The following day she was bundled into a closed carriage for the duc d’Aiguillon’s nearby estate of Rueil. Not two hours after her departure Louis asked to see her, but was told that she had quit the palace. “Where has she gone?” he asked hazily.

  “To Rueil, Sire,” came the reply.

  “What, already?” he said forlornly. Eyewitnesses noticed a large tear running down his cheek. “Gone,” he murmured, “as we all must go.”

  Louis lost much of his powers of speech on May 7, and his public confession was made for him by the Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon. The cardinal also extracted something else from the dying monarch. He blackmailed the superstitious Louis, insisting that the king sign a lettre de cachet exiling his mistress to the abbey of Pont-aux-Dames as a prisoner of state. The cardinal must have warned the king that his soul would not enter the pearly gates of heaven unless his mistress’s body entered those of a convent.

  At the time Louis promised the comtesse on May 4 that she would be well looked after, he never imagined the conversation he’d have the following day with his Chief Minister, the duc d’Aiguillon. Their secret discussion ultimately resulted in the drafting of the documentation that would ignominiously banish Madame du Barry—something the king had never intended to occur.

  Louis died on May 10, 1774, and was scarcely mourned by his people, despite a reign of fifty-nine years. As a corpse the Well-Loved was the All-but-Ignored, and his disease-riddled body was swiftly transported with minimal fanfare to Saint-Denis for burial.