thresholds of these pious asylums where souls once found emotions so pure
and such sweet consolations? The stone saints of Gothic architecture no
longer seem so venerable. The changing lights of stained windows have
no more the same mysterious clearness. The sound of the organ is less
grandiose, less touching. Walpole is afflicted by that spirit of the
times, that accursed breath which corrupts and withers human souls.
The same sentiment of vague disquiet, of melancholy discouragement, is
found in many minds; above all, in many hearts. In the midst of this
society, ailing in spite of its brilliancy, in spite of the paint and
patches which cover the cheeks of its fashionable beauties, how many
strive to stupefy themselves, like those timid people who sing when they
are afraid! What do these successful personages, men or women, say
to themselves when, wrested from the worldly tumult, they enter into
themselves a moment? What do they think at the hour when the festal
lamps are extinct, the flowers faded, and when, after a night noisy with
impieties and so-called pleasures, the clarity of dawn appears?
SECOND PART
THE WOMEN OF VERSAILLES AT THE END OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XV.
[1768-1774]
I
LOUIS XV. IN 1768
Marie Leczinska was just dead, and saddened Versailles presented a
funeral aspect. Mademoiselle Genet, the future Madame Campan, who
had recently become reader to Mesdames de France, was profoundly
struck by the doleful spectacle offered by the château. “Those grand
apartments hung with black,” she wrote, “those State armchairs raised
upon several steps and overhung by a canopy adorned with plumes, those
caparisoned horses, that immense procession in deep mourning, those
enormous shoulder-knots embroidered with gold and silver spangles which
decorated the habits of the pages and even those of the footmen, all that
pageantry, in fine, produced such an effect on my senses that I could
hardly hold myself up straight when I was brought into the apartment
of the Princesses. The first day on which I read in Madame Victoire’s
private room, it was impossible for me to pronounce more than two
sentences; my heart palpitated, my voice trembled, my sight was dim.”
Within two years and a half, Louis XV. had lost his son, his
daughter-in-law, and his wife. These three saintly and affecting deaths
were for a moment to reawaken sentiments of religion and repentance
in his heart. During the long sufferings of Marie Leczinska he had
surrounded her with such assiduous attentions that the poor Queen,
little accustomed to such solicitude, knew not how to show him her
gratitude. After she had breathed her last, it was with sincere emotion
and respectful tenderness that her husband imprinted a last kiss on
her icy forehead. People fancied that so many warnings could not be in
vain. Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. His surgeon had recommended
virtue to him as being good for the body as well as the soul, and advised
him to not merely rein up his horses, but to take them out of the
traces. Excusable to a certain degree in a young man, vice is ignoble,
ridiculous, revolting, in an old one. Everything combined to induce the
King to amend; health, honor, self-interest, conscience, the clamor of
public opinion, the voice of morality and religion, the dignity of his
throne, and the salvation of his soul. During the last four years, since
the death of Madame de Pompadour that is, he had had no acknowledged
mistress. The Deer Park was not closed; but the mean debaucheries of that
mysterious rendezvous gave less occasion for scandal to the court and the
people than would a reigning favorite in the palace of Versailles. Louis
XV. showed affection for his four remaining daughters, Mesdames Adelaide,
Victoire, Sophie, and Louise, and it was hoped they would bring their
father back to truly religious ideas. The Most Christian King had faith,
and it might be believed that, age having blunted his passions, he would
at last repair the evils wrought by his bad example, by a pious and
respectable life. He may himself have desired a reconciliation with God,
but the force of habit, the interested suggestions of persons speculating
in vice, a sort of impulse and giddiness, were still to prevail over
reason and remorse.
The dominant sentiment in the heart of the aging Louis XV. was not the
religious one, but a mixture of apathy and indifference. Men who have
reigned for a long time, whether they end their days on the throne,
abdicate, or die in exile, are nearly always attacked, at the close of
their career, by a sort of lassitude and disgust. They have seen so many
intrigues, meannesses, and recantations; they have been the object of
such stupid adulations and loathsome flatteries; they know the ugliness
of men’s souls so thoroughly, that they end by conceiving an absolute
contempt for human nature. This contempt does not go so far as wrath
and indignation; it is tranquil, indolent, disdainful. An experienced
sovereign retains no illusions concerning others or himself. Whatever may
be proposed to him, he feels inclined to answer: What is the good of it?
His ministers, his courtiers, his mistresses, his people, inspire him
with equal mistrust. There are hours when he would like to abandon the
governmental machine to itself, so much is he afflicted by the past
and discouraged by the present. Like an old pilot contemplating from
some rocky height the barks threatened by the tempest, which he can no
longer aid, the monarch, from the interior of his palace, sees the ship
foundering in the distance, and sadly tells himself that he is powerless
to save the crew.
Disturbed by gloomy presentiments, Louis XV. believed no longer either in
the prestige of his throne or the future of his family. He had recourse
to petty means, shabby tricks, conspiracies against himself, in the
hope of strengthening his tottering power. As Madame Campan has so well
remarked, “to separate Louis de Bourbon from the King of France was what
the monarch found the most piquant thing in his royal existence.” “They
wanted it so, they thought it would be for the best.” That was the way he
talked when the operations of his ministers had been unsuccessful. One
might say he had a dual reign, with two policies and two diplomacies, a
private treasury and an occult government in opposition to the official
one.
As M. Boutaric says, “the _man_ spent a part of his life in thwarting and
contradicting the _king_. Curious spectacle, that of an absolute monarch
reduced to the most obscure intrigues in order to obtain his will, which
he is afraid to declare, engaging in an underhand and secret struggle
with his ministers, and at last deceived in his expectations, wounded in
his self-love, a retired conspirator, persisting to his last breath in
intrigues transparent on every side, and owing it solely to his supreme
rank that he does not share the captivity or exile of his agents, I was
about to say his accomplices.” It was in this way that he admitted to
his secret diplomacy such persons as the Chevalier d’Eon, by turns man
and woman, and the famous Count de Saint-Germain, who, claiming to be
several centuries old, was supposed to possess a prodigious elixir of
long life. Baron de Gleichen relates in his _Souvenirs_ that this “led to
the composition of the laughable story of the old chambermaid of a lady
who had hidden away a phial of this divine liquor; the ancient soubrette
discovered it and drank so much of it that by dint of drinking and
rejuvenating, she became a little baby.”
There were adventurers in the personnel of the secret diplomacy, but
there were remarkable men likewise. Count de Broglie was the chief of
these. The mysterious Minister of Foreign Affairs acted simultaneously
with the official one. “He presently had trusty agents at every court;
sometimes it was the resident minister himself, unknown to the titular
Minister of Foreign Affairs; more frequently it was some inferior
employee of legation, who thus became a spy on his immediate chief.” M.
d’Ogny, director of the secret postal service, recognized the despatches
of the initiated diplomatists by an exterior sign; they were sent to
Count de Broglie through Guinard, a servant of the château, deciphered in
the cabinet of the Count, and then sent back to Louis XV. with draughts
of replies, to which the King each time affixed his visa after making
corrections. Baron de Breteuil, ambassador to Sweden in 1766, who had
been recommended by the King to pay particular attention to the affairs
of that country, Count Desalleurs, ambassador to Constantinople, M. de
Saint-Priest, and lastly, M. de Vergennes, took part in this secret
diplomacy.[35] “Count de Broglie retained the direction of it even after
he had been exiled in consequence of an official disgrace which was
only apparently such.” As M. Geffroy remarks: “Louis XV., aided by this
unknown personnel, liked to direct the principal affairs himself with a
certain attention. Perhaps, jealous of all who surrounded him,—ministers,
favorites, and mistresses,—he took pleasure in being able to thwart and
oppose them secretly, in conspiring against them without taking the
trouble to make an open resistance. His hidden policy was frequently
more honorable than the avowed policy of the cabinet of Versailles.” M.
Théodore Lavallée has made the same reflection. He says: “The secret
correspondence of Louis XV. shows that this prince had the sentiment of
national grandeur as if by royal instinct and family tradition; it is
full of good sense, dignity, and loyalty. No one can read it without
regretting that this noble policy should have been rendered sterile by
lack of will, that these profound views concerning the interests of
France’s future should have been lost sight of in the debaucheries of the
Deer Park.”
What was lacking to Louis XV. was not intelligence—he had a great deal
of it; nor was it the moral sense, for even while doing evil he had a
clear idea of what was right; it was will. From his youth he had had
upright and pure intentions, and from time to time he had them still, but
he did not feel in himself the needful energy to withstand the torrent
of his time. As was said by his huntsman, Le Roy, that master of the
hounds whom Sainte-Beuve styles a La Bruyère on horseback, “he despaired
of ever being able to do what is right, because one is always more
disposed to regard as impossible in itself what one has not the courage
to do. To this point had a man arrived by degrees whose intelligence and
character, if he had been born a private person, would have made him
considered above the common and what is properly called a gallant man.”
In growing old he had preserved a noble and elegant figure, regular
features, a reserved but subtle and witty style of conversation, an
exquisite politeness, and a very great care of his person. “This prince
was still beloved; one would have desired that a manner of life suitable
to his age and dignity should at last throw a veil over the aberrations
of the past and justify the love which the French people had had for his
youth. It pained them to condemn him severely. If he had established
recognized mistresses at court, the excessive devotion of the Queen was
blamed for it. Mesdames were reproached for not trying to avert the
danger of seeing the King arrange another intimacy for himself with some
new favorite. People regretted Madame Henriette, twin-sister of the
Duchess of Parma; this princess had had some influence over the King’s
mind; they wrote that if she had lived she would have exerted herself
to provide amusements for him in the bosom of his own family; that she
would have accompanied the King on his journeys, and would have done the
honors of those little suppers which he was fond of giving in his private
apartments.”[36]
Count de Ségur, a wit and boon companion _par excellence_, who saw the
last years of Louis XV., likewise speaks of them with a certain sympathy.
“This good, feeble monarch,” he says in his charming Memoirs, “was in
his youth the object of a too little deserved enthusiasm; the rigorous
reproaches cast upon his old age are not less exaggerated. Successor to
the absolute power of Louis XIV., he reigned sixty years without its
being possible to accuse him of an act of cruelty.... No prince can be
found who has not more or less participated in the errors, weaknesses,
and follies of his time. Moreover, the French have always shown
themselves too lenient to this sort of wrong-doings; but they desire at
least that these stains should disappear under the rays of some halo of
glory. Hence they become only too indulgent and almost panegyrize the
same faults when committed by the chivalrous Francis I., the brave Henry,
the majestic Louis XIV., while they bitterly reproach the weak Louis XV.
on account of them.”
Sovereigns are nearly always the personification of their epoch. They
seem to give the law, but generally they merely submit to it. The
contrasts in the character of Louis XV. reappear in the society of
which he was the head. He belongs to that period of dissolution and
decay when, according to Chateaubriand’s expression, “statesmen became
men of letters, and men of letters statesmen; great nobles bankers,
farmers-general great nobles. The fashions were as ridiculous as the arts
were in bad taste; they painted shepherdesses in paniers in salons where
colonels were embroidering. Everything was out of order in both minds
and morals, sure sign of a revolution.... To see the monarch benumbed
in voluptuousness, the courtiers corrupted, the ministers malicious or
imbecile, some of the philosophers undermining religion, and others the
State; the nobles either ignorant or attacked by the vices of the day;
the ecclesiastics, at Paris, the disgrace of their order; the provinces
full of prejudices,—one would have thought of a crowd of workmen
hastening to tear down a great edifice.”
And yet, in appearance, there was very little alteration. As Count de
Ségur remarks, “the old social edifice was completely ruined in its
lowest foundations, without any sign at the surface which announced its
approaching fall. The change in manners was unperceived because it had
been gradual; the etiquette at court was the same,—the same throne,
the same names, distinctions of rank and formalities were still held
there. The parliaments, opposing the government, but in a respectful
manner, had become almost republican without suspecting it, and were
themselves striking the hour of revolutions while supposing they were
merely following the examples of their predecessors when they resisted
the concordat of Francis I. and the fiscal despotism of Mazarin.” Louis
XV., who was a shrewd observer, in spite of his defects, appreciated the
whole gravity of the situation. But to remedy it would have demanded
genius,—not merely cleverness, talent, or wisdom. To conciliate, at the
close of the eighteenth century, necessary liberties with indispensable
authority, was a problem which the greatest of men might have found no
means of solving. Louis XV. contented himself with saying: “Things will
last as they are as long as I do.”
At his side a minister was governing whose character was in singular
contrast with that of his master. The Duke de Choiseul was as
enthusiastic, loquacious, good-humored, as Louis XV. was reserved,
taciturn, and bored. The monarch, although he understood his religion
badly, had a deep and lively faith, while the minister was Voltairean.
Liked by the parliaments, the aristocracy, and the men of letters,
Choiseul, with his audacious petulance, his brilliant and easy way of
transacting business, his seductive and resourceful talent, his witty
even eloquent conversation, his faith in his star, his habit of believing
all successes possible, his philosophy which stopped at Voltaire and
disdained Rousseau, his unconscious prodigality, which, counting on the
future suppression of monasteries and the taxation of ecclesiastical
property to supply the deficit, was untroubled by the pit dug beneath
the throne, Choiseul was the type of that brave and charming, frivolous
and adventurous nobility which marches smilingly toward an abyss covered
with flowers. “Never,” says Baron de Gleichen in his _Souvenirs_, “have I
known a man so capable as he of spreading joy and contentment all around
his person. When he entered a room, he rummaged his pockets and seemed to
draw from them an inexhaustible abundance of pleasantries and gaiety.”
In spite of his charm and kindliness, the minister, whom Pope Benedict
XIV. described as “a fool who had a good deal of genius,” had drawn upon
himself irreconcilable enmities. His rivals and those who were jealous
of him could not forgive him for his lofty fortune, and anxiously sought
means of overthrowing this colossus who dominated everything. In what
salon, by what means, could they hope to prepare and bring about the
fall of the man who hampered them,—such was the question they incessantly
asked themselves. As has been remarked by Madame Campan, Louis XV. had
at this time no relations with women except those of a class that could
be of no use in a prolonged intrigue; the Deer Park, moreover, was a
seraglio in which the beauties were constantly renewed. They would have
liked to give the monarch a mistress who, by means of daily insinuations,
might have force enough to overthrow the powerful minister. To fight a
grand vizier, a sultana was essential. This was why the enemies of the
Duke de Choiseul cast their eyes upon the woman whose beginnings we are
about to recall,—the Countess Du Barry.
II
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COUNTESS DU BARRY
On the 9th of January, 1829, a curious suit was tried before the civil
tribunal of first instance. It was a contest between two families,
each of which claimed to be the sole heir of the Countess Du Barry,
and demanded the carrying into execution of a legacy bequeathed to the
Countess by the Duke de Cossé-Brissac, massacred by the revolutionists
in 1792. The Duke, while naming his daughter, Madame de Mortemart, as
universal legatee, had burdened her succession by a legacy which, at
first, could not be paid. But under the Restoration the Mortemart family,
having received a considerable portion of the indemnity of a milliard,
granted to the _Émigrés_, found itself in a position to accomplish
the last wishes of the Duke de Brissac. The Gomard heirs presented
themselves, appealing, as the certificate of Madame Du Barry’s birth to
the following extract, drawn, they said, from the baptismal registers
of the parish of Vaucouleurs, diocese of Toul: “Jeanne, daughter of
Jean-Jacquard Gomard de Vaubernier and Anne Bécu, called Quantigny, was
born August 19, 1746, and was baptized the same day, had Joseph de
Mange for godfather and Jeanne de Birabin for godmother, who have signed
with me: L. Galon, vicar of Vaucouleurs, Joseph de Mange and Jeanne de
Birabin.”
The heirs on the maternal side, the Bécus, also presented themselves.
They came not merely to share, but to contest with the Gomards all rights
of succession to Madame Du Barry. They maintained that the certificate
of birth furnished by the latter was false, having been fabricated in
1768 to flatter the Countess, and they opposed to it another act, taken
from the civil registers of the town of Vaucouleurs, September 25, 1827,
and which was expressed in these terms: “Jeanne, natural daughter of
Anne Bécu, called Quantigny, was born August 19, 1743, and baptized the
same day. For godfather she had Joseph Demange, and for godmother Jeanne
Birabin.”
By judgment of January 9, 1829,—a judgment confirmed by a decree of the
royal court of Paris, February 22, 1830,—the Seine tribunal of first
instance decided in favor of the Bécu heirs. The certificate of birth
produced by the Gomards was declared apocryphal. The tribunals thus
established that in 1768 a genealogy of complaisance had been invented in
favor of the mistress of Louis XV. Of a natural daughter they had made a
legitimate daughter. The Bécu girl had been transformed into a Demoiselle
Gomard de Vaubernier. The “particle” was attributed to the godfather,
M. Demange, and to the godmother, Jeanne Birabin, “la Birabine,” as they
said in the country, who became Madame de Birabin. The fawning spirit
went to even further lengths. The favorite was made younger and made to
come into the world, not on August 19, 1743, the real day of her birth,
but three years later, August 19, 1746. In his interesting work, _Les
Curiosités historiques_, M. Le Roi, the learned curator of the Versailles
library, has told the truth about the origin of the Countess Du Barry.
He has given her back her true name: Jeanne Bécu. He has refuted the
numberless falsehoods which tended to create an absolutely false legend
on the subject of the royal mistress.
The child who was one day to call herself the Countess Du Barry had for
mother a simple peasant. She had to struggle against poverty from her
cradle. A commissary of provisions, M. Dumonceau, gave her the first
elements of instruction through charity. He placed her in the convent
of Saint Anne, with two pairs of sheets and six napkins by way of
trousseau. It is said that she afterwards peddled haberdashery through
the streets, and later on, under the name of Mademoiselle Rançon, the
name of the husband recently taken by her mother, entered the millinery
shop of one M. Mabille, rue Saint Honoré. It seems the little shop girl
was not a model of virtue. Alas! the snares of every kind with which
pretty girls are surrounded make goodness and beauty what may almost
be called incompatible things in the poorer classes. The milliner
encountered one of those men who are met in every capital,—Count Jean Du
Barry. He said to himself that so charming a person ought to make her
way, and in his enthusiasm he gave her a seraphic title: he called her
Mademoiselle l’Ange. This angel, of an inferior order, presided at the
gambling-parties given by the Count. It was there Dumouriez saw her in
1764. In 1764 the Duke de Lauzun followed her from the opera ball, and
found her truly ravishing. Lebel, valet-de-chambre to Louis XV., who, in
consequence of his special functions was on the track of all dainties
for the King, thought he would do well to place Mademoiselle l’Ange on
the list of his clients. He fancied she would be only the favorite of a
day and night and would then disappear, after having had her place in
the Deer Park but an instant. He was mistaken. The former milliner was
destined to a succession that had been vacant four years,—that of the
Marquise de Pompadour.
Instead of imitating the great ladies who fatigued the King, she showed
herself just as she was, under the aspect of a veritable courtesan, with
all the cynicism, animation, and refinements of her trade. Louis XV.
found his jaded senses revive as if by miracle. He was delighted by it.
The new favorite seemed to him an exceptional being. He determined to
cover her with a rain of gold and jewels, and make her the first _femme
entretenue_ in France, in all Europe.