The Book of the Courtesans

by Susan Griffin

  Her resolve did not, however, last for very long. At the public festivities held to celebrate the placement of a statue of Louis XV in the Place de la Concorde, she caught the attention of the comte Jean du Barry. Born to a titled but impoverished family in Toulouse, though the land and manor he had inherited from his godfather afforded him a respectable income, du Barry lived so far beyond his means that soon all he had left was debt. At which point, he abandoned his wife and infant son to cultivate his connections with wealthy men until eventually he arrived in Paris. But despite these connections, he failed to win the diplomatic appointment he sought. Thus, he turned to another way to make his fortune. Possessed of a fascinating charm himself, he became the procurer for a group of men from the most prominent families in France. Searching the city for beautiful women, grisettes, shopgirls, and actresses, he could be counted on to provide aristocrats with their mistresses.

  In the beginning, he kept Jeanne for himself. She went to live with him in exchange for a sum of money he paid to her parents. Jeanne herself was pleased with the luxuries with which he surrounded her, while for a period he preserved the girl for himself alone. Yet clearly he had other plans. He began almost immediately to prepare her for her debut in higher society. The fine French accent she had learned to speak at Saint-Aure’s, and her education there—she had read Shakespeare and was familiar with Greek and Roman classics—and the exquisite sense of fashion she had learned at Labille’s shop served her well, and to this du Barry added a certain worldliness. She was presented as his mistress at the Opéra, taken in an elegant carriage to balls and parties, where she mingled and conversed with aristocrats, poets, and writers. And like so many courtesans before and after her, while she was trained to appear as if she were a noblewoman, she also became well versed in erotic arts.

  Of the many men to whom Jean du Barry sold Jeanne’s favors in this period, probably the most important was the duc de Richelieu. He would be a loyal ally until his own death once she became the king’s lover. Yet ironically, it was a meeting with the man who was to become her chief enemy at the court that brought her, almost by accident, into the king’s visual range. (For such was her charm that for all practical purposes she won him in a single glance. )

  Still hoping for a diplomatic post, and thinking that Choiseul, Louis’ minister of foreign affairs, would not be able to resist her, du Barry sent Jeanne to Versailles to plead his case. But Choiseul was not attracted to her. “She was not at all to my taste,” he wrote; rightly suspicious of du Barry, he dismissed her.

  Disappointed as she may have been, Jeanne must have resolved that the trip she had made not be entirely in vain. The king would soon be leaving mass and going to dine, and like all Parisians, she knew that the public was allowed to watch him as he walked there. Hence she made her way to the state apartments and managed to find a place at the front of the crowd, which was pressed against the royal balustrades, waiting to see their king pass by.

  The public was there so often, observing him every time he went to mass or sat down to dine, that the king could easily have failed to turn in her direction. Unless—and this of course is pure conjecture—a certain kind of charm is not only figuratively magnetic but literally so. As absurd as the proposition may sound, it often does appear that very charming people have the power to draw the attention of those in whom they are interested into their own orbits. Whatever the explanation, Louis did turn toward her, and he was immediately struck by what has been described by many of those who knew her as the radiance of her presence.

  Three centuries later, we are still speculating what it could have been, once the king turned, that moved him so at the sight of this woman. Of course, she was uncommonly beautiful, but so were many of the women who surrounded him. Like his great-grandfather, the lustful “Sun King,” Louis XV was a famously amorous man. He liked to make love with his ma"tresse en titre, whoever she was, at least twice a day. Moreover, in addition to occasionally spending a night with the queen, he had other, more transitory lovers. While she was still living, Pompadour, who had a more fragile nature and was literally worn out by his appetites, sought to protect him from public scandal by establishing a house called Le Parc aux Cerfs.*3 His valet, Lebel, picked out the beautiful women who were housed there while they waited for royal visits.

  Though he did not bring Jeanne to the Parc aux Cerfs, this must have been the destination Lebel thought the king eventually intended when Louis asked that he bring her to him. Not only was she born a natural child to a seamstress in the provinces, but she was a prostitute living with the notorious Jean du Barry. When finally she came to Versailles as Louis’ ma"tresse en titre, this caused some controversy. Lebel tried to warn him about her past, but Louis was so in love that no one could dissuade him.

  In part, his ardor can be explained by what he said to the duc de Richelieu. “She is the only woman who can satisfy me,” he told him. Yet this does not solve the mystery so much as locate it. What it was he needed and what it was she gave him are two questions still unanswered. We know that Jeanne was skillful in bed. But skill, especially for a king, used to the best of everything, is never satisfying by itself. Can anything be worse than clinical manipulation where desire is concerned? It was not only her body that he wanted. Apparently long after she had moved into the palace, he had an almost insatiable wish for her company. True, the king must have been lonely. The queen, who had not satisfied him sexually in years but whom he loved, had recently died. Pompadour, his great friend for years, even after they were no longer lovers, was gone, too. Still there were countless women, noble and otherwise, who would have been happy to accompany him anywhere.

  Since love is, of course, mysterious, it would be hubris to pretend to understand the chemistry between these two. If we are tempted to conjecture, it is only because the moment when Louis turned his head has been so well described, a moment that, if it was not love at first sight, certainly contained a powerful premonition of love. Were we to paint the famous scene, the focal point of the canvas would have to be Jeanne’s smile. Louis was amazed that she had smiled at him at all. An expression that, under the circumstances, was somewhat brazen.

  But where swaying the powerful is concerned, of the two virtues that are most efficacious, cheek and charm, the latter is by far the more important. And Jeanne’s smile, as it so happens, was known to be exceedingly charming. In an instant, she managed to convey the impression when she smiled that she was innocent, almost virginal. Yet it was by no means innocence alone that drew the king. At the same time that she seemed fresh, untouched, pure, she made no attempt at all to conceal what in fact she knew. Sexual knowledge is evident not only in bed but in the way a woman carries herself anywhere, the expression in her eyes, her gestures. Jeanne’s considerable background in matters of the flesh would have been evident in her least movement, including the subtle shift that occurs as a smile passes over a face.

  If this mixture of innocence and experience seems an unlikely achievement to us today, in the eighteenth century it must have seemed miraculous. Yet, looking back at her childhood, the provenance of the mix becomes easier to explain. We have only to begin with the simple fact that her father was a monk. And when we add to this that at the age of four she moved with her mother into the home of her mother’s lover, which was shared with his principal lover, a courtesan, the answer becomes almost obvious. Especially when we consider that it was a courtesan, Francesca, who arranged for Jeanne to be sent to a convent school. And that soon after leaving the protection of the nuns, her mother arranged for her to live with a man who planned to sell her sexual favors to the most distinguished members of society.

  Not only did Jeanne know the backside of polite society, she was raised to be so familiar with it that nothing of this order shocked her, including her own past. She was, in short, unashamed. Neither her parentage, her upbringing, nor anything she had done to survive in the past embarrassed her. She accepted all that had occurred in her life as if it were ordinary.
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  That at the convent she attended, she must have heard more than one lecture condemning the way that both her mother and Francesca lived, hardly undermined her convictions but instead must have given her sensibility another level of complexity that would help her in the future. Rather than weep or wonder over the contradictions in her life, Jeanne accepted contradiction as part of the natural order. What was said in church did not necessarily have to apply to what was done outside church. After all, by the time she was a young woman, her father had become a priest ministering to upper-class ladies at Saint-Eustache in Paris.

  The ability to ignore conflict must have accounted for her great adaptability. She learned the manners and language of Versailles more easily than had Pompadour. Louis arranged for her to be married to Jean du Barry’s brother. Though this may seem odd to us now, the marriage made her seem more respectable, and especially since she was a countess now, eased the way for her move to court. Louis designed a coat of arms for her. And soon she was living above him in the bedrooms once occupied by the late Dauphine.

  As they had with Pompadour, many of the king’s ministers and courtiers waited for du Barry to make some fatal mistake, but the king only fell more and more deeply in love with her. And in the light of our conjecture, perhaps, finally one can see why. If, for instance, as Louis had implied once to Richelieu, he was suffering in his older age from some sexual dysfunction, Jeanne would have given him just what he needed, not only her skills, but her cheerful, unclouded attitude. The stunning absence of shame she displayed must have relieved the burden of his own guilt, inculcated by years of religious training together with the judgments from many at court, and from the public, too, over his infidelities, a guilt which must have had an inhibiting effect.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, Louis’ evident pleasure with his mistress, the judgments continued. The citizenry of Paris, angry about how much money Louis spent on her, circulated verses about the countess describing her as a slovenly whore. It was thus more to defend herself than for any other reason that Jeanne became involved in intrigue. Despite the fact that many opposed her, she was also well liked. It was her smile again, which she distributed without prejudice to the highest and lowest born alike. She was known to be kind. The journalist Brissot told the story of her that the day he first visited Voltaire, he encountered her descending the stairs of the great man’s house, and because she smiled at him, he took the risk of asking her if Voltaire was receiving visitors. “Very few,” she replied; but immediately she escorted him up the stairs and gave him the introduction he needed.

  Beginning as the lover of the most powerful man in France, she became a very powerful woman. She was known to have dictated the letter Louis signed asking his brother, the king of Spain, not to risk war with England over the Falkland Islands. She succeeded in bringing down her enemy, Choiseul. Louis dismissed him and he was exiled to the provinces. At her urgings, her good friend the duc d’Aiguillon was appointed minister of foreign affairs. Moreover, once he was in place, she used her influence with him regarding the appointment of ambassadors. At her urging, the baron de Breteuil, whom she felt had snubbed her, was dismissed from his post in Vienna, only to be replaced with the largely incompetent Louis de Rohan, who was among her admirers. At the height of her tenure, her salon would often be crowded with petitioners, including many among the fermiers généraux, asking for her help or wanting to tell her their opinions on various affairs of state.

  Many men would have been threatened by such potency in a lover. But far from objecting, Louis seems to have been eager to spend even more time with her during this period. A woman who, from her youngest days, was aware of the formidable effect that her beauty and her charms had on others, would well have been able to understand and empathize with the burdens of a king, himself surrounded so much of the time by sycophantic admirers. That the lovers had this experience in common would have made for a strong attraction. The courtesan’s charm has often been described as a dangerous form of power. Yet rarely, if ever, has it been admitted how forcefully powerful men are drawn to powerful women.

  A Fatal Attraction

  I am no more than the shadow of a king.—King Ludwig of Bavaria

  Passion is often a weathervane for change in the political atmosphere. As the idea of monarchy came under assault in Europe, the romantic liaisons between kings and their lovers became more tumultuous. A hundred years after Louis XV succumbed to the charms of Jeanne du Barry, King Ludwig I of Bavaria fell deeply in love with a courtesan. Lola Montez had such a disquieting effect on Bavaria and its king that before the affair had ended, she would be forcibly ejected from the country and Ludwig would give up his crown.

  Where Madame du Barry was adaptable, Lola Montez was imaginative. Though she claimed to be the daughter of Don Carlos, a Spanish aristocrat killed in a noble cause, this story was only part of an elaborate fable she created about herself. She was, in fact, born in Ireland under the name of Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert. Her mother Eliza, the natural child of a landed gentleman and his mistress in County Cork, was a seamstress when she met Lola’s father, Edward Gilbert, an ensign with the British army.

  As with most fiction, however, there was a seed of truth to Lola’s story. When she was just two years old, her father successfully petitioned for a post to Bengal in India and thus for three years she lived in a lushly tropical setting. And as in her story, she had witnessed her father’s death. Only a few weeks after the family arrived, Gilbert succumbed to cholera.

  The mother and daughter stayed on in India, and within a year Eliza Gilbert had married again, this time to an officer named Craigie. Lola’s new stepfather, it turned out, would be far more attentive to her than her mother was. But still she felt neglected. While Craigie was out on his command, she was largely left to the care of an ayah who pampered her, bathing her twice a day in the Houghly River, letting her run barefoot in the village. Late in her life, when in her memoir she reclaimed this past, she recalled being fascinated by the parade of exotic birds and monkeys, and by the dancers and holy men who were part of the outdoor village life. Was it memories of Southern climates that eventually pulled her to study flamenco dance in Spain?

  What is taken away from us suddenly or by force will have a strong appeal for years afterward, stronger than if we had relinquished whatever we loved more naturally, over the course of time. When the child was five, Craigie, who was concerned that Lola was too wild, arranged for her to be sent to England, where she could receive a proper education. The decision was reached and acted upon quickly. She was handed over to friends of Craigie’s, Lieutenant Colonel Innes and his family, who were returning to England themselves. The shock must have been great. Her mother and father, the ayah who raised her, the scents of the flowers, the feel of the river, the luxury of bare feet, of moving blithely through warm air, were all suddenly gone. And the manner in which she was raised also changed. The Innes family, who were strangers to her, were kind but far more strict in their habits. As it grew colder and colder and the ship moved further and further away from all she had known, the mood of the child grew more stormy. For the rest of her life she would be famous for a raging anger that could be triggered by even the smallest incident.

  She was not to see her mother again until she was fifteen years old. Her life could not have seemed secure to her. Along with her tumultuous emotions, there were several more moves. For four years, Elizabeth lived with Craigie’s mother and father in a small Scottish town, whose inhabitants regarded the manners she had learned in India as exotic. Still another series of moves came when she was ten, at which time she traveled with Craigie’s sister and brother-in-law to England, where she stayed with them for a year before being settled for a few months with Craigie’s commanding officer, Major General Sir Jasper Nicolls, who, before returning to England, had agreed to find a proper school for her. Elizabeth’s temperament could only have been exacerbated by the fact that Sir Jasper did not like his headstrong charge. She was described, even a
t this age, as having an “iron will.” Finally at eleven, she was sent to a boarding school run by the Misses Aldridge in Bath.

  It was an excellent school. She had been well provided for, except that she must have still felt abandoned. Sir Jasper, who liked her mother even less than he liked her, complained that when he needed answers to his questions about the daughter’s education, Mrs. Craigie failed to answer the letters he sent either often or punctually enough. The failure must have made Elizabeth wonder if her mother cared about her. But this did not stop her from longing to see her family again. At last, when she turned fifteen, the date at which it was generally agreed a young woman should be prepared for marriage, knowing that only she could handle this, Mrs. Craigie arrived in England.

  But the long-awaited reunion between mother and daughter did not go very well. After such a long absence, Elizabeth scarcely knew her mother any longer. According to her later memories, when at their first meeting she enthusiastically threw her arms around her mother, Mrs. Craigie withdrew, commenting, “My child, how badly your hair is dressed!” The scene corresponds to the description Montez would write later of her mother as a vain, self-centered woman, who liked parties and balls above all else and was more focused on her own appearance than on her daughter.

  According to Lola again, the Craigies had already settled on a husband for her. Was he an older man in his sixties, as she said? As with many courtesans, the truth of Lola’s telling cannot be trusted; indeed, the propensity to stretch the truth for the sake of a good story was not a small part of the courtesan’s charm. Yet given the humor of the times, during which marriages of convenience were commonly made, this story is not unlikely. In any case, it does not take any great act of imagination for us to understand that after so many years of being moved without her consent from one place and one family to another, to be carried off forcibly to spend the rest of her life with a man she did not know would have disturbed her.