On February 29, 1764, while the marquise was at Choisy with Louis, she was felled by an excruciating headache. Louis wrote to his son-in-law, “I am as much worried as ever; I must tell you that I am not very hopeful of a real cure, and even feel that the end may be near. A debt of nearly twenty years, and an unshakable friendship!” Seven days later she rallied, but then she developed a putrid fever and pneumonia. The king rarely quit her bedside. “At Court, Mme. de Pompadour’s illness stopped everything,” observed the duc de Croÿ.
She was at death’s door on March 10. The very fact that she remained at Versailles in such a condition was a huge violation of etiquette, as only monarchs and members of the immediate royal family could die in a royal palace. Yet the marquise held on to life for several more weeks. On Wednesday, April 11, she asked to receive last rites. Louis delayed as long as possible, aware that she was dying; he knew that once she was shriven, they would never be allowed to see each other again. On Friday the thirteenth the marquise couldn’t breathe. Yet in her final hours, the pious, self-righteous dauphin who had never liked her found a kind word to spare for the woman he had called Maman Putain. “She is dying with a courage rare in either sex,” he told the bishop of Verdun. “Every time she breathes, she believes it to be for the last time. It is one of the most painful ways to die and one of the cruelest one can imagine….”
Madame de Pompadour received extreme unction in the middle of the night on April 14. On Palm Sunday, April 15, after adding a codicil to her 1757 will and refusing any assistance from her ladies-in-waiting, insisting that she didn’t have long to live, she noticed the curé of the Madeleine, who until then had not quit her bedside, about to quietly depart.
“Un moment, monsieur le curé; we will go together,” she murmured. And scarcely a few breaths later, at seven p.m., Madame de Pompadour expired, age forty-two and four months.
Her servants discreetly covered her body with a sheet and quickly conveyed it to the Hôtel des Réservoirs, as it was already a gross violation of court etiquette for her corpse to remain within Versailles. Although he received the story secondhand, Jean-Nicolas Dufort, the comte de Cheverny, one of the king’s minor household officials, described the scene: “The duchesse de Praslin told me: ‘I saw two men pass by carrying a stretcher. When they came closer (they passed right under my window) I saw that it was the body of a woman covered only with so thin a sheet that the shapes of the head, the breasts, the belly and the legs were clearly visible. I sent to ask: it was the body of that poor woman who, according to the strict rule that no dead person can remain in the Palace, was being carried to her house.”
Most poignant of all was that the man who was first her lover and then her closest friend and confidant for two decades was not permitted to attend her funeral or openly mourn her, because their liaison had been illicit and adulterous. According to Dufort, who witnessed the king observing the departure of the marquise’s funeral cortege on April 17, “It was six o’clock at night…and a dreadful storm was raging. The king took [his valet] Champlost by the arm; when he arrived at the mirrored door of the cabinet intime which gives out onto the balcony facing the avenue, he told him to close the entrance door and went with him out onto the balcony. He kept absolutely silent, saw the carriage drive into the avenue and, in spite of the bad weather and the rain, which he appeared not to feel, he kept looking at it until it went out of sight. He then came back into the room. Two large tears were still running down his cheeks, and he said to Champlost only these few words: ‘These are the only respects I can pay her.’”
Madame de Pompadour’s hearse was drawn by twelve horses caparisoned in black-and-silver silk. Following them on foot were a hundred priests, two dozen children, forty-two liveried servants, and seventy-two beggars (the last group wearing respectable garments, which they were expected to return after the funeral). But the wind whipped their hats from their heads, blowing them irretrievably into the ditches along the sides of the road. “The Marquise has bad weather for her journey,” her royal lover was said to have murmured sadly.
It was the dead of night before the cortege reached the Convent of the Capucines, where Madame de Pompadour was laid beside the body of her daughter.
At Versailles, the woman who had for nearly twenty years influenced France’s art, culture, and politics, as well as its most powerful and illustrious resident, was either genuinely mourned or not given a second thought, depending on whom one asked. “No one talks anymore of the person who has just died, as though she had never existed,” wrote the queen to a friend only five days after Pompadour’s death.
The words of the duc de Croÿ, always a Pompadour devotee, contradict those of Her Majesty. “In general she was missed, being a good person and doing only good to most who came to her…and she had never done any harm, except when forced, but so many misfortunes had befallen France during her life, and so many extravagances!”
The nasty epigrams that made the rounds of the Paris coffeehouses were predictably cruel.
Here lies one who was twenty years a virgin,
Eight years a whore and ten years a pimp.
And then it was the philosophers’ turn to weigh in. Denis Diderot asked, “[W]hat remains of that woman who exhausted us of men and money, left us without honor and without energy and who has overturned the political system of Europe? The Treaty of Versailles, which will last while it is possible. The Cupid of Bouchardon which one will admire forever, some stones engraved by Guay which will astonish the antique dealers to come, a good little painting by Van Loo which one will regard from time to time, and a handful of ashes.”
It’s a portrait of a remarkably influential woman for any era, however unflattering Diderot intended it to be, and an unvarnished view of one of the most powerful royal mistresses who ever lived. Madame de Pompadour’s extravagances were said to have cost Louis XV 36 million livres (in comparison, the Seven Years’ War cost the crown 1,350 million livres), but each of the marquise’s houses was constructed on royal property, and all of them reverted to the crown upon her death. Tragically, most of these châteaux and the priceless treasures they contained were destroyed during the Revolution.
Madame de Pompadour carefully cultivated the image of a woman of refinement and discernment, a tastemaker whose personal sensibilities influenced art, culture, architecture, and interior design for two decades. This most influential of royal mistresses paired with the most libidinous of lovers was physically and emotionally cool and did not enjoy sex. Yet remarkably, she held him for twenty years, in some measure because she remained trustworthy and discreet. Despite some close calls in his bed, no one else supplanted Madame de Pompadour in Louis’ affections.
From his self-imposed exile in Switzerland, Voltaire eulogized, “It is indeed ridiculous that an old scribbler is still alive, and that a beautiful woman should die at forty while in the midst of the most dazzling career in the world…. I believe…that the king is experiencing a great loss; he was loved for himself by a soul born sincere who had justesse dans son esprit et de la justice dans son coeur [sound judgment and sure instinct]. One does not meet with this every day….”
LOUIS XV AND
JEANNE BÉCU, COMTESSE DU BARRY (1743–1793)
Madame de Pompadour died on April 15, 1764, and although she went to her grave as Louis’ maîtresse en titre, she had not warmed his bed for a decade. He was a man of large appetites, and he was lonely. Not only was he unsatisfied sexually, but after her death he missed the Pompadour’s vivacious companionship. Escorted to him by his faithful valet and sometime-pimp Lebel, the beauties from the Parc-aux-Cerfs scratched the temporary itch, but the king was craving a more permanent relationship, and none of the girls had the talents to keep him amused. It takes a certain amount of cultivation and skill to be more than just a professional courtesan and to become a beloved mistress. A woman must understand how to stimulate far more than a man’s nether regions, particularly when her client is a king.
Jeanne Bécu had lit
erally been groomed for the position. But she was not schooled by her mother, Anne Bécu, a lowly seamstress. Nor did she receive her tutelage from her purported father, a monk, Jean-Baptiste Gomard, who went by the ironic name of Frère Ange (Brother Angel). Jeanne’s Pygmalion was a scoundrel and renowned pimp named Jean-Baptiste du Barry. He was a man well-known not only to the Paris police but among society as “the Roué.” Du Barry transformed the seamstress’s illegitimate daughter into, as he termed it, “un vrai morceau du roi”—a morsel fit for the king. But the phrase had a frank sexual connotation as well, morceau also being a synonym for “piece,” as in piece of ass.
Jeanne had enjoyed quite a checkered career before she crossed paths with the Roué. Her mother, who was also somewhat free with her favors, managed to liberate herself from the garrison town of Vaucouleurs in Lorraine by seducing Monsieur Dumonceaux, the visiting postmaster of Paris. She became pregnant and followed him back to the capital, with Jeanne in tow. At first they stayed with Anne’s sister Hélène, who was the housekeeper to the king’s librarian. Then Anne and Jeanne moved in with Anne’s lover, and—to her shock—his mistress Francesca, a notorious Italian demimondaine who went by the name of Madame Frédérique.
Anne was taken on as a cook, and Madame Frédérique, who loved children, indulged the five-year-old Jeanne, giving the child the run of her lavishly appointed apartments. The provincial child with the wide blue eyes and masses of blond hair had never seeen such luxuries—perfume bottles, gilded beds and hand mirrors, abundant jewels, and sumptuous gowns in the latest fashions. Madame Frédérique played dress-up with Jeanne as if she were a little doll. She taught the child how to dance, while Monsieur Dumonceaux, an amateur artist, painted her as a nymph.
Anne got out of Dumonceaux’s kitchen by wedding a pockmarked valet named Nicolas Rançon. Dumonceaux supplemented Rançon’s income by giving him a plum assignment to the army detachment in Corsica.
Little Jeanne was placed in the convent of St. Aure in the heart of Paris. St. Aure was a school for “at risk” girls of modest means where they could learn a trade—a good way to avoid the paths of temptation. Jeanne spent nine years there, leaving at the age of fifteen with a fairly comprehensive education.
To keep her out of trouble, her aunt Hélène arranged for Jeanne to apprentice to a hairdresser. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but her employer, Monsieur Lametz, was so smitten with her that in short order they became lovers. When his mother showed up, she accused Anne Bécu of prostituting her underage daughter. Anne sued Madame Lametz for defamation of character, and Jeanne’s first love affair ended in tears. It also resulted in the birth of a daughter, Marie Josephine, nicknamed Betsi, who was raised in a convent, passed off as the daughter of Jeanne’s stepfather, Nicolas Rançon. Many years later, when lowly Jeanne Bécu was warming the bed of the king, Betsi would be married off to a marquis.
In 1761, her brief career in coiffures at an abrupt end, eighteen-year-old Jeanne spent several months as a lady’s maid for Madame de la Garde, the wealthy widow of a provincial finance minister. But when madame found out that her voluptuous domestic was sleeping with both of her married sons (and had clumsily fended off the advances of one of their wives), Jeanne was promptly sacked.
She had much better luck at her next job. In the spring of 1762, she became a grisette, or shopgirl, at Paris’s most exclusive fashion house, À la Toilette, owned by Monsieur Labille. There she regularly crossed paths with Labille’s posh clientele, which included both aristocrats and demimondaines, and was surrounded day in and day out by the finest textiles, ribbons, and laces.
The Prince de Ligne, a bon vivant of the era, described “the charms of the little grisette who worked at Labille’s, a girl who was tall, well made and ravishingly blonde with a wide forehead, lovely eyes with dark lashes, a small oval face with a delicate complexion marked by two little beauty spots, which only made her the more piquante, a mouth to which laughter came easily and a bosom so perfect as to defy comparison.”
Working among luxury goods every day, Jeanne coveted such items for herself and had no qualms about doing what it took to secure them. Soon she was retailing more than ribbons and bonnets. She developed a discerning eye and knew what type of man would pay the most for her favors. Working her way up the social food chain, she rented herself to merchants, bankers, and financiers, and soon became well-known to the local police (although as Mademoiselle de Vaubernier). Police records of 1782 describe Jeanne as “a pretty little grisette ready to accept whatever came her way—in short, a kept woman living with various men to whom she was not married, but in no sense a prostitute or a raccrocheuse guilty of soliciting in the streets.”
That report would put the lie to the rumors that dogged Madame du Barry during her royal romance, namely that she had been a whore in the house of the notorious procuress Madame Gourdan. But Jeanne was indeed in the game for the material gain. Her heart had been broken by the coiffeur Monsieur Lametz. Now she just wanted to amass as many worldly goods as she could by casting the right sort of glances with her notorious yeux fripons—her mischievous, or roguish, eyes.
In 1763, at the unveiling of an equestrian statue to celebrate the inauguration of a public square named in the king’s honor, Jeanne’s vivacity attracted the attention of another spectator, one who always had an eye out for a fresh and pretty face and a pulchritudinous form. Jean-Baptiste du Barry (who styled himself as a comte, though he certainly did not behave like a member of the aristocracy) had noticed Jeanne at Labille’s shop, and recognized in her the answer to his greatest ambition. He had started out with more quotidian aspirations, but when his plan of becoming a foreign diplomat didn’t pan out, he turned to his fallback talents of debauchery and cardsharping. In time he developed a niche for himself, specializing in finding the perfect girl for his friends at court. His ultimate goal was to place one of his protégées in the king’s bed, but for obvious reasons, Madame de Pompadour had been hell-bent on thwarting it.
In the weeks following the unveiling of Louis’ statue, Jean du Barry, having decided that Jeanne Bécu was the girl he’d been waiting for all his life, arranged with her mother and stepfather for her to move in with him. It was understood that she would be his mistress, and Jeanne does not seem to have put up much of a fuss. On Jean du Barry’s arm, she would always be impeccably gowned, coiffed, and jeweled, and would gain entrée into the world of sophisticated demimondaines and their aristocratic lovers—the sort of education she never could have gotten at St. Aure. She already possessed all the requisite natural talents of a courtesan: She knew how to amuse, flatter, and cajole; she could bestow her body while withholding her heart. With Jean du Barry, she had plenty of opportunities to observe how the nobility carried themselves: how they dressed, moved, and spoke—and not only how they spoke, but what they spoke of. In eighteenth-century Parisian salons, conversation was both an art and a skill.
Jean-Baptiste du Barry’s activities were well-known to the Parisian police force. “When he begins to weary of a woman he invariably sells her off. But it must be admitted that he is a connoisseur and his merchandise is eminently salable,” read one report.
Sure enough, the comte du Barry also retailed Jeanne to other men, and she did not protest. On the contrary, every experience was a teachable moment, and every client was another contact, another potential friend. One of them, the sixty-seven-year-old duc de Richelieu, a crony of the king’s, would become a lifelong champion. At the age of twenty Jeanne became the duc’s lover as part of a business transaction. She was his fee (plus fifty gold louis) for securing a position at court for du Barry’s fourteen-year-old son, Adolphe.
From 1765 to 1766, Jeanne rented her own house in the rue de la Jussienne, setting up shop as a courtesan in order to afford her lavish lifestyle. Alternately calling herself Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, Mademoiselle Beauvarnier, and Mademoiselle l’Ange (an ironic nod, perhaps, to her alleged father, the so-called Frère Ange), she entertained poets and courtiers,
ministers and other influential men of the day so that she could learn how to converse with them. Jean du Barry had found a diamond in the rough. He realized he might have only one shot to dangle her tantalizingly before the king; he couldn’t risk blowing it. It was four years from the time they had serendipitously met on the Place Louis XV until du Barry deemed Jeanne ready to present to the king.
She was first dispatched to Versailles on an errand that would appear innocuous enough: pleading a matter before the powerful duc de Choiseul, who held several ministerial offices simultaneously. In the spring of 1768, Mademoiselle de Vaubernier, dressed like a country lass in a beribboned straw hat and a simple muslin gown that revealed her famous décolletage, entered the duc’s office with a sob story. Choiseul was unimpressed by her looks and her tale of woe (that she’d given all of her money to an army contractor in charge of supplies for Corsica and now needed help collecting it). He fobbed her off on an underling, but Jeanne remained undeterred and requested a second meeting a few days later. The subsequent meeting didn’t go well either. Jeanne made the mistake of mentioning du Barry’s name, and Choiseul quickly curtailed the interview, suspecting that her real motives in coming to see him were to ask him for money or to seduce him.
It was a matter of being in exactly the right place at the right time for the wrong reasons. Or not. After all, du Barry’s intention had always been for Jeanne to catch the king—and hold him. As she was headed out of the palace she locked eyes with His Majesty as he strode through the Hall of Mirrors on his way to Mass. She gave Louis one of her dazzling smiles and he was smitten for life.
Soon he was making inquiries about the luscious blonde. He had to meet her, to possess her. To the Roué, Jean du Barry, it must have felt like shooting fish in a barrel.
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