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BELASCO THEATRE
BROADWAY AND FORTY-SEC OND STREET 1
UNDER THE SOLE MANAGEMENT or DAVID BELASCO
Evenings at 8 precisely Matinees Saturdays at 2
DAVID BELASCO
PRESENTS
Leslie Carter
IX HIS NEW PLAT
DU BARRY"
"Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call
up single, sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or strug-
gle, reach us more nearly." OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
CAST
Louis XV., King of France . . , . . C.A.STEVENSON
COMTE JEAN DU BARRY, eventually brother-in-law of
" La du Barry " CAMPBELL GOLLAN
COMTE GUILLAUME, his brother .... BERESFORD WEBB
Dec DE BRISSAC, Capt. of King's Guard, HENRY WEAVER, SR.
CossE-BnissAC, his son (of the King's Guard), known
as " Cosse " HAMILTON REVEILE
THE PAPAL NUNCIO H. R. ROBERTS
Due DE RICHELIEU, Marshal ^ (
of France I Under I GEO. BAR.NUM
MAUPEOU, Lord Chancellor j Louis XV. | C. P. FLOCKTON
TERRAY, Minister of Finance } \ H. G. CARLTON
Due D'AiouiLLON LEONARD COOPER
DENYS, porter at the milliner shop . CLAUDE GILLINGWATER
LEBEL, confidential valet to His Majesty, HERBERT MILLWARD
M. LABILLE, proprietor of the milliner shop, GILMOHE SCOTT
VAUBERNIER, father of Jeanette . . CHARLES CAMPBELL
SCARLO, one of " La du Barry's" Nubian servants, J. D. JONES
ZAMORE, a plaything of " La du Barry's " . MASTER SAMS
FLUTE PLAYER . A. JOLY
1
DU BARRY" CAST CONTINUED
VALROY ....
D'ALTAIRE . .
DE COURCEL . .
LA GARDE .
FONTENELLE
BEXARD, one of the
DOUGLAS J. WOOD
. . Louis MYLL
. HAROLD HOWARD
. . W. T. BUNE
THOMAS BOOXE
. WARREN DEVEN
1 Of the (
/King's Guards
Two Tavern
Roysterers
Hundred Swiss "
CITIZEN GRIEVE, of the Committee of Public
Safety GASTON MERVALE
MARAC, one of the Sans-Culottes . . . JAMES SARGEANT
DENISOT, Judge of the Revolutionary Court, H. G. CARLTON
TA VERNIER, clerk of the court JOHN INGRAM
GOMAHD CHARLES HAYNE
HORTENSE, Manageress for Labille the
LOLOTTE ....
[ NINA LYN
MANON
/""ii-lc.
FLORENCE ST LEONARD
JULIE
at the
CORAH ADAMS
LEONIE
Milliner's"
. BLANCHE SHERWOOD
NlCHETTE ....
JULIETTE
Shop
. . . . ANN ARCHER
. MAY LYN
MARQUISE DU QUESNOY, known as "La Gourdan,"
keeper of a gambling house BLANCHE RICE
SOPHIE ARNAULD, queen of the opera . . Miss ROBERTSON
THE GYPSY HAG, a fortune-teller ... C. P. FLOCKTON
MLLE. LE GRAND ) Dancers from the ( RUTH DENNIS
MLLE. GUIMAHD . \ Grand Opera ( . ELEANOR STL-ART
MME. LA DAUPHINE, Marie Antoinette at
sixteen HELEN HALE
MARQUISE DE CRENAY
DUCHESSE D'AlGUILLON
PRINCESSE ALIXE . .
DUCHESSE DE CHOISY
MARQUISE DE LANGERS
CoMTESSE DE MARSEN
Ladies
of
Louis'
Court
. HELEN ROBERTSON
, . . . Miss LYN
. Miss LEONARD
, . LOUISE MOREWIN
. . MAY MONTFORD
GRACE VAN BENTHUYSEN
SOPHIE, a maid IRMA PERRY
ROSALIE, of the Conciergerie . . . : . HELEN ROBERTSON
CERISETTE JULIE LINDSEY
AND
JEANETTE VAUBERNIER, afterwards
"La du Barry" . . . . MRS. LESLIE CARTER
2
"DU BARRY" CAST CONTINUED
Guests of the Fete, Dancers from the Opera, King's
Guardsmen, Monks, Clowns, Pages, Milliners, Sentries,
Lackeys, Footmen, King's Secret Police, Sans-Culottes, a
Mock King, a Mock Herald, a Drunken Patriot, a Cocoa
Vender, Federals, National Guards, Tricoteuses.
SYNOPSIS OF SCENES.
Act I. The Milliner's Shop in the Rue St. Honore, Paris.
JEANETTE TRIMS HATS.
Act II. (One month later.) Jeanette's Apartments, adjoin-
ing the Gambling Rooms of the Marquise de
Quesnoy (" La Gourdan ").
"THE GAME CALLED DESTINY."
Act III. (A year later.) Du Barry holds a Petit-Lever in
the Palace of Versailles at noon.
"THE DOLL OF THE WORLD."
Act IV. Scene 1. In the Royal Gardens. Before the
dawn of the following morning.
"FOLLY, QUEEN OF FRANCE."
Scene 2. Within the Tent.
"THE HEART OF THE WOMAN."
Act V. (A lapse of years.) During the Revolution.
Scene 1. The Retreat in the Woods of Louve-
ciennes.
"FATE CREEPS IN AT THE DOOR."
Scene 2. (Five days later.) In Paris again.
"A REED SHAKEN IN THE WIND."
Scene 3. In Front of the Milliner's Shop on the
same day.
" Once more we pass this way again,
Once morel T is where at first we met."
Time : Period of Louis XV and after the reign of his
Successor.
Place : Paris, Versailles, and Louveciennes.
. Mr. Belasco wishes to state that, as the traditional parting
of Madame du Barry and the King of France is impossible
for dramatic use, he has departed entirely from historical
accuracy in this instance. He also begs to acknowledge his
indebtedness to M. Arsene Houssaye for his sequence of
scenes. (" Nouvelle a la main, sur la Comtesse du Barry.")
3
"D U BARRY" CAST CONTINUED
Between Acts I, II, and III there will be intervals of 12
minutes ; between Acts IV and V an interval of 15 minutes.
The entire production under the personal supervision of
Mr. Belasco.
Stage Manager H. S. MLLLWARD
Scenery by Mr. Ernest Gros.
Incidental Music by Mr. William Furst.
Stage decorations and accessories after designs by Mr.
Wilfred Buckland.
General Manager for Mr. Belasco . . MR. B. F. ROEDER
BEFORE THE CURTAIN
~DRIEF words, when actions wait, are well;
The prompters hand is on his bell ;
The coming heroes, lovers, kings,
Are idly lounging at the wings ;
Behind the curtains mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.
One moment more : if here we raise
The oft-sung hymn of local praise,
Before the curtain facts must sway ;
Here wails the moral of your play.
Glassed in the poet's thought, you view
What money can, yet can not do ;
The faith that soars, the deeds that shine,
Above the gold that builds the shrine.
BRET HARTE
Copyright by
HOUGHTON, MlFPLIN & Co.
TO-NIGHT
H E author of to-night's
play finds himself in the
position of one who has
journeyed far and along a
difficult way, but is home
at last.
To his home and Mrs.
Carter's he welcomes you,
wishing it to prove, so far as comfort and appoint-
ment can make it, an annex of your own.
A dedication is an outline of purpose, just as a
christening is an act of faith. A word, therefore,
as to the plans of this house. The Belasco Theatre
will be devoted to such plays as prove suitable to
the art and temperament of Mrs. Leslie Carter,
who, by her tireless devotion to her' work, her
capacity for reaching the heart, and her flashes of
insight into human nature as it is, has achieved
a unique place upon the English-speaking stage
of to-day. Here she will appear during a part
of every season. Her plays will not be confined
to those of any one author. It is the present
10 TO-NIGHT
purpose to have Mrs. Carter seen in Shakesperean
and classic roles, of which she has been making a
close study.
Mrs. Carter will share this season with her
sister artist, Miss Blanche Bates, who will follow
the " Du Barry " in a new play now in course of
preparation. Miss Bates has proved herself
worthy of a stronger drama than any in which
she has yet appeared, and her forthcoming role is
one which will offer her the opportunity of her
career.
Later, Mr. David Warfield, who has been called
the " comedian of pathos," will appear from time
to time.
Next season Mrs. Carter will open here in her
new and unnamed play, which will appeal partic-
ularly to her genius for sustained tragedy of
intense, quiet suspense and depth of feeling.
Eventually it is probable that a stock company
may gather in under the roof-tree.
A word as to the decorations in the interior of
the theatre. On your chair you will see the
Napoleonic bee ; this Mr. Belasco has chosen for
the house emblem because it means " work, work,
work ! " The Napoleonic era has also been ad-
hered to in other decorations, chiefly because
this period was the luxurious cradle of romantic
literature.
The genius of drama was born among the
ancient Greeks, and the best there is in our
theatres can trace its source to them. They
were the first to find outward expression for in-
ward grace. To them beauty was a thing more
INTERIOR
Bigehw, (falli! and Cotton, jtrchittcti
TO-NIGHT 13
of spirit than human, and they created an art for
the world that was severely classic in its exquisite
balance of form and feeling. Not until Napoleon
stirred the bitterness of men's souls by the violence
of war, did the warmth of luxury such as Greek
philosophers had evaded in their expression of
feeling appear in art.
To-day the imperial wreath that crowns the
proscenium arch is a symbol of the drama. The
ornamental decorations of the Belasco Theatre
have been taken directly from those made for
Napoleon by the famous architects of the First
Empire, Charles Percier and P. F. L. Fontaine.
The Flying Pegasus and the Napoleonic eagles
were originally made by these same architects,
who built and decorated Napoleon's throne room.
The applique design in the box draperies is an
exact copy of that used in the palace of the King
of Spain.
The general coloring is autumnal, the rich reds
and sombre browns, with a lingering green among
them all, blending the seasons in a restful scheme
of color. There is a reception room on every
floor, including that of the second balcony. A
Marie Antoinette boudoir, to be reached from the
orchestra, is an exact duplicate of a room of that
period. A smoking-room has been added for the
comfort of guests. Behind the scenes the old-
fashioned " green room " has been revived. As
to further details of the realm behind the curtain,
with its many new devices, that must of necessity
remain the hidden world of illusionment, and
more the land of camaraderie in art. The
14 TO-NIGHT
mythical place where inspiration is born and
romance identified ; where all that the heart dares
feel the lips dare say, and what darings, w hat
sayings are possible in the sway of artistic
camaraderie !
No labor of art is too long or too great, no
creative faculty is spared imagination and tra-
dition are drained to the dregs, for they who
build under the laws of the artist-world measure
as high as the stars. There is no greed there,
only a life to live, a soul to explore, a clasp of
the hand now and then, a work to do by labor
of love, and the whole standard of success a
word of sincere approval.
To-night the foot-lights are not a dividing line,
but a uniting tie, for there will be present many
old friends, some personally unknown to Mr.
Belasco and Mrs. Carter, who have formed their
" public " in days past, and to whom author and
player have always labored to be faithful.
When the lights are dimmed and the theatre is
empty, there will remain two people who will
consecrate these walls with a deep reverence for
what they represent to them.
It will not be a gratitude for material prospects,
just a deep sigh of relief that one more mile-stone
has been passed since they began their work in art
together.
THE STORY OF DU BARRY
STORY of DL
MRS. LESLIE CARTER.
THE
STORY of DU BARRY
BY
JAMES L. FORD
With Six Full-Page Illustrations in Photogravure and
Fifty-Five Half- Tone Engravings
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1902,
BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
Published in September, 1902
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 1
II. A LOWLY BEGINNING 19
III. ENTERING UPON HER CAREER .... 40
IV. A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON OF VER-
SAILLES 72
V. PRESENTED AT COURT 94
VI. THE PETIT LEVEE Ill
VII. A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL . . . 138
VIII. THE WAGES OF SIN .157
IX. MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 182
X. IN RETIREMENT 217
XI. THE STORM BREAKS 240
XII. DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE ..... 258
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PHOTOGRAVURES
Mrs. Leslie Carter Frontispiece
The Beginning of a Great Love . Facing page 36
A New Fancy " " 92
The Favorite of Royalty .... " "144
" Swear on the Cross !".... " " 274
David Belasco " "280
HALF-TONE ENGRAVINGS
" Fascinating Idlers and Handsome Noble-
men" Page 7
Reproduction of the Original Sign of the
Milliner's Shop "11
With her Shopmates at Labille's .... "15
Milliner's Doll "21
Something New in Bonnets "23
Jeanette and Cosse-Brissac "31
Hurdy-gurdy Player "35
The Belle of Labille's Shop "41
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Copy of Affiche actually used in the Shop
of Labille Page 47
A Noble Scoundrel " 49
Grands Seignem*s " 57
The Corset of the Period " 6l
An Ominous Visit ' 65
The Soothsayer's Prophecy " 73
Orange Woman " 77
In Comedy Vein " 81
Her First Meeting with the King ... "89
Objects seen in the Milliner's Shop ... " 91
Wooed by a Royal Lover " 97
Sedan Chair " 105
Jean Du Barry and Jeanette "107
The Flute-player "115
Punch Bowl "119
A Courtesy to Royalty ........ "123
The Father of Cosse-Brissac "131
Slippers "133
The Petit Levee "139
Screen and Toilet Table "145
A Queen of the Left Hand "147
Ecclesiastical Homage "153
Jeanette and the Cardinal "159
Zamore " l6l
The Diversions of Royalty " 167
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
Louis XV Table Page 173
Alone with the King "175
A Loyal Officer "183
The Du Barry Coffee Cup "187
A Lover's Peril "191
With the Scent of the Violets .... "199
Veritable Night Table actually used by Du
Barry at Versailles "203
Fortiter in Modo "207
The Search for the King's Rival .... "213
Bodyguard of Louis XV "218
At the Height of her Power "219
A Kingly Revel "227
A Corner of Du Barry's Bedchamber in the
Palace at Versailles "233
The Clowns' Gambol "235
A Woman's Intercession " 243
Spinnet of the Period "247
With Breaking Heart . "251
A Jealous King "259
A Corner of the Property Room .... " 265
In the Garden of Louveciennes .... " 267
Condemned to Die . " 275
On the Way to Execution "283
THE STORY
OF DU BARRY
CHAPTER ONE
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE
NEVER go on the stage
as Du Barry without see-
ing that awful guillotine
knife shining before me
in every scene that I
play," said Mrs. Leslie
Carter one night just
after the curtain had fallen on the last
act of Belasco's drama ; and we who view
the play from before the footlights, seeing
every scene from the enlightened stand-
point of latter-day knowledge, are perhaps
inclined to wonder whether any vision of
2 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
the guillotine ever troubled the dreams of
Louis XV, Jeanette Du Barry and the rest
of the dissolute court that went dancing
and singing down the road that at last be-
came the " deluge " that Pompadour had
foreseen as the aftermath of it all.
It seems inevitable, as we look back at it
now, this period of blood and vengeance
that was the outcome of so many decades
of luxury in high places and bitter poverty
in the homes of the lowly ; yet we of the
present day can no more read the future
than could the nobles of a century and a
half ago who danced and drank and wore
fine clothes and cared little for the welfare
of France so long as they basked in the
favor of their king.
They had had many warnings before the
storm broke in its awful fury. In 1757,
Damiens, the shabby man with the pen-
knife who was tortured to death for his
futile attempt on the life of the king, had
written from his prison cell these ominous
words :
" Sire, I am sorry that I was so unfor-
tunate as to gain access to you ; but if you
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 3
do not take your people's part, before many
years you and the dauphin and many others
will perish."
Earlier than that the philosophers had
sounded the note of protest and warning,
generally by means of pamphlets and books
hurled into France from some rock of exile
to which they had been banished. Vol-
taire had foreseen what destiny had in
store for his mal-governed country as clearly
as had Madame de Pompadour, whose re-
mark " after us the deluge " became the
by-word of her royal lover's court.
Sardou has said that when History makes
a drama, the work is well done, and he
speaks with a modesty that well becomes
one of the first of modern French drama-
tists. He might have added that History
seldom does more than furnish the raw
dramatic material which the playwright
must knead into dramatic form, even as
the sculptor kneads the rough clay into
the statue which he imbues with his own
genius.
In the case of Madame Du Barry, the
last of that long line of " queens of the left
4 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
hand " whose influence was so potent in
French statecraft during the eighteenth
century, History has certainly set the stage
for her in gorgeous fashion, and made ready
for her first entrance by years of Bourbon
rule which brought about the social and
political conditions under which she played
her picturesque and interesting part.
The age in which she lived was worse
than the present one, in that a certain
number of men and women, forming the so-
called " privileged classes," had free license
to do a great many things that their coun-
terparts of to-day would like to do, were it
not for the force of public opinion. It was
an age of wanton luxury and indulgence
for the few, and one of great suffering
and misfortune for the many. Happily
enough for the purposes of the drama, the
world was beginning to tire of these con-
ditions, and was preparing for a great up-
heaval at about the time that Madame Du
Barry set her foot upon the threshold of
her destiny.
The fires of liberty were ready for kind-
ling across the ocean, where George Wash-
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 5
ington of Virginia had already won his
spurs in the French and Indian war ; and
statesmen like John Hancock and Samuel
Adams in Massachusetts were beginning
to realize that there could be no loyalty
and contentment in the colonies so long as
George III continued to regard his Ameri-
can subjects as people made only to be
taxed for his benefit. But this king who,
like his royal brother in France, believed
that he ruled by divine right, paid no more
heed to the remonstrances of those states-
men of the colonies whose words should
have had weight, than Braddock, the Gen-
eral Redvers-Buller of his day and genera-
tion, did to the warnings of his young staff
officer, Washington, who had had his ex-
perience in Indian fighting and was familiar
with the red men's tricks.
Braddock's conceit and ignorance led
him to underestimate the strength of his
enemy, while he placed an absurdly high
value on his own prowess and the advan-
tage to be derived from fighting the red
men " according to the rules of war," so
it happens that the story of his defeat and
6 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
death sounds very much like a chapter -
almost any chapter from the history of
the Boer war. His disposition seems to
have been not unlike that of King George,
who certainly did not lose his American
colonies because of his gracious and tactful
methods of dealing with them.
And while the people of these colonies
were preparing for the struggle from which
they were to emerge a powerful young
nation, one whose future possibilities even
the wisest among us cannot yet predict,
the French people, who had been ground
down by years of Bourbon misrule, were
being driven by the inexorable force of cir-
cumstances into a revolution of a totally
different kind, and one that was second
only to our own in its effect on the genera-
tions that were to come after it.
There is nothing in our civilization of to-
day which more closely resembles what is
poetically termed the " ancien regime " in
France, than the stockyards in Chicago,
with their owners as the Bourbon king, and
the sheep, cattle, and pigs as the people.
This, however, is not quite a fair compar-
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 9
ison, as the cattle are supplied with food,
drink, and shelter, and are killed instantly,
and not permitted to drag themselves off to
remote parts of the field and there die of
hunger, disease, or their wounds. They
are of no use, however, except to be killed,
and in this respect they bear a distinct
resemblance to the subjects of Louis,
known in the early years of his reign as
"the well-beloved," and of his predeces-
sor, "the grand monarch," by whom the
common herd were looked upon as good
for nothing except to pay taxes and stop
bullets.
Once in a while there are signs of revolt
and dissatisfaction in the Chicago stock-
yard, and in like manner, even before the
Du Barry's accession to power, there had
been signs of dissatisfaction among the
human cattle of her august lover. But
these little rebellions, put down and
often by hired mercenaries as quickly
as they were begun, were nothing more
than the mere angry tossing of a few pairs
of horns, or a squeal of defiance from some
far-seeing pig, drawing back from the
10 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
shambles in a vain effort to escape his
predestined fate.
For the human cattle who made up the
bulk of the population of France, far less
consideration was shown than for their
hoofed and horned counterparts in Chicago,
for it was the fortune of the first-named to
be ruled absolutely by a selfish, pleasure-
loving monarch who believed that he gov-
erned by divine right, and that those who
lived under his dominion could have no
higher duty to perform than that of servile
obedience to his will. He it was who could
consign men with whom, perhaps, he had
supped and walked and talked the day be-
fore, to a living death in the Bastille, merely
to satisfy his own anger or the jealous whim
of a mistress. He it was who stood watch-
ing the funeral procession of his dead love,
Madame de Pompadour, as it started from
the courtyard in Versailles for Paris, and
remarked, as he drummed with idle fingers
on the window-pane, " Madame la Marquise
will have a wet day for her ride." He it was
who, in the early years of his reign, gained
the surname of "well-beloved," and who,
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE
11
at the end, was hustled into the ground with
less ceremony and respect than would have
been shown to one of his own valets.
Yet such was the divinity that
did hedge this king, this splen-
did type of the Bourbon
who could neither learn,
nor forgive, nor for-
get, that the greatest
ladies in his court
vied with one an-
other for the
honor of filling
the position
left vacant
by the death
of Madame de
Pompadour.
But Louis
XV would have none of them. " I will
never choose another mistress from the
ranks of the nobility," he said. " It 's too
much trouble to get rid of them when they
pall upon me."
Lord Chesterfield once said of him : " By
an unusual combination, Louis XV was both
Reproduction of tJie original sign of the
milliner's slwp.
12 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
hated and despised," and to the day of his
death he never realized the awful and bloody
depth of the abyss that lay directly beneath
his feet and those of the wigged and per-
fumed courtiers who helped him in his life-
long race after pleasure, with ennui following
close upon his heels. To the very end he
lived only for himself, regarding the remon-
strances of his cabinet and the opposition of
his parliament as merely the outward and
visible signs of a revolutionary spirit which
must be crushed at all hazards. He went
to his death still firmly believing that he
had ruled by divine right, and little dream-
ing that the Almighty, on whom he had
sought to throw the responsibility for so
much evil, was even then forging a thunder-
bolt that was destined to involve Europe in
a storm of unexampled violence, one that
would in the end clear the political skies
and leave the atmosphere freer and purer
than ever before.
Within three months after the formal
presentation of Madame Du Barry at the
court of her king and lover, Napoleon
Bonaparte was born in the Island of Cor-
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 13
sica. He took the field at a surprisingly
early age, but that was because he was
sorely needed, and the world had waited for
him till its patience had long since been
exhausted.
Such, in brief, were the conditions under
which History prepared the French stage
for Jeanette Du Barry's life-drama ; but
although she furnished a gorgeous setting,
and associated her with various men and
women of great historic and dramatic
value, the work of building a play was left,
as it always is in such cases, to be done
by the dramatist.
For example, in Julius Cassar, the greatest
of all historical dramas, History has sup-
plied the raw material in the shape of the
life of Caesar, his murder, the events that
led up to it, and its immediate results.
From this splendid material Shakespeare
constructed a drama which has done more
than all else that has been written about
Julius Csesar to impress upon the world
the tragic story of his fall. In doing this,
he did not content himself with arranging a
number of scenes from the life of the great
14 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Roman emperor in order that his drama
might be historically accurate in trivial as
well as in important details. Had he done
this, no matter if he had clothed his work
in language as beautiful and convincing as
that which still lives in his deathless drama,
his work would not have survived a dozen
representations, in fact, it would not have
been a play at all.
But Shakespeare was a genius and not
a mere cataloguer of events, and when it
came to dealing with such a tremendous
theme as that of the Roman conspiracy
and the tragedy which it brought about,
he set his imagination to work, and the
touch of his genius transformed the dull
clay of history into a living, breathing story
that has touched the hearts of generations
of playgoers and will continue to charm
and interest and instruct so long as the
English language shall be spoken. He
invented the quarrel between Brutus and
Cassius. He invented the great speech of
Brutus to the Roman people. He invented
that masterpiece of subtle, convincing ora-
tory in which the brilliant Marc Antony
w
*
<:
-si
HISTORY SETS THE STAGE 17
stirs the very stones of Rome to rise and
mutiny. In short, the world is indebted to
the illuminating genius of the playwright,
and not to a mere recorder of history, for
nearly every one of the great scenes and
speeches which have kept alive in the
hearts of generation after generation of
humanity the impressive story of Caesar's
fall.
It is a far cry from Shakespeare to Ros-
tand, in time and in other respects as well,
but apart from the interest that attaches
itself to every chapter and paragraph of the
Napoleonic story, what dramatic value do
we find in the life of that " dove that found
birth within an eagle's nest," the Due de
Reichstadt ? None whatever, excepting
that which the dramatist has invented.
Even the character which Madame Bern-
hardt portrayed with so much art is one in
which Metternich, could he return to earth,
would probably fail to recognize the unfor-
tunate young prince whose unhappy destiny
he helped to shape. But Rostand is per-
fectly justified in what he has done.
Given the son of the world's conqueror,
18 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
baptized at Notre Dame amid the acclama-
tions of all Paris, anointed in the cradle
with the oil by the virtue of which he was
to rule by divine right, and accustomed
from his very earliest childhood to the cere-
monial deference due him not only as a
king, but also as the only son of one who
was almost a demigod in the eyes of his
people, it was only fair to assume that the
fires of ambition burned fiercely within
his breast, although, as a matter of fact,
they did not. And it is on this perfectly
justifiable assumption that the play of
" L' Aiglon " is constructed. The real Na-
poleon's son, whom we find in the pages
of veracious, unimaginative history, could
not have been made to serve as the central
figure of a drama, because he did not possess
the requisite attributes.
CHAPTER II
A LOWLY BEGINNING
HE life of Madame Du
Barry, while not afford-
ing in itself as much in
the way of raw dramatic
material as does that of
Julius Csesar, has never-
theless been fashioned
into a stage story of deep human interest,
set in brilliant surroundings, and far better
suited to the tastes of modern audiences
than that of the poor little king of Rome.
It is, moreover, a story which, while follow-
ing the true course of history more closely
than almost any successful historical play of
modern times, is nevertheless sufficiently
charged with the dramatist's imagination
to seem in the eyes of twentieth century
20 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
audiences an intensely interesting picture
of what might very well have happened at
the court of the French king.
Historians differ widely as to the real
character of this last of the Favorites, a cir-
cumstance not to be wondered at when we
study the conditions under which she lived,
and take into account the extreme of adu-
lation on the one hand and execration on the
other that were the natural results of the
king's fondness for her. These historians
differ also as to her parentage, the date of
her birth, the exact extent of her power,
and in scores of other respects.
It is certain, however, that she was
born in Vaucouleurs, the same little
French village in which Joan of Arc first
saw the light nearly three hundred and
fifty years before. Indeed, Anne Becu,
the mother of Du Barry, always claimed a
blood-relationship with the Maid of Or-
leans, a boast which it would probably have
been difficult for her to substantiate. Cer-
tain it is that in the middle of the eighteenth
century the Becu family was not one of
great distinction, most of its members being
A LOWLY BEGINNING
engaged in domestic service, while the
certificate of Madame Du Barry's birth,
taken from the parish records in the town
of Vaucouleurs, describes her as " Jeanette,
natural daughter of Anne Becu, sometimes
called Quantigny, born on the
19th of August, in the year one
thousand seven hundred and
forty-three, and baptized the
same day."
Who little Jeanette's fath-
er was will never be known.
Tradition and history assert
variously that he was a tax-
collector, a sailor, and an
unfrocked monk named Gomard
de Vaubernier. From these possi-
ble parents, Mr. Belasco selected the last
named as being more interesting than either
of the others, and he actually introduces
him for a moment in the first act of the
drama in the guise of a shoe-cleaner, fitted
out with his elaborate contrivance for clean-
ing shoes and imparting to them the dead
lustreless finish that was in vogue in Louis
XV's time.
Milliner's
Doll.
22 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
In her own memoirs, 1 Madame Du Barry
gives her birth as the 28th of August, 1746,
and passes over the maternal claim to kin-
ship with the inspired maid as if she put
no faith in it. She speaks of her father as
a man without fortune who had accepted a
mean situation as clerk at the Barrieres, and
who had married her mother from love.
The reason for this will be shown in an-
other chapter.
But, whether married or no, Jeanette's
mother found herself, a few years after the
birth of her daughter, absolutely without
resources, and set out for Paris with the
intention of trying her luck there. Through
the kindness of a financier named Duinon-
ceau, Jeanette was sent to the Convent of
1 The four volumes purporting to be the memoirs of the
Countess Du Barry have been drawn on guardedly for some
of the material of lesser importance contained in this book.
In all probability these memoirs are largely apocryphal, but
they have been compiled, if not entirely by Madame Du Barry
herself, at least by some one who was thoroughly familiar
with the history of her time, as well as with her own career,
and who, for reasons of his own, did not wish to place his
own name on the title-page. Other examples can be named
of books which contain a vast amount of accurate and inter-
esting information of a personal and delicate nature, and
which are nevertheless apocryphal as to signature.
A LOWLY BEGINNING 25
Sainte-Aure. This convent was designed
as a retreat for young girls whose condition
in life was such as to expose them to temp-
tation, and here Jeanette remained until she
was nearly fifteen. During all these years
she lived a life of such extreme rigor that
her subsequent relapse from austere virtue
is not to be wondered at. It was an ex-
istence of terrible severity for children as
young as she. Clothed in an ugly dress,
deprived of all the little ornaments that
children hold dear, forbidden to laugh,
jest or play with her little companions,
and obliged to devote most of her time to
work, nothing but her elasticity of spirit
and marvellous birthright of roguish, infec-
tious gayety enabled her to remain in the
dreary Convent of Sainte-Aure as long as
she did.
Soon after leaving the convent, her
mother lost her situation, and the young
girl began to earn her living by going from
door to door in Paris and the near-by coun-
try with a little open box of watch-guards,
imitation pearls, brilliants, and snuff-boxes
which she offered for sale. Through the
26 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
influence of a certain Madame Lagarde, the
girl was removed from the temptations of
the street and retained by her as a sort of
lady's companion in her Chateau Cour-
Neuve. The old lady was charmed with
the growing beauty and bright, amusing
chatter of her new retainer, and, for a time,
all went well.
It was at Madame Lagarde's that she
gained that familiarity with certain of the
outward and visible signs of high breeding
which stood her in such good stead when
in after years she was first admitted to the
intimate circle of courtiers that clustered
about the French king. Among those
who frequented the house were Voltaire,
at that time the most powerful, most
quoted, most feared, and most sought-after
man in the kingdom ; M. Marmontel, the
author of the famous " Moral Tales," and
M. Grimm, whom she describes as " a cun-
ning fox, witty, though a German, very
ugly and very thin." Besides these men
of literary renown, Madame Lagarde's salon
was frequented by such aristocrats as the
Due de Richelieu, the Prince de Soubise,
A LOWLY BEGINNING 27
and the Due de Brissac, whose son was
destined to play a part of no mean impor-
tance in the story of her later years. Un-
fortunately, however, Madame Lagarde
had a young son living with her, and it was
not long before she discovered and nipped
in the bud a love affair between the two
young people which had made a most
promising beginning. Jeanette, cast once
more upon her own resources, entered,
under the name of Lancon that of the
new husband whom her mother had just
taken the millinery establishment of
Monsieur Labille in the rue Saint- Honore.
Here, although safe from the brutal
temptations of the street, she was exposed
to others that were far more dangerous.
" Imagine," says that conscientious and
entertaining chronicler, M. de Goncour,
"stores with glass windows all around,
where fascinating idlers and handsome
noblemen kept ogling the girls from morn-
ing till night ; shutters which were used
for correspondence and which allowed the
notes, folded up fan-fashion, to be passed
through the peg holes ; little trips out of
28 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
doors where the smart milliner's girl, such
as Leclerc has sketched her in the series of
costumes of D'Esnoult and Repilly, trotted
about with a conquering air, her head cov-
ered with a big black hat shaped like a
calash, allowing her fair curls to slip down
her rounded shapely waist, squeezed into a
polonaise of printed calico, trimmed with
muslin. Imagine, at the end of all this,
conversations and proposals and, after the
proposals and the responses to the proposals,
it was for nearly every one of them, as it was
for the little Lan9on girl, some Monsieur
Lavauvelarbiere (one of Jeanette's early
lovers) or some Monsieur Duval or some-
body else."
This picture we may supplement with
one given in Madame Du Barry's own
words :
" I now commenced a new existence, and how
different a one from that I had led at Sainte-Aure !
There, all was wearisome and dull ; there, the least
motion, a word, a burst of laughter, was kept in
check, and sometimes we were severely punished.
At Madame Labille's there was a constant watch
to keep the house in order and regularity; but
A LOWLY BEGINNING 29
how different from the unceasing surveillance of
the convent ! Here we were almost mistresses of our
own actions, provided the allotted portions of our
work were properly done. We might talk of any-
thing that came into our heads ; we were at liberty
to laugh at anything that provoked our mirth, and
we might sing as much as we pleased. And we did
chatter, laugh and sing to an unlimited extent. Out
of the shop on Sunday, we were at perfect liberty
and at equal liberty in our chambers, which were
situated at the top of the house. Each of us had
her room, which was small but very neat. My god-
father had mine decorated with a handsome carpet,
and gave me a commode, a pier-glass, a small table,
four chairs, and an armchair of velvet, magnificently
gilt. This was all luxury, and when my fellow-
apprentices came to see my apartment, the richness
of the furniture excited surprise and universal ad-
miration. For at least four and twenty hours the
sole theme of conversation at Madame Labille's was
the chamber of Mademoiselle Lancon."
It is not easy for us of the present age to
imagine such an establishment as that in
which little Jeanette found employment.
Patronized by women of the very highest
social position, it was at the same time con-
stantly frequented by the most notorious of
female harpies, while it kept in stock sword-
30 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
knots, shoe-buckles, and other articles of
male adornment, the sale of which furthered
those free and easy flirtations between the
apprentices and the idle men of the town
which were carried on across the counters
without even the pretence of concealment.
Moreover, we must bear in mind the fact
that in the France of the eighteenth cen-
tury millinery and dressmaking were in-
dustries of the highest importance in the
economic life of the nation, and the crea-
tions of such a shop as that of Labille were
viewed by everybody and discussed seriously
like works of art.
At that time French taste governed the
entire world in matters of dress and adorn-
ment, as for that matter it did a century
later during the Second Empire. The
new fashions for each season emanated from
the court of the king, and were sent abroad
by means of a manikin called " the great
doll of France," which was dressed in ac-
cordance with the very latest styles, and
sent to every court of Europe in charge of
an envoy and a numerous suite of attaches
and lackeys. So much importance did
A LOWLY BEGINNING 33
foreigners of fashion and distinction attach
to the visits of this doll, the forerunner of
the modern fashion-plate, which was of
course unknown then, that once, during the
Seven Years' War, when the British had
established such a complete blockade of the
French ports that it was impossible for a
single ship to break through the cordon, an
exception was made in favor of the vessel
bearing the great d6ll of France, which was
allowed to cross the channel.
And it is with no small degree of pride
that French historians describe the manner
in which the flags of the enemy's fleet were
dipped in salutation to the ship bearing the
doll and its accompanying embassy on its
way to teach the English how to dress
themselves properly.
It was toward the close of a reign char-
acterized by luxury in personal adornment,
wanton licentiousness, and selfish indiffer-
ence to the needs of others, a rococo age of
elaborate ceremonial, superficial ornament,
and over-gilding, and in a shop that might
very well have contributed to the outfit of
the great doll of France, that Jeanette
34 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Vaubernier first made her bow. She was
then at the very dawn of womanhood, and
equipped with gifts of personal beauty and
coquetry which made her, from the very
first, the object of gallant attentions on the
part of the young men of fashion who flut-
tered about the rue Saint- Honore, and
awakened the immediate interest of the
buzzards of both sexes, who were more in
evidence then in Paris than ever before or
since, and forever on the lookout for some
attractive bit of femininity which could be
added to the stock and trade of their hideous
traffic.
The peculiar clientele of the Labille shop
must be borne in mind if we are to judge
this young milliner's girl fairly, and we must
also take into consideration her daily sur-
roundings and the mode of life of her
companions and shopmates. And these
young women, had they been taken to
task by any of the professional reformers
of their day, would undoubtedly have
justified their conduct on the ground that
they were merely following the example
set by the very highest women of the no-
A LOWLY BEGINNING
35
bility, and winked at by the princes of
the church.
Nor can we in fairness regard the excuse
as a lame one, for at that time the post of
Favorite at the king's court was
one that was openly coveted,
and shamelessly sought by
women who bore the
proudest names in the
kingdom.
As for the men with
whom Jeanette was now
brought in contact, they
were worthy members of
a society of such exalted
ideas that it could conceive
of no finer or more to be
desired post than that of
Favorite to a king who had
long since grown weary
of all womankind and was
as difficult to please as a man might well
be who had followed pleasure through
youth, manhood, and up to the begin-
nings of old age and to the very point of
satiety.
Hurdy-gurdy player.
36 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
No man or woman would have been
deemed worthy of a place in the corrupt
court of this blase monarch who did not
stand ready at a moment's notice to sac-
rifice to his pleasure a wife, sister or
daughter, as his taste might dictate. It
was this spirit of loyalty to the person of
their sovereign that had much to do with
the development of the race of "grands
seigneurs" - courtly gentlemen bearing
splendid historic names, wearing exquis-
itely ruffled clothes, and carrying at their
sides slender, jewel-hilted swords which they
were always ready to draw in defence of
their king, or of what they w r ere pleased
to term their honor. These were the men
who deemed it an honor to sacrifice a wife
or sister to the king's whim, and it is
pleasant to learn from the pages of history
that His Majesty was always willing to
pay handsomely for such proofs of loyalty
on the part of husband or brother.
There were, however, in the ranks of the
nobility, men who could be singled out as
notable exceptions to the rule of dishonor
and licentiousness that prevailed at the
The Beginning of a Great Love.
A LOWLY BEGINNING 37
court of King Louis, and one of these was
that distinguished and gallant gentleman,
the Due de Cosse-Brissac, Governor of
Paris and Colonel of the Cent Gardes du
Roi, whose after life was so curiously bound
up with that of the humble little milliner's
girl, Jeanette Lancon.
It was this nobleman whom the king
bade to take courage, and not grieve over
so small a disaster as a scandal that affected
the fair name of one of his female rela-
tives. And to this he made answer :
" Sire, I trust that I have courage to
bear resignedly any disaster, though none
to support dishonor."
All historians unite in singling out this
nobleman from the others of his day as a
man worthy of the highest praise for the
lofty purity of his character.
" His romantic devotion to Jeanette Du
Barry," says one of these chroniclers, " is
indeed singular. For many years, until
he fell a victim to the Revolution, he paid
her a sort of passionate worship ; such as,
in the old romances of chivalry, gallant
knights were supposed to render to the
38 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
ladies to whom they had sworn fealty.
Before his death he made a will providing
handsomely for her, and recommending her
to the care of his nearest of kin as one
' who has been very dear ' to him."
But it was not every young milliner's
girl who had the good fortune to win the
chivalrous devotion of such a man as the
Due de Cosse-Brissac. They were men
of a very different sort who came crowding
into Labille's shop, ostensibly to look at
sword-knots or the latest design in shoe-
buckles, but in reality to flirt with the
young girls, to invite them to theatre and
supper parties, and to arrange with them
for meetings on Sundays and holidays.
The esteem in which they held these
young apprentices may easily be imagined.
And if they could traffic openly in the
honor of wife or sister without loss of
caste, who can blame these girls for regard-
ing their attentions as a distinction to be
proud of?
The modern biped whose mission in life
is to follow and insult young women who
work for a living is a despicable creature,
A LOWLY BEGINNING 39
but he is a high-minded gentleman in
comparison with some of the " grand sei-
gneurs " who used to haunt the milliner's
shop of Madame Labille, and we cannot
fairly estimate her character without taking
theirs into account as well.
CHAPTER III
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER
ADAME LABILLE
was the real owner of
the shop which was con-
ducted, for form's sake,
in her husband's name.
It was situated in the
rue St. Honore at the
corner of the rue Neuf-des-Petits-Champs,
since made world-famous in Thackeray's
" Ballad of Bouillabaisse." It is in this
shop that the dramatist first reveals his
heroine as a light-hearted, roguish girl,
ready to flirt with any one who comes
along, no matter whether he be soldier or
prelate, perfectly willing to borrow for her
own use the new hat which has just been
made for a princess, and obviously a girl
who is on the best of terms with herself
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 43
and every one about her. The same quali-
ties of character and disposition which
made her popular with her shopmates,
which won the love of her employer and
held it, too, to the very day of her execu-
tion, are the qualities which enchained the
fancy of Louis XV the first time that
he saw her, and enabled her to hold her
place as Favorite until the end of his reign.
In the play the shop in which Jeanette
Vaubernier actually worked is reproduced
as nearly as possible, and the back of the
scene is so constructed that, reversed, it is
used to reveal the exterior in the final act
of the drama. In all respects this scene is
a perfect study of a milliner's shop of that
period. The affiche, or sign, which hangs
on the wall, is an exact copy of the one
which was actually displayed in Labille's
shop. And if we read it w r ith the aid of
opera-glasses, we learn precisely what sort
of goods were sold there. These very
goods are displayed in the mimic scene,
and are of great variety, for the milliner
of Louis XV's time not only made hats
and bonnets, but also kept a large stock of
44 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
silks, muslins, and other dress fabrics, to-
gether with buckles, high-heeled slippers,
sword-knots, and other articles of wear and
adornment.
The benches scattered about the room
for the convenience of the customers are
copied from those in use at that time, and
the bandboxes are specially designed for
hats that were larger and much more elab-
orate than those that are worn at the pres-
ent day. The sedan chair that stops for a
single moment before the door is well
worth the attention of the serious student
of the Louis XV period. It is an exact
copy of the one used by the Polish princess
who became the wife of Louis and the
Queen of France, and it opens in such a
way as to admit the elaborately large head-
dresses which were in fashion during her
time.
It was during her apprenticeship in this
shop that Madame Du Barry, according to
her own confession, had her first love affair.
Her sweetheart was a young pastry-cook
named Nicolas Mothon, and his lowly sta-
tion in life excited the contempt of the
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 45
other young women in the shop, whose
adorers were either notaries or barrister's
clerks, students or soldiers.
That her attachment for her humble
lover was genuine cannot be doubted, for
years afterward when, at the close of her
remarkable career she had retired to pri-
vate life, this woman who had basked in
the supreme favor of her king wrote as
follows : " When I call to remembrance
all those who have adored me, shall I say
that it is not poor Nicolas, perhaps, who
pleased me least ! I, too, have known
what first love is."
In the drama there is no Nicolas the
pastry-cook. Wisely enough, Mr. Belasco
has disregarded whatever claims to priority
he may have possessed, and plunged at
once into the one true, enduring, and credi-
table love affair that runs through the life
of his heroine.
Young Cosse-Brissac appears in the very
first act, an ideal French lover, ardent,
chivalrous and handsome. As a matter of
fact, although history does not speak defi-
nitely on the subject, the young noble did
46 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
not make known his love for her until
some years later ; but, in deference to
dramatic exigencies, this affair of the heart
is made to date from the very beginning
of the drama. He comes to see her in the
shop, and she flirts with him across the
counter, while pretending to wait on one
of the customers. He brings her flowers,
too, a bunch of violets, and their fra-
grance permeates the whole play. In as-
suming that this love affair was a pure and
honorable one throughout, Mr. Belasco does
not violate historical truth, though he
would be perfectly justified in so doing, -
but simply avails himself of the fact that
history tells us nothing positively to the
contrary.
Moreover, he has made this love affair,
with its consequent hates and jealousies,
the chief motive of his drama, quite prop-
erly giving it precedence over her more
mercenary relations with the king.
After the affair with the pastry-cook
came one with a hair-dresser named Lamat,
which lasted no longer than that unfortu-
nate gentleman's very short purse. This
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 47
young man, however, may be said to have
left his mark on history by virtue of a cer-
tain style of hair-dressing which he designed
expressly for his young sweetheart, and
which is still known
when known at all -
by her name. After
Lamat had impover-
ished himself through
the extravagance of
his young mistress he
fled to England to es-
cape his debts while
she entered a gam-
bling house kept by a
certain Madame Du-
quesnoy in the rue dc
Bourbon. In those
days the fashionable
Parisian gambling houses were much fre-
quented by women, and were generally
looked upon as convenient places of rendez-
vous for the light-minded and dissolute.
Madame Duquesnoy's gambling house
serves as the setting for the second act of
the play, and a very notable scene it is too,
of njfiche actually used
in the shop of Labille.
48 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
done entirely in a peculiar shade of red.
It is a shade that cannot be found else-
where in this country, for it is made ex-
pressly for this scene in France, and the
silk brocade which is employed for walls,
curtains and furniture is dyed with it. It
is the only shade of red that could be used
as a background for a woman with such
extraordinary red hair as that of Mrs.
Carter.
It w r as while frequenting this gaming
house that Jeanette Vaubernier (or Lancon,
as she called herself now) first met, in the
person of the Count Jean Du Barry, a
man who was destined to play a most im-
portant part in the shaping of her strange
destiny, and whom Horace Walpole, in his
memoirs of that period, aptly characterized
as " a most consummate blackguard." The
count came from the neighborhood of Tou-
louse, and always claimed connection with
the Barry family who have resided for
years in the south of Ireland, as well as
with their kinfolk the Barrymores. He
had come up to Paris from Toulouse,
leaving behind him a wife who in after
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 51
years contemptuously refused to accept
any benefit whatever from the hands of
either her husband or the Favorite. In
Paris the count succeeded in obtaining a
government contract for supplying provi-
sions to the Island of Corsica, and with
the money which this yielded him he in-
dulged his tastes for gambling and other
debaucheries to a degree which soon gained
for him the name of Roue.
As time went on and his acquaintance
among men of wealth and fashion increased,
the count found other ways of earning
money beside his Corsican contract. One
source of revenue was the gambling table,
where at this time fortune always smiled
upon him, and another was the traffic in
young and pretty women, in which, like
many another nobleman and gr ancle dame
of that corrupt age, he took part without
any evidence of shame. This man is known
to have carried on his infamous trade as far
back as the time of Madame de Pompadour,
whom he had sought to supplant with a
certain Mademoiselle Dorothee, the daugh-
ter of a Strasburg water-carrier. That there
52 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
was " money in the business " may be
inferred from the fact that the Count Du
Barry had the effrontery to ask for him-
self the post of Minister to Cologne on the
ground that it was he who had introduced
her to the king, and that, too, without
waiting to learn if she had found favor in
the royal eyes.
Under the protection of this gallant gen-
tleman Jeanette was extremely happy for
she was allowed to plunge heart and soul
into the gayest life that the French capital
had to offer. It was in the very midst of
all this gayety that something happened
which she records at considerable length,
and which is presented, in a somewhat al-
tered form, in the drama. One day while
walking in the street she was followed by
a young man of distinguished appearance,
richly clad, and with something peculiarly
sombre and mysterious in his face which
excited her curiosity. This young man
dogged her footsteps for two or three days,
until at last she turned upon him and asked
him what he meant by following her.
" Mademoiselle," he said in most respect-
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 53
ful accents, " promise to grant me the first
reasonable favor I shall ask of you when
you come to be Queen of France."
Smilingly she gave the required promise,
and then the unknown continued: "You
think me mad, I know ; but I pray you
have a better opinion of me. Adieu,
mademoiselle. There will be nothing
more extraordinary after your elevation
than your end."
Returning home she related the inci-
dent to Count Jean, who was profoundly
impressed.
"It is strange," he said, " but that proph-
ecy fits in with what has already come into
my own head. Why should you not be
queen, not the real queen, of course, but
as Madame de Pompadour was ? "
From this moment the scheme suggested
by the words of the mysterious stranger
took complete possession of Count Du
Barry's breast, and for weeks he thought
of it night and day, and planned a hundred
projects for its accomplishment.
In the drama this incident receives due
attention, although for pictorial purposes
54 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
the prophecy is not made by the young
man in the street but by a picturesque old
witch who comes into the gaming house to
tell fortunes. In this act, too, we see the
change that has taken place in the character
of the young girl whose roguish follies were
but yesterday the delight of her companions
in the millinery shop, and a constant source
of attraction to the young men of fashion
who came flocking about there. She is a
woman now, and has set her feet, lightly it
is true, but none the less surely, in the path
that she is to follow to the end, and which
leads direct to the palace of Versailles.
Under the tutelage of the unprincipled
Du Barry she has entered upon a life of dis-
sipation and excitement which is already
beginning to tell on her, and from which
she recoils now and then at the thought of
Cosse-Brissac.
Compressed into this scene are two of the
crucial events of her mimic life. One, his-
torical, her meeting with the king, and the
other, invented, her quarrel with her lover
which definitely determines her future
course of life.
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 55
Concerning this gambling house period
of her career Madame Du Barry herself
says : " My entrance into the world was
bad ; the progress of it was like the com-
mencement, and I led a dissipated life."
It is during one of the moments of re-
flection that come now and then to such
as she no matter how fast the pace or
how deep the cup that she goes back in
fancy and with infinite yearning to the days
when she wandered through country lanes
and hedge-rows, selling her little trinkets
to whomever would buy. The sky was
blue then, the grass green, and the violets,
which she loved, and which Cosse gave
her, were lifting their shy heads in the
quiet places in the woods.
The stranger's prophecy made a profound
impression on Jean Du Barry. And, in-
deed, the prospect of supplying an incum-
bent for the place that had been vacant since
the death of Madame de Pompadour was
in itself enough to completely enlist the
sympathy and interest of a man of his
nature.
For to be the Favorite of the King of
56 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
France meant not merely a life of indolent
pleasure, but power far exceeding that
of any queen or minister. The post car-
ried with it the appointment of cabinets,
the dismissal of statesmen and generals, the
disposal of the highest honors within the
gift of the sovereign, and unlimited drafts
on the public treasury. It is not easy for
people of the present day, who have grown
up under such institutions as ours, to un-
derstand how the French nation could sub-
mit year after year to such government
as this.
But if the sufferings of the people were
great, so was their vengeance, and the Reign
of Terror was simply a natural and inevitable
outcome of it all, the mad bloodthirsti-
ness of a wild beast which, hunted and tor-
mented beyond all endurance, turns upon
its pursuers and rends them. The blood of
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was shed
in atonement for the crimes of the two
reigns that preceded theirs.
Since the days of the elegant Pompadour
there had been no Favorite in the royal pal-
aces, though it would have been hard to
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 59
find among all the high-born dames of
France a single one with any pretensions
whatever to youth and beauty who did not
aspire to the post. Many there were, in-
deed, whose claims were artfully pressed
by near relatives or mercenary intermedi-
aries ; but the king, who was by this time
nearly threescore years of age, and had run
the whole gamut of pleasure and dissipation,
would have none of them. By nature
morose and " unamusable," as Talleyrand
said of the first Napoleon, as years went by
he grew more and more difficult to enter-
tain. Madame de Pompadour had been a
woman of wit, beauty, and talent. A con-
summate actress behind as well as before
the footlights, she had not only made her
way skilfully among the grand ladies of the
court, but had also organized the theatre of
the Petits Cabinets, in which she was wont
to entertain the king, taking the leading
part herself and choosing her supporting
company from among the ranks of the
higher nobility.
These performances were usually given
to an audience of not more than twoscore,
60 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
and so great was the fame that attached
itself to them, that ambassadors and cabinet
ministers considered it an honor to be in-
vited to take even the smallest part in the
representation.
Madame de Pompadour, moreover, was
a woman of genuine artistic temperament,
and one thoroughly in touch with the spirit
of her luxurious, richly decorative age.
AVith her own hands she engraved nu-
merous portraits of her royal lover and
did much to develop the manufacture of
Sevres porcelain, which was begun during
her reign.
Jeanette Vaubernier, on the other hand,
was merely an unlettered Parisian grisette
who had been transplanted from behind
the counter of the milliner shop, where
she had bloomed like a fragrant, healthy
carnation, to the hot-house atmosphere
of a gambling house, where, among the
painted and wrinkled and world-worn habi-
tues, she seemed like an exotic of rare
beauty and exquisitely fresh charm. In
the ways of court life she had had abso-
lutely no experience, and she herself laughed
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 61
in unaffected merriment at the mere idea
of filling the place of the gifted and beau-
tiful Pompadour.
Nevertheless the day came when Count
Du Barry entered her apartment radiant
with delight, and informed her
that their dinner-table that
night was to be graced by no
less a person than that widely
known and infamous creature
of Louis XV called Lebel.
Now Label's nominal posi-
tion at court was merely that
of valet de chambre to the king ;
but there was no man in the
royal service who was more diligently
courted by men and women of position
than this same Lebel, and for no other
reason save that it was generally known
that he commanded all the approaches
through which a woman might hope to
reach the much coveted place of Favorite.
As it was necessary that the place should
be filled by a married woman, it was agreed
that Jeanette should be presented to Lebel
as the wife of Jean's brother Guillaume,
The corset of
the period.
62 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
who still had his home in the country. So
much excited was the count over their
good fortune in securing a guest of such
distinction that he assumed personal charge
of Jeanette's toilette, as well as of the din-
ner, and for two hours he divided his time
between her dressing-room and the kitchen,
to the despair of both cook and hair-dresser.
He had his reward, however, for Lebel was
conquered by the first smiling glance of his
hostess, and to the count's question, " What
think you of our new beauty ? " he made
answer, as he raised her hand to his lips :
" She is worthy of the throne."
The company sat down to dinner, and
the king's valet de chambre was so warm
in his praise that the count began to fear
that he had fallen in love with Jeanette
himself, and would refuse to resign her to
any one else.
Two days after the dinner the king's
valet de chambre called again and, finding
Jeanette alone, talked to her quite seriously
of her personal charms and of the part
which a woman like herself might assume
under the conditions then exis'ting in France.
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 63
" Fearing to compromise myself," relates
Madame Du Barry, " I made no reply, but
maintained the reserve which my character
imposed upon me. I saw that he really
thought me the sister-in-law of Count Jean,
and I left him in all his error, which was ma-
terial to my interests. I am not clever, my
friends ; I never could conduct an intrigue.
I feared to speak or do wrong ; and, whilst I
kept a tranquil appearance, I was internally
agitated at the absence of Count Jean.
" Fortune sent him to me. He was
crossing the street when he saw at our door
a carriage with the royal livery, which
Lebel always used when his affairs did not
demand a positive incognito. This equi-
page made him suspect a visit from Lebel
and he came in opportunely to extricate
me from my embarrassment.
" * Sir,' said Lebel to him, when he en-
tered, * here is the lady whose extreme
modesty refuses to listen to what I dare not
thus explain to her.'
" ' Is it anything I may hear for her ? '
said the count, with a smiling air.
" * Yes, I am the ambassador of a mighty
64
power ; you are the minister plenipoten-
tiary of the lady, and with your leave we
will go into your private room to discuss
the articles of the secret treaty which I
have been charged to propose to you.
What says madame ? '
" ' I consent to anything that can come
from such an ambassador,' was my answer,
and thereupon Count Jean led him into
another room."
In this private interview the ambassador
informed the plenipotentiary that the king
had become deeply interested in the de-
scription he had given to him of the
charms of the ravishing Madame Du Barry,
and that he desired an interview with her
in order that he might himself be the
judge of her beauty.
The count, naturally enough, was agree-
able to this proposal, and Lebel continued,
saying that he intended to entertain the
king and several of his court, including
the famous Due de Richelieu, at supper
the following evening. He had promised
His Majesty that Madame Du Barry should
be one of the party.
a
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 67
The count eagerly accepted, in the
name of his supposed sister-in-law, the
valet's invitation, and no sooner had the car-
riage with the royal liveries rolled away
than he hastened to the room where the
one-time sweetheart of Nicolas the pastry-
cook sat waiting to learn the results of the
interview, her brain dazzled at the mere
thought of becoming the mistress of His
Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV.
" Victory ! " cried the count, delightedly
as he entered the chamber. " Victory, my
dear Jeanette ! To-morrow you sup with
the king ! "
And on receipt of this information, we
learn that dear Jeanette turned pale, lost
her strength completely and was compelled
to sit, or rather to fall into a convenient
chair. When she had recovered a little,
Count Jean told her of his interview with
Lebel, and advised her as to the course that
she should follow should she become the
Favorite of the king.
" To-morrow you will be everything 1 "
he cried with energy ; " but we must think
about this morrow. Make haste, noble
68 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
countess. Go to all the milliners seek
what is elegant, rather than what is rich.
Be as lovely, pleasing, and gay as possible ;
this is the main point and God will do
all the rest."
Late on the following day, the Du Barrys
presented themselves at Versailles, and were
eagerly received by Label, who came for-
ward, saying : " Ah, madame, I began to
fear you might not come. You have been
looked for with an impatience -
" Which can hardly equal mine," inter-
rupted Madame Du Barry ; "for you were
prepared for your visitor, whilst I am yet
to learn who is the friend that so kindly
desires to see me."
" It is better that it should be so," added
Lebel. " Do not seek either to guess or
discover more than that you will here meet
with some cheerful society, friends of mine
who will sup at my house, but with whom
circumstances prevent my sitting down at
table."
" How ! " she exclaimed with affected
surprise. "Not sup with us ? "
" Even so," replied Lebel, and then added,
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 69
with a laugh, "he and I sit down to sup-
per together ! What an idea ! No, you
will find that just as the guests are about
to sit down at table I shall be suddenly
called out of the room, and shall only
return at the close of the repast."
Had Jeanette Du Barry been a woman
of greater experience in the ways of the
polite world, it is not at all unlikely that her
history would never have been written, and
that her acquaintance with royalty would
have begun and ended at the little supper
in which Louis XV bore the title of the
Baron de Gonesse, and at which no cover
was laid for the plebeian host. If there
was one moment in her life in which she de-
serves praise, and, to do her justice, there
were many, it was this one of such great
importance to her. Instead of endeavor-
ing to charm the man whom she knew to
be her king by imitating the airs, graces,
and affectations of a society with which he
had long been surfeited, instead of simulat-
ing the embarrassment to which every
woman resorted as a sort of tribute of
homage to royalty, she had the good sense
70 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
to remain her own simple, natural self.
Not for years had the worn-out monarch
met a woman with such hoydenish exuber-
ance of spirit, such beauty of face and
form, such bright, lively chatter. With him
it proved a case of love at first sight.
On her return to Paris the next day
Jeanette received from him a magnificent
diamond aigrette, worth at least sixty
thousand francs, and the sum of two hun-
dred thousand francs in bank-notes. Both
she and Count Jean were well-nigh struck
dumb with astonishment at the sight of
these treasures, which, so the record runs,
he divided into two equal parts, putting
one into his own pocket, and the other into
the escritoire of his soi-disant sister-in-law.
And she in her turn bestowed a large dou-
ceur upon Henriette, her faithful maid, and
before nightfall contrived to squander at
least one-quarter of her share on all sorts of
beautiful but unnecessary trifles.
It is recorded also that that evening she
and the Count Jean sat late in grave coun-
cil. The different ministers and generals
passed in review before them, to be retained
ENTERING UPON HER CAREER 71
or dismissed as they thought best ; new
schemes of taxation Heaven knows the
people were taxed beyond all endurance
then ! were seriously discussed, in short,
they began in idea to act as if sovereign
power in France had already been bestowed
upon the new Favorite.
"After all," said Jeanette Du Barry, " the
world is but an amusing theatre, and I see
no reason why a pretty woman should not
play a pretty part in it."
CHAPTER IV
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON OF
VERSAILLES
HE next day Madame
Du Barry repaired again
to Versailles, where the
king was awaiting her
with such impatience
that he hastened to
greet her while she was
still at her dressing table completing her
toilet. She was installed at once in a
splendid apartment, attended by obsequious
serving women, and from that moment
had a regular establishment of attendants
appointed for her special use.
That night, as the two sat in conver-
sation over the supper-table, the king
informed his new mistress, with a degree
of fervor that left no shadow of doubt in
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 75
her mind, that she was now no longer an
obscure, friendless woman, but a personage
very, very dear to the heart of the sovereign
of France. To use the exact expression of
Lebel, she was "the new sun which had
arisen to illumine the horizon of Versailles."
The Due de Richelieu lost no time in
doing homage to her, and brought with
him the Due d'Aiguillon, at that time one
of the most powerful nobles in France.
Moreover, women of fashion solicited places
about her person, among them a certain
Madame Saint Benoit, who became first
lady of the bed-chamber, and remained with
her during the whole period of her reign,
her former maid, the faithful and beloved
Henriette, contenting herself with the
second place of honor.
A few days after the installation of the
new Favorite, Lebel died in such a sudden
manner that many believed him to have
been poisoned. This was probably not the
case, but it is certain that he became
alarmed at the king's infatuation for his
new mistress, and took it upon himself to
explain to the monarch that she was not
76 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
worthy of his regard ; that she was not of
noble or even of decent birth, and that she
had lied in representing herself to be a
married woman, whereas she was merely
the latest sweetheart of Count Du Barry.
So incensed did King Louis become at this
frankness on the part of his faithful ser-
vitor that he actually threatened him with
a pair of tongs and drove him from his
presence, bidding him see that the lady
was supplied with a husband without de-
lay. It is not improbable that the excite-
ment of this interview had much to do
with Lebel's sudden death, but he lived
long enough to transmit his sovereign's last
command to Count Du Barry, and he, in
his turn, hastened to write to his brother
Guillaume, a young officer who was living
at the family home in Toulouse, and ap-
prised him of the brilliant marriage which
he had arranged for him.
Guillaume, who seems to have shared his
elder brother's willingness to do anything
that was likely to augment his revenues,
hastened to Paris, bringing with him the
power of attorney by which his mother
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 77
authorized him, in accordance with French
law, to contract marriage with such person
as he might think fitting. The contract of
marriage was immediately
prepared, but it was deemed
politic to delay the cere-
mony for a short time
in order that
a new certificate
of birth, less shameful than
the real one quoted on a
previous page, could be
forged and substituted.
In this document,
which, with the conni-
vance of persons high in
power, was actually en-
tered in the baptismal
register of the parish of
_ r . Orange woman.
Vaucouleurs, Jeanette is
described as the daughter of Jean Jacques
Gomard de Vaubernier and Anne Becu,
called Quantigny, and three years are taken
from her age.
These arrangements having been made,
the contract was duly drawn up and signed,
78 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
and on the first of September the marriage
was celebrated. Immediately after the
ceremony, the husband returned to Tou-
louse, and there is every reason to believe
that he went with well-filled pockets. Per-
sons of his class did not do business merely
for the sake of their health in those days.
As for the bride, she returned to Versailles
and took possession of Lebel's quarters,
moving from them a short time later to the
apartment that had just been vacated by
the Princess Adelaide. These rooms were
situated in the second story, conveniently
near the apartments of the king, who could
pass from one to the other without being
seen. During the remainder of the year
1768 the liaison was conducted in strict
privacy, as the king was in deep mourning
for the queen, who had recently died, and
French etiquette forbade any public dem-
onstration of affection until the end of a
fitting period of grief.
That Louis XV was from the very first
thoroughly infatuated with Jeanette Du
Barry there can be no doubt. He loaded
her with presents, allowed her to make un-
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 79
limited drafts on his treasury, and cham-
pioned her cause in the many vexatious
quarrels which the jealousy of the other
courtiers forced upon her.
" How you all must have hated me in
those days," she said, years after the king's
death, while speaking to one of the great
princesses of the realm.
"Not at all, my dear," was the amiable
reply. " It was not that we hated you, but
that we all wanted your place."
Jeanette Du Barry must have been a
consummate actress, for while she was
simulating an ardor for her lover that
seemed fully as great as his own for her,
she kept her senses about her to a degree
that enabled her to make an estimate of
his character that is well worth recording
here. Nor does it read at all like the
rhapsody of a love-sick young woman.
" Louis XV, King of France, was one
of those sentimental egotists who believed
he loved the whole world, his subjects, and
his family ; whilst in reality the sole en-
grossing object was self. Gifted with many
personal and intellectual endowments which
80 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
might have disputed the palm with the
most notable personages of the court, he
was nevertheless devoured by ennui, which,
by the way, he regarded as one of the
necessary accompaniments of royalty. De-
void of taste in literary matters, he despised
all connected with belles-lettres and es-
teemed men only in proportion to the
number and richness of their armorial bear-
ings. With him, M. de Voltaire ranked
beneath the lowest country squire, and the
very mention of a man of letters was terri-
fying to his imagination, because it dis-
turbed the current of his own ideas.
" He revelled in the plenitude of power,
yet felt dissatisfied with the mere title of
king. He ardently desired to win renown
as the first general of the age, and enter-
tained the utmost jealousy of Frederick II
of Prussia of whose exploits he spoke with
undisguised spleen and ill-humor. The
habit of commanding, and the prompt
obedience he had always met with had
long since palled upon his mind, and he
cared nothing for what was so easily ob-
tained. This satiety and listlessness were
In Comedy Vein.
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 83
by many attributed to a melancholy dis-
position. He disliked any appearance of
opposition to his will, not that he particu-
larly resented the opposition, but that he
knew his own weakness, and feared lest he
should be compelled to make a show of
a firmness which he knew he did not
possess.
" For the clergy he entertained the most
superstitious veneration, and he feared God
because he had a greater dread of the devil.
In the hands of his confessor he believed
was lodged absolute power to confer upon
him the unlimited license to commit any
and every sin. He greatly dreaded pam-
phlets, satires, epigrams, and the opinion of
posterity, and yet his conduct was that of
a man who scoffs at the world's judgment."
There is much truth in this intimate por-
trait of the man who, for nearly sixty years,
was the constitutional ruler of France. No
woman could have found a more powerful
protector than he was ; but his very power
made the recipient of his favor a person to
be hated, envied, and intrigued against by
the other factions in the court.
84 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
So it happened that while there were
many who, like the Due de Richelieu,
sought to ingratiate themselves with the
Favorite, and to warm themselves in the
rays of the new sun that had arisen on
the horizon of Versailles, there were others
who ranged themselves against her in open
or secret hostility. Chief among these
were the then prime minister, the Due de
Choiseul, and his sister, the Duchesse de
Grammont. Between this powerful couple
and the Favorite there was carried on a
war which eventually brought about the
dismissal of the prime minister from office,
and ceased only with the death of the king
and the downfall of his mistress.
The real cause of this enmity may be
traced to the endeavors of the duchess,
aided by her powerful brother, to obtain a
mastery over the king, and secure for her-
self the post which had been vacant since
the days of La Pompadour. In further-
ance of this excellent project, the Due de
Choiseul had exercised eternal vigilance in
regard to the moral welfare of the king,
and had taken pains to nip in the bud any
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 85
indication of a passion that seemed likely
to be lasting or serious.
On one occasion, about a year after
Madame de Pompadour's death, an attempt
was made by a court faction hostile to his
own to install in the vacant place a young
woman named Mademoiselle d'Esparbes,
who had the most beautiful hands in Ver-
sailles, and who had charmed the aesthetic
fancy of the sovereign by the dainty grace
with which she employed her slender, beau-
tiful fingers in picking cherries. She had
already been honored with a suite of apart-
ments at Marly, and all seemed to be going
well, when Monsieur de Choiseul, who had
been patiently biding his time, stopped her
one day on the grand staircase, and, in the
presence of the whole court, chucked her
under the chin and said brutally : " How
is your business going on, my girl ? "
These words literally killed the whole
scheme, for after this open affront the
king, whose interest in the woman was
very slight, did not deem it prudent to go
any further, and a few days later her apart-
ment was taken away from her, and she
86 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
herself received a letter under the royal
seal, exempting her from paying court to
the king, and commanding her to retire to
the home of her father, the Marquis de
Lussan, at Montauban.
After this episode the Due de Choiseul
felt tolerably sure that his own place was
secure, and that it might be possible for him
to install his sister in the place that she
coveted. But Louis XV was tired of the
government of political women. He had
had enough of that sort of thing during
the Pompadour reign, and had long since
declared that no earthly power would
induce him to take a mistress from the
ranks of the nobility. But in spite of his
increasing coldness toward her, the duchess
continued in her efforts to charm him in a
manner so open as to excite the raillery of
the entire court circle.
The intrigue with Du Barry, she and her
brother at first regarded with contempt.
They thought that they saw in it the cun-
ning handiwork of their natural enemy,
Richelieu. And so both of them held
aloof from the newcomer. Very soon,
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 87
however, the prime minister realized that
a new power had arisen that might, in the
end, prove a formidable rival to his own.
He saw that he had no longer to deal
with a passing caprice on the part of the
king, but with a passion that had taken a
strong hold on the royal heart and was
growing stronger, instead of weaker, every
day.
It was a serious discovery for him, but
to his proud sister, who saw the place that
she had coveted for herself filled by a mere
waif from a milliner shop, it was maddening
beyond her powers of endurance.
In a rage, she stirred her brother on to
open hostilities, and made war herself by
means of pamphlets, street ballads, vulgar
verses and satirical newspaper articles. She
raked up the past life of the Favorite,
spiced it liberally with her own imagina-
tion, which appears to have been not over
clean, and had it set to music under the
name of " La Bourbonnaise." She even
imbued Voltaire, who had always been an
ally of her brother, with the idea for the
pamphlet, " The King of Bedlam," in which
88 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
his wit passed over Madame Du Barry and
found a target in the king himself.
Fully as bitter in their hostilities as the
Duchesse de Grammont, although they did
not deign to show it as she did, were the
royal princesses, the daughters of the king.
This is scarcely to be wondered at, espe-
cially when we consider the recent death
of their mother. Nor is it surprising to
learn that these ladies united in vigorous
remonstrance when their father appro-
priated for the use of his new love the
apartments which belonged to his daughter,
the Princess Adelaide.
That Madame I3u Barry was able to
stem the tide of opposition that was raised
against her during the early part of her
reign, seems little short of marvellous when
we consider her low origin, previous man-
ner of life, and utter inexperience in the
ways of a royal court. Her success, though
due largely to her own good sense and
good nature, probably owed a good deal to
the constant care with which her brother-
in-law, Count Jean, watched over her from
his home in Paris, and gave her counsel
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 91
that helped her over every difficulty she
encountered. Although thoroughly de-
based, he was nevertheless a man of talent
and energy, and he knew too, that the
services which he could
render his former mis-
tress, who in her new
life could not distinguish
friend from enemy, were
of such value that she
could well afford to pay
him handsomely for
them.
Between
Versailles
and Paris a
corps of mes-
sengers was
in continual
service, car-
rying from
MadameDu
Barry letters
of inquiry
regarding
CV en t n e Objects seen in the milliner's shop.
92 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
smallest details and bringing in return the
most explicit and minute instructions from
her crafty and experienced brother-in-law.
It is doubtful if the actress ever studied
the great part in which she has won such
signal triumphs on the mimic scene any
more conscientiously and carefully than
this young shop-girl did that of the extraor-
dinary one that she was called upon to
play at such short notice and with so little
experience. Certainly both women were
supremely fortunate in the matter of a
stage director.
So well did the king's Favorite follow
the instructions of her director, so much
native aptitude did she display for her call-
ing, that during the critical year which
elapsed between her first meeting with the
king and her formal presentation at court
she did not once gratify her enemies by
making herself ridiculous.
Moreover, she had found time and oppor-
tunity to strengthen her claims to a like
recognition by means of a none too accu-
rate genealogy of the Du Barry family,
which had been prepared in England, under
A New Fancy,
A NEW SUN ON THE HORIZON 93
the inspiration of the same brain that had
conceived the idea of the false baptismal
entry, and claiming for the Du Barry's
blood-kinship with the famous Irish family
of Barrymore. She had also obtained from
the hand of her former lover some pam-
phlets reflecting on the character of her
arch enemies, the Duchesse de Grammont
and her brother the Due de Choiseul.
PRESENTED AT COURT
ER position in the per-
sonal regard of the king
having become secure,
the Favorite's next step
was to secure the much-
coveted and all-impor-
tant honor of a formal
presentation at his court. And in this,
as in all other matters affecting her inter-
ests, she received the support and counsel
of her brother-in-law.
To a woman in her anomalous position,
this formal presentation at court was a
matter of vital importance. Without it she
was merely the king's mistress, the fancy
of a passing moment, and, like others who
hang on princes' favor, liable to be set
aside the very instant that a fresh face
found favor in the royal eyes.
PRESENTED AT COURT 95
Once presented at court, however, she
had the right to live openly in the palace
of her sovereign, to take her place in the
world as a woman whose position in soci-
ety was assured, to entertain ambassadors,
statesmen and generals, give orders to the
ministers, in short, to have a voice in all
matters of state.
From the very first Jean Du Barry had
urged her not to cease in her efforts to
secure for herself this distinction. He
knew far better than she did how much it
meant to a woman playing such a fascinat-
ing and hazardous game as the one in which
she had taken a hand. When she seemed
content with liberal presents of money and
jewelry, when she expressed perfect confi-
dence in the continuance of royal favor,
simply because she found herself lodged in
apartments that communicated easily with
those of the king, it was Jean Du Barry
who spurred her on to fresh exertions by
showing her that all this meant no more
than the capricious love of a man who had
been lavishing money and diamonds on
women all his life.
96 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Of course , this presentation was opposed
by a very strong court faction. The pow-
erful Due de Choiseul sought in every
possible way to prevent it, as did his sister,
the Duchesse de Grammont. The daugh-
ters of the king, who had been inexpressi-
bly mortified by their father's open lack of
respect for the memory of his dead queen,
were no less bitter in their opposition, and
in their efforts they found many powerful
allies in the most exalted court circles.
These and other persons of the highest
importance formed what seemed like an
impenetrable wall about the throne of
France. So great indeed was the opposi-
tion from within the ranks of his own fam-
ily, as well as from those of his advisers,
that the king, who seems to have had rare
skill in the difficult art of keeping out of
family rows, summoned his grand almoner,
Monsieur de Vauguyon, and addressed him
as follows : " La Vauguyon, you are a man
of a thousand. Listen attentively to me.
I wish much that the Countess Du Barry
should be presented ; I wish it, and that
too in defiance of all that can be said and
PRESENTED AT COURT 99
done. My indignation is excited before-
hand against all those who shall raise any
obstacle to it. Do not fail to let my
daughters know that if they do not comply
with my wishes, I will let my anger fall
heavily on all persons by whose counsels
they may be persuaded ; for I only am
master and I will prove it to the last.
These are your credentials, my dear duke,
add to them what you may think fitting.
I will bear you out in anything."
The prelate undertook this delicate com-
mission, having first obtained from Madame
Du Barry her promise that the weight of
her influence would at all times be thrown
in favor of the clerical party, to which he of
course belonged, and not with their natural
enemies, the philosophers or free-thinkers.
Armed with this assurance, he soon ob-
tained from Madame Louise, the most pious
and obedient of the king's daughters, her
promise that she would yield to her father's
wishes. The princesses Sophie, Adelaide,
and Victoire he found less complacent, and
it was only by the exercise on his part of
the most adroit diplomacy and the most
100 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
convincing and pious eloquence that he
succeeded in persuading them that it was
their duty, as daughters of the king, to
set an example in obedience. Finally the
four sisters met at the house of Madame
Adelaide and decided that as the king had
expressed himself so positively on the sub-
ject of the presentation they would receive
his mistress with every mark of courtesy.
The almoner hastened to Madame Du
Barry and informed her of his success.
Her joy was so great that she embraced
him with the greatest w r armth and a few
days later sent him a Chinese mandarin,
fashioned in porcelain, on whose finger was
placed a jewelled ring worth nearly forty
thousand francs.
The opposition of the royal princesses
having been silenced, the next difficulty
that lay in the path that led towards the
throne was that of obtaining a sponsor.
The etiquette of the French court, very
strict in this as in all other respects, de-
manded that every woman presented should
have as a sponsor some other woman of
title who was herself a member of the
PRESENTED AT COURT 101
king's court. Ordinarily, it was not diffi-
cult for a candidate to obtain, from among
her own friends, a noblewoman qualified
for the post of sponsor and willing to
assume it. In the case of Madame Du
Barry, however, the opposition was so
strong and her notoriety so great that
every woman who was approached on the
subject either refused on one pretence or
another, or else demanded for her services
a sum so exorbitant as to stagger even such
an extravagant woman as the Favorite.
One lady who was applied to demanded a
large sum of money for herself, the com-
mand of a regiment for her son, and for
her husband, a government and the Order
of the Holy Ghost. Another, the Mar-
quise de Castellane of that day, stipulated
that she should receive a gift of half a
million francs and be created a duchess.
A presenteuse was found at last, thanks
to the indefatigable energy of the Due
de Richelieu, in the person of a certain
Madame de Beam, who was a woman of
great avarice and a chronic litigant as well.
This lady was at this time one of the par-
102 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
ties in a law-suit involving several hundred
thousand francs, and Madame Du Barry's
influence with the chancellor of the king-
dom was a consideration that had great
weight with her. In addition to this in-
fluence, she demanded for herself a hundred
thousand francs and a station in the royal
household, and for her son, the command
of a regiment.
Even when her demands had been ac-
ceded to, this avaricious countess had the
effrontery to require the king's written
promise, and it was only by an artful strat-
egy on the part of Madame Du Barry that
the matter was finally adjusted.
But although a sponsor had been found,
the opposition of the Choiseul party was
not silenced, and it was not until the mis-
tress made a personal and tearful appeal to
the king, aided by the influence of her
friend the Due de Richelieu, that that
weak and vacillating monarch consented to
the ceremony which should give her once
and for all the status that she desired.
The presentation took place on the 22d
of April, 1769, and on that day vast num-
PRESENTED AT COURT 103
bers of people went out from Paris to
Versailles to witness the passage of the
Favorite's carriage to the court. The ex-
citement and interest manifested in this
purely ceremonial act is not difficult to
understand when we remember that to
the clerical party, against which the Choi-
seul ministry had always arraigned itself,
Madame Du ISarry was not a mere courte-
san, the toy of an indolent, pleasure-loving
prince, but a veritable Moses sent for the
salvation of the chosen people of the
Church. In her, strange as it may seem
to us of a different civilization, were centred
to a large extent the hopes of the Jesuits,
for had she not already given assurance
through the grand almoner, who pleaded
her cause with the royal princesses, that her
influence would be thrown with that party ?
Therefore thousands of people gathered at
the gates of the park in Versailles and
waited patiently for the appearance of the
carriage with her well-known livery.
Within the palace the king, nervous and
ill at ease, stood waiting her coming, won-
dering at the delay, for the hour had long
104 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
since passed, and annoyed by the clamor
that was borne to his ears from the throngs
about the gates. Choiseul, standing beside
him, grew more and more exultant as each
passing minute diminished the chance of
the presentation taking place that day.
On the other side of the royal person stood
Richelieu in his capacity of first gentle-
man, watching through the window with
the corner of his eye and hoping, almost
against hope, that the familiar equipage
would come within his range of vision.
" What means all this uproar ? Why are
all those people gathered about the gates ? "
demanded the king of his minister.
*' Sire," replied Choiseul, in sarcastic tones
that were almost jubilant, " the people have
learned that Madame Du Barry is to be
presented to-day, and they have hurried
here from every point of the compass in
order that they may at least witness her
arrival, as they are not able to be at the re-
ception which your Majesty will give her."
A moment later Louis XV glanced at
the clock, and then opened his lips for the
purpose of countermanding or postponing
PRESENTED AT COURT
105
the presentation, but at this instant Riche-
lieu caught sight of the Favorite's carriage
crossing the great court and exclaimed,
" Sire, here is Madame Du Barry."
Sedan chair.
Woman-like, and knowing, too, the vast
importance of looking her best that day,
she had lingered too long at her dressing-
table. But, if the chronicles of that period
are to be believed, the results were well
worth the sacrifice of time. For neither
canvas nor marble has ever fitly repro-
106 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
duced those charming seductions of form
and that exquisite beauty of face in which
were realized the ideal of eighteenth cen-
tury beauty. There was one portrait of
her, however, which, though it but faintly
pictured her charms, nevertheless moved
Voltaire to exclaim, " The original was
made for the gods ! "
Her hair was long, silky, curling like the
hair of a child, and blonde with an exquisite
auburn tint. Her eyebrows and eyelashes
were dark and curly, and beneath them the
blue eyes, which one seldom saw quite
open, looked out with coquettish sidelong
glances. The nose was small and finely
cut, and the mouth a perfect Cupid's bow.
The neck, the arms, her feet and her hands
reminded one of ancient Greek statuary,
while her complexion was that of a rose-
leaf steeped in milk. She carried with her
a delicious atmosphere of intoxicating, vic-
torious, amorous youth.
Her costume was a triumph of the dress-
maker's art and was of the kind called by
the women of her century " a fighting cos-
tume." Diamonds worth 150,000 francs,
PRESENTED AT COURT 109
the king's gift of the day before, still fur-
ther adorned her and contributed to a
beauty that was so radiant and dazzling
that even her bitterest enemies were able
to comprehend the power that she exercised
over the king. The Countess de Beam,
also gorgeously attired, appeared with her,
delighted to have a share in the pomp and
splendor of the occasion. The royal prin-
cesses, true to the promise given their
father, received her with a degree of amia-
bility and courtesy which carried conster-
nation to the hearts of the Choiseul faction.
They would not suffer her to kneel before
them, but hastened to raise her in the
most gracious manner when she began to
perform that act of homage.
The king himself was even more gracious
in his manner towards her. She had made
a bet with him the day before, that he
would not permit her to bend the knee to
him, for he had threatened to permit her
to fall at his feet without making the least
effort to prevent it. Now, as he took her
hand when she began to stoop before him,
she exclaimed, " You have lost, sire."-
110 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
" How is it possible to preserve my dig-
nity in the presence of so many graces ? "
he exclaimed in a voice loud enough to be
heard by those who stood near by.
That evening Jeanette Du Barry enter-
tained at her house a score of the highest
dignitaries in the land, in the presence of
whom the king embraced her warmly, say-
ing : " You are a charming creature," a
compliment which was quickly echoed on
all sides, and the next day all Paris knew
that her place by the king's left hand was
permanent and secure.
In the mere act of this presentation, in
the cabals which favored or opposed it, in
the great significance with which it was
invested, and in the splendor of the function
itself, there is material for a great drama.
In the play of Du Barry, however, it is
not touched upon.
CHAPTER VI
THE PETIT LEVEE
N the third act of his play
the dramatist teaches
the present generation,
in a manner so vivid
that no one can see it
without carrying away
a lasting recollection of
it, what it meant to be the favorite of a
Bourbon king a century and a half ago.
In this act Madame Du Barry is shown
in the bedroom of her apartments at Ver-
sailles, holding one of thepetits levees which
were of such ordinary occurrence in those
days. By this time the presentation has
taken place, her power is acknowledged by
all, and there is no prince or princess of
the blood royal, no woman of the haute
noblesse, no dignitary of the church, state,
THE STORY OF'DU BARRY
or army who is above coming there to do
her homage.
To the student of history, this gathering
in the bedchamber of the most talked-of
Frenchwoman of her day is a scene of the
deepest interest. She is still in the heart
of her quarrel with Choiseul, and h^R visi-
tors this morning are many of them from
the ranks of her own personal supporters.
The most distinguished of these guests,
next to the king himself, is the polished
and sin-worn old diplomat, the Due de
Richelieu, who comes tripping in to pay
his court to the Favorite with all the
smirks and graces of a nobleman of the old
regime. Accomplished as he is in the arts
of the courtier, familiar by long experience
and practice in the school of diplomacy,
with the consummate and subtle art of mask-
ing his feelings and intentions behind a face
that smiles and gives no sign, he has not
been clever enough to deceive the woman
whose knowledge of court customs has been
gained within a single twelvemonth. In
the vernacular of to-day, she has " sized him
up" long ago, and her impressions of his
THE PETIT LEVEE 113
character have been handed down to us
in the following words :
" This nobleman," she says, " when in
his seventy-second year, had preserved all
his former pretensions to notice. His suc-
cess in so many love affairs a success
which he never could have merited had
rendered him celebrated. He was now a
superannuated coxcomb, a wearisome and
clumsy butterfly. When, however, he
could be brought to exercise his sense by
remembering that he was no longer young,
he became fascinating beyond description,
from the finished ease and grace of his
manner and the polished and piquant style
of his discourse. Still I speak of him as a
mere man of outward show, for his attain-
ments were superficial, and he possessed
more of the jargon of a man of letters than
the sound reality. He possessed a most
ignoble turn of mind. All feelings of an
elevated nature were wanting with him.
A bad son, an unkind husband, and a worse
father, he could scarcely be expected to
become a steady friend. All whom he
feared, he hesitated not to trample under-
114 THE STORY OF UU BARKY
foot, and his favorite maxim M r as, ' We
should never hesitate to set our foot upon
the necks of all those who might in any
way interfere with our progress.' ' Dead
men tell no tales,' he would always add.
Between himself and Voltaire, who called
him the ' tyrant of the tennis court,' a strong
personal enmity always existed."
Another important visitor is Monsieur de
Maupeou, at that time the Lord Chancellor
of the king, and of whom Madame Du
Barry says :
" Monsieur de Maupeou possessed one of
those firm and superior minds, which, in
spite of all obstacles, changes the face of
Empires. Ardent, yet cool ; bold, but re-
flective ; neither did the clamors of the
populace astonish, nor obstacles arrest him.
He went on in the direct path which his will
chalked out. Quitting the magistracy, he
became its most implacable enemy, and,
after a deadly combat, he came off con-
queror. He felt that the moment had
arrived for freeing royalty from the chains
which it had imposed upon itself. It was
necessary, he has said to me a hundred
.
THE PETIT LEVEE 117
times, for the kings of France in past ages
to have a popular power on which they
could rely for the overturning of the feudal
power. ' Before fifty years,' he said to me
once, 'kings will be nothing in France,
and parliaments will be everything.' As
brave, personally, as a marshal of France,
his enemies, and he had many, called him
a coarse and quarrelsome man. Hated by
all, he despised men in a body, and jeered
at them individually. Insensible to the
charms of our sex, he only thought of us
casually and as a means of relaxation."
Another notable figure at the petit levee
is the Abbe Terray, the Minister of Fi-
nance. This astute and utterly unprin-
cipled politician was not slow in allying
himself with the faction that gathered
about the Favorite, and she, on her part,
could not have found a more docile or use-
ful supporter. As Controller- General of
the Finances of the Kingdom, he literally
held the purse-strings, and he was politic
enough to loosen them whenever the king's
mistress commanded. That he was fre-
quently called upon to do so, may be
118 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
inferred from the richness of the bedcham-
ber and its furnishings, as well as from the
fact that during the five years of her reign,
Madame Du Barry's personal expenditures
amounted to over twelve million livres, a
sum of money whose purchasing capacity
about equalled that of the same number of
dollars at the present day. Her dress-
maker's bill alone amounted to a quarter
of a million livres a year, and she had
already found that silver, even when it was
the work of the very best craftsmen in
France, was not good enough for her, and
must be replaced by solid gold. There
was a toilet service ordered in the same
precious metal, and the government paid
to Roettiers, the greatest carver of plate in
France, the sum of fifteen hundred gold
marks as an advance payment, before he
would undertake the work. But scandal,
caused by this piece of useless extrava-
gance, put a stop to the work, and the gold
toilet service was never finished.
It is not unlikely that an understanding
existed between Madame l)u Barry and the
Abbe Terray, through which the Minister
THE PETIT LEVE'E 119
of Finance secured for himself a percentage
of what he permitted her to squander. It
is a matter of history that his mistress,
known in fashionable Parisian circles by
the name of La Sultane, received money,
presumably in collusion with the Abbe,
for every act of favor or justice solicited
from the department which he controlled.
Indeed, this degraded creature and Madame
Sabatin, the mistress of the Due de la
Vrilliere, kept open shop for the sale of
preferments of all kinds.
The Count Jean Du Barry is also a visi-
tor at the petit levee, nor is it surprising to
see him in quest of money. The class of
men to which he belongs is
one that in all ages has found
its chief support in the earn-
ings of frail women. It is a
class, by the way, which has
not yet passed from off
the face of the earth, and
has its representatives in
the good society of the
present day as well as in
the slums. Jean Du ...
Punch bowl.
120 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Barry, who has always been known as a
man of extravagant tastes, is now rapacious
in his demand, and, from what we know
of his character, we do not feel that the
dramatist has strayed far from historical
accuracy when he reveals him in the light
of a blackmailer.
His Eminence, the Papal Nuncio, is here
too in the mimic scene, as he frequently
was in the flesh when the real Madame
Du Barry held her petit s levees in the great
palace of Versailles. Moreover he seems
to be a trusted adviser, as well as a friend
who lends the weight of his influence in
her behalf in her quarrel with the king.
Another guest is the young girl of six-
teen, the Princess Marie Antoinette, to
whose memory clings the tragic pathos of a
queen's martyrdom.
" She appeared to me less beautiful and
fair than pleasant and ladylike," says
Madame Du Barry, in describing the im-
pression made on her by this young prin-
cess on her first arrival from Austria.
"Her hair was of a reddish auburn, but
her skin was of a dazzling white. She had
THE PETIT LEVEE 121
a beautiful forehead, a delicious set of teeth,
a well-formed nose, and eyes full of vivac-
ity and expression. Her air was majestic
and dignified. She walked well ; her figure
was well shaped, and her gestures were
more free and unstudied than those of the
princesses of the blood royal of France."
This princess, however, did not have agood
opinion of the Favorite, toward whom her
conduct at first was so frigid that the
king summoned the Austrian ambassador,
Mercy- Argenteau, explained to him his
wishes, and bade him use whatever influence
he possessed to induce her to conform to
them. The ambassador, alarmed at the
prospect of anything like coolness between
the two royal houses, and knowing how
much trouble can be brought about by the
obstinacy of one young woman, instantly
despatched letters to his sovereign, the
Empress Maria Theresa, in which he ex-
plained to her the precise state of affairs at
the French court. He described the in-
fatuation of the king for the new Favorite,
and took pains to relate the manner in
which His Majesty showed his displeasure
122 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
when the least slight was put upon her.
In view of these conditions, he begged the
empress to use her influence with her
daughter, and persuade her to address a few
civil words to a woman whom the king had
honored by his regard. The empress saw
the force of his argument, and wrote at
once to her daughter, urging her to remem-
ber what was due the king at whose court
she was living. At last, in obedience to
her mother, Marie Antoinette consented
to receive the Favorite ; and statesmen,
who had foreseen, as an outcome of her
obstinacy possible trouble with Austria,
breathed freely again.
Whether or no the dauphiness ever
overcame her feeling of repugnance toward
Madame Du Barry to such an extent as to
attend one of her pctits levees, is a fact on
which history throws but little light, so we
may accept the picture as the dramatist has
painted it for us. Certainly her presence
in this scene lends a new interest to it.
Denys, the faithful servant who follows
Madame Du Barry's changing fortunes to
their bitter end, is a character who really
THE PETIT LEVEE 125
existed, and who was deeply attached to
his mistress.
Another type of servitor was Zamore,
the black dwarf, whom we see squatting on
a rug beside the Favorite's bed. Creatures
of this sort were frequently maintained in
luxurious houses in those days, in Paris and
in London as well. We encounter them,
more than once, in the pictures which
Hogarth painted of dissolute London life
of exactly that time. Zamore received
innumerable favors at the hands of Madame
Du Barry and her royal lover, but, in the
end, turned against her, and at her trial
gave testimony which contributed mate-
rially to her conviction.
Madame Du Barry had received Zamore
at the hands of the usually penurious Due
de Richelieu, who turned him over to her,
clad in his native garb of pleated grass and
adorned with bracelets, earrings and neck-
lace of solid gold, fashioned in barbaric style.
He was a hideously ugly little savage with
no more respect for persons than one
would have looked for in a monkey. He
was funny, however, in a rude simian way,
126 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
and could make grimaces and distort his
puny body in such a way as to set his
mistress off into roars of laughter. He
had scant respect for her visitors, and was
wont to amuse himself and the company
by snatching the wig from the head of
some aged courtier, leaving his victim a
bald target for the laughter of the rest.
Pleasantries of this order seem to have
been rather to the taste of his Most Chris-
tian Majesty, Louis XV, for history tells
us that once, in appreciation of some par-
ticularly entrancing exhibition of this subtle
and engrossing form of humor, he rewarded
the young African with the post of gov-
ernor of the Chateau of Louveciennes, an
office carrying with it a salary of one thou-
sand crowns.
The Jeanette Du Barry who figures in
this act has made distinct progress along
her chosen path since we last saw her in
the gambling house. It is true that she
is, at heart, the same wanton, good-hearted,
good-tempered young woman whose chief
concern is for the pleasures of this life ; but
now her destiny is assured, whereas her life
THE PETIT LEVEE 127
at the gaming house was merely a prelimi-
nary glance into the brilliant, dissolute and
luxurious world that lay before her. Now
she has realized the very highest dream
that any woman of her class ever dared
to indulge in. The all-powerful king of
France is madly in love with her, and
there is nothing, from the dismissal of a
minister to the price of a jewelled bauble,
that she may not ask and receive at his
hands.
I declare that I can think of no more in-
structive spectacle, nor of one better worth
the consideration of a philosopher, than that
of this pampered mistress reclining in her
splendid bed, with the gorgeously capari-
soned ape, Zamore, by her side, and minis-
ters, prelates and royalty gathering to do
her honor.
The chief interest in this act is one of
love, and here the inventive genius of the
dramatist comes into play. Having taken
the love between Jeanette Du Carry and
Cosse-Brissac as the chief motive of his
drama, Mr. Belasco avails himself of his
dramatic license to assume that there was
128 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
jealousy on the part of the king, and, logi-
cally enough, that that jealousy resulted in
a bitter quarrel between himself and his
mistress. He shows us, too, how the heart
of woman, even though that woman be the
Favorite of a king, must break all artificial
bonds imposed by high station and self-
interest and rule her whole life.
It is reasonable enough to assume that
Jeanette Du Barry had more than one love
affair beside that supreme one with the
king, during the period of her reign. Hos-
tile historians, who pander to that horror
of immorality and taste for reading about
it which characterizes Anglo Saxon virtue,
ascribe to her a legion of sweethearts, and
her own memoirs indicate that she was not
altogether true to the king.
Certainly she must have had plenty of
idle time on her hands ; for, although she
had succeeded Madame de Pompadour in
the royal esteem, she was wise enough not
to challenge comparison between herself
and her predecessor by mixing too much
in affairs of state.
The Pompadour had been a woman of
THE PETIT LEVEE 129
distinct influence in the affairs of the world.
Not only had she amused the king with
her theatre, her conversation, her supper
parties, and the brilliant men and women
whom she gathered together for his enter-
tainment, but she had also sought to relieve
him of many of the serious duties of his
exalted position. Her life had been one
of constant intrigue ; of intimacy with
cabinet ministers, statesmen and men of
business ; of interest in politics, in short,
her role was one of actual power openly
exercised.
Madame Du Barry, on the other hand,
was content with her position as Favorite,
and, apart from her struggle with the
Choiseuls and the various squabbles with
the ladies of the court into which she was
drawn, she did not figure prominently in
the affairs of her time. Her chief delight
was in spending money, and nowhere is the
real history of the reign more accurately
summed up than in the four volumes of
her expense accounts purchased some years
ago by the National Library.
Like every woman of her class, she was
130 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
passionately fond of the luxuries of life, and
utterly heedless of their cost so long as
there was some one to pay the bills for her.
In these accounts we read of dresses cost-
ing from one to ten thousand livres, of a
watch costing nearly six thousand francs,
of the same sum spent for the gildings on
her bed, of lace that cost three or four
thousand livres for each dress, of superb
furniture, of bronzes, of everything, in
short, that the richly decorative age of
Louis XV could supply.
The morning receptions in her bedcham-
ber were not given over altogether to the
visits of personages of distinction. It was
at this time that tradesmen came to her
with their newest and choicest wares, and
workmen received instructions and sub-
mitted to her the half-completed articles
of beauty and utility which she had
ordered, and which she loved to inspect
from time to time. That her taste was
good, is evident from such of her posses-
sions as are still in existence. Nor is this
to be wondered at, when we remember the
great influence that the demi-monde has
c
THE PETIT LEVEE 133
always exerted on the dress, jewelry and
other ornaments of the polite world.
The de Goncour Memoirs have this to
say about Moreau's picture of a fete given
by the Favorite in honor of her royal lover
at her Chateau of Louveciennes, December
27, 1771 : "Throughout the apartment, all
white and gold, a vapor of light seems to
rise from the lustres hanging in front of
the mirror between the columns, shedding
on them flashes to which other flashes
respond in other mirrors, handfuls of flame
which fling into the air four figures of
women carved in marble by Pajou, Le
Count, and Moineau, and standing on mar-
ble socles with golden wreaths. Around
the table, surrounded by curious lookers-on,
behind the round backs of the armchairs and
the clubs of the chattering guests'
perukes, the attendants, the
servants, the %^fifc ^^ persons carry-
ing dishes,
keep coming
and going rapidly,
some in yellow
straw liveries, others
Slippers.
134 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
in crimson velvet coats with facings, with
blue collars and wristbands, with white
boot-tops and white gaiters, three-cornered
hats on their heads, and swords by their
sides. You see even little Zamore in a
turban with feathers, a rose-colored vest
and breeches, gliding towards a lady who
has doubtless left some bonbons on her
plate. The crystal, the silver, the struc-
ture representing an opera scene, which
rises above the tablecloth, the cordons bleus,
the diamonds, the smiles on the faces of
the guests, all keep the table in a glow ;
and in the brilliant light shed around them
is seen, by the side of Madame Du Barry's
pretty countenance, the handsome, noble
face of Louis XV."
There is more than a suggestion of all
this in the superb scene which constitutes
the fourth act of Mr. Belasco's play, the
act in which the highest point of dramatic
interest is attained. It is in this act, too,
that the dramatist touches the deepest and
most significant note in his entire work.
It is not easy to convey, in mere words,
an adequate idea of the splendid picture of
THE PETIT LEVEE 135
luxury that is set before us here under the
rays of a smiling harvest moon. Up and
down the marble steps and across the stage,
ambassadors, noblemen, and court ladies
come and go, laughing gayly and with no
thought save for the caprice or intrigue or
ambition of the moment. Opera-dancers
whirl and pirouette on tiptoe for the en-
tertainment of the guests ; clowns, all in
white, come somersaulting across the floor ;
tables are spread in sumptuous fashion ; a
huge bowl of flaming brandy punch is
served, and the guests amuse themselves
by throwing about illuminated balls. At
a signal from the mistress, servants, bearing
a score of rich candelabra, come upon the
scene, and the stage is lit up with that real
candlelight which electricity cannot coun-
terfeit.
Never, perhaps, has our stage presented
such a luxurious and gorgeous spectacle as
this. But beneath it all there is an omi-
nous note that we, whose vision has been
made clear with the light of after-knowl-
edge, cannot help seeing. The writing is
on the wall, but there is no Daniel to
136 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
interpret it. The keen, glittering knife
that the actress sees in fancy from the
moment when she first comes on the stage,
is hanging over a score of those bewigged
and bepowdered heads.
Valois, the young revolutionary, has
already been brought in by the guards,
and, before he can be taken away to execu-
tion, has contrived to fling in the faces of
his captors, a word of defiant warning ; but
they give him no heed. Now, however,
from without the gates, comes the noise of
angry mutterings and discontent, for the
people, starved and over-taxed to support
all this riotous waste, are clamoring for
bread. Their murmurings reach the ears
of Louis the Well Beloved, and he comes
striding out of his palace to demand its
cause.
" Am I king or not, that this rabble
should disturb my pleasure ? " he cries
haughtily. And which one of us is there
so dull and devoid of imagination as not
to catch a glimpse of the gleaming knife
conjured up by his words ?
The soldiers go out to disperse the mob,
THE PETIT LEVEE
137
and their clamor ceases ; the distant roll
of the drums tells us that the name of
Valois has been written in his own blood
upon the long roll of those who have died
for principle ; the king and his bejewelled
mistress again lead the court in the mad
hunt after pleasure, but that clamor at the
outer gates is one that will not down. A
powdered head will fall for every drop of
Valois blood that has been shed to-night.
CHAPTER VII
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL
N the month of July of
the year 1769, Sir Hor-
ace Walpole writes as
follows: "Well! I am
going to a quiet little
town where they have
had nothing but one
woman to talk of for this twelvemonth,
I mean Paris. Madame Du Barry gains
ground, and yet Monsieur de Choiseul car-
ries all his points. He has taken Corsica,
bought Sweden, made a pope, got the
Czarina drubbed by the Turks, and has
restored the Parliament of Bretagne, in
spite of the Due D'Aiguillon, for revenge
can make so despotic and ambitious a man
as Choiseul even turn patriot, - and yet
at this moment I believe he dreads my
o
.1
v.
3
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL 141
Lord Chatham more than Madame Du
Barry."
Time has shown, however, that the great
minister who was at one time the virtual
master of France had more to fear from
the French courtesan than from the Eng-
lish statesman. The struggle between him-
self, egged on by his sister, the Duchesse de
Grammont, on the one side, and the Favo-
rite, aided by her own faction, on the other,
resulted at last in the dismissal of the min-
ister. Before this final catastrophe, how-
ever, occurred a contretemps between the
two women that may be said to have served
as a prelude to his downfall.
As may be easily believed, the duchess
was one of the first to pay court to the
dauphiness, Marie Antoinette, on her ar-
rival at Versailles, and so skilful was she
in the art of making herself agreeable, that
the princess conceived a strong liking for
her, and consulted her on innumerable sub-
jects relating to her life at court.
Now it is related that this young princess
was so innocent in regard to worldly wicked-
ness, that she once artlessly asked who Mad-
142 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
ame Du Barry was, and what her precise
status was in the entourage of Louis XV.
It is not likely that the Duchesse de Gram-
mont, who had perhaps been waiting for a
convenient opportunity to express herself,
permitted the future Queen of France to
remain longer in the dark concerning the
character and antecedents of her grand-
father's mistress. Possibly she was one of
those raconteurs who, as the Irish say,
" never let a story go out without a cocked
hat and a cane." Certain it is that noth-
ing could equal the abhorrence with which
Marie Antoinette regarded the Favorite,
and the latter was not slow to attribute
this feeling to the efforts of her arch enemy,
the duchess. She complained to the king
again and again, but her lover did not like
to be drawn into quarrels not his own, and
it was not until the duchess affronted the
woman whom she detested in his presence,
and in such a manner that he felt himself
aggrieved, that he exerted his authority.
It was at a moment when both ladies
were on their way to a levee held by the
dauphin, and the duchess, while trying to
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL 143
pass the other, set her foot upon her train
in such a way as to tear it to tatters, after
which, without a word of apology, she went
on her way laughing loudly. It is difficult
to imagine what Madame Du Barry would
not have done to the duchess if she had not
chanced to read in the face of the king,
who had been a witness of the affair, an
expression of rage and offended dignity
which told her that she could safely leave
the task of avenging her outraged feelings
in his hands.
That very day the king summoned the
Duchesse de Grammont to his presence,
sternly rebuked her for what she had done,
and then banished her from his court for a
period of two years. Even the remon-
strances and entreaties of her brother failed
to have any effect, and the next day the
duchess departed, and the polite world
realized that Madame Du Barry's influ-
ence with the king was even greater than
had been believed.
If it had not been for the persistence of
Monsieur D'Aiguillon and others who, like
himself, were influenced by their own per-
144 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
sonal ambition, it is doubtful if Madame
Du Barry would have persisted in working
to obtain the overthrow of the Due de
Choiseul. The triumph over his sister was
enough to satisfy a woman of her light,
easy-going nature who had no desire to be
dragged from her toilet-table and the mat-
ters which were of serious moment to her,
to take part in political cabals which she
imperfectly understood and for which she
cared but little.
At the very outset of her career at Ver-
sailles she had diligently paid court to the
great minister, to whom she wrote amiably
and in the humble tone of one who seeks
the friendship and regard of a superior.
She interested herself on behalf of his
brother, the Comte de Stainville, whom she
permitted to secure the reversion of the
Governorship of Strasburg, and she even
went so far as to ignore the contemptuous
attitude of the Duchesse de Grammont and
the fierce war of insulting ballads, pam-
phlets, and epigrams which the Choiseuls,
both brother and sister, waged against her.
Moreover, she did her best to make the
The Favorite of Royalty.
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL 145
minister understand that her influence with
the king was such as to make her a person-
Screen and toilet table.
age of far greater influence than himself,
and she warned him that if he continued
10
146 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
to struggle against her, he must inevitably
get the worst of it.
Meanwhile the exiled duchess was trav-
elling through France under pretence of
health-seeking, and busying herself with
the various parliamentary leaders whom
she met on the way. Naturally enough
the D'Aiguillon faction took it upon them-
selves to see that the king was informed
in regard to everything that the roving
duchess did and said, arid although this
knowledge made him cool towards the
adviser in whose talents he firmly believed,
nevertheless he continued to consult him,
to work with him, and to invite him to eat
and drink with him.
All this having been made known to
D'Aiguillon by his faithful pensioner, he
redoubled his efforts with the Favorite, and
besought her, as she valued her own power
at court, to use every art that she possessed
to extort from the king the lettre de cachet
which should send the Due de Choiseul
into ignominious exile.
Never before, perhaps, did the mistress
of a Bourbon king work with less zest
and malevolence for the banishment of a
prime minister than did Madame Du Barry
for that of Choiseul. She was kept at
her work entirely by the persistency of
D'Aiguillon, who teased her night and day,
trying to interest her in his own ambitions
and hates, and seeking by every means in
his power to instil into her soft heart and
easy-going disposition some of the poison
of his own vindictiveness.
Roused at last by the ceaseless prompt-
ings of the ambitious D'Aiguillon, and the
strong pressure brought to bear on her by
everybody who had anything whatever to
gain by Choiseul's fall, she began to harass
her royal lover, and more than once used
her blandishments with such effect that
the lettre de cachet was actually written at
night, only to be torn up in the morning
when sober sense banished the fumes of
wine from the royal brain. It was not,
however, until the arts of political intrigue
had been nearly exhausted that the party
of the opposition found a mode of attack
which compelled the king to the belief that
it was necessary for him to take speedy
150 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
and definite action. Choiseul had always
sought to impress the king with the idea
that his highest ambition for France was
to keep her at peace with all the rest of
the world. Against this impression the
opposition skilfully directed their forces of
attack by circulating the rumor that the
prime minister was really endeavoring to
restore his waning prestige by involving his
country in war. In proof of this, they
declared that he was trifling with the con-
fidence of Spain, and at the same time
intriguing against England. The king
well knew that a very few weeks before
his prime minister had actually placed on
the council table the scheme for a descent
on England which had been prepared
under the direction of Monsieur de Eroglie
in the year 1766, and had himself brought
forward witnesses to assure the king of its
practicability.
The confidence of Louis XV in his
minister having thus been shaken, Madame
Du Barry's turn arrived, and she, availing
herself of a favorable moment, told him
that if he wished to know the truth in
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL 151
regard to the negotiations with Spain,
he had only to send for the Abbe de
la Ville, M. de Choiseul's clerk, who
was thoroughly familiar ^with the whole
matter.
Now this Abbe de la Ville had begun
life as a Jesuit, and had left that order to be-
come a secular priest. When the great
Fenelon went to Holland as ambassador,
he accompanied him as the instructor of
his children ; but in a very short time his
taste for intrigue and diplomacy made him
a person of consequence in the eyes of
the ambassador, and he became secretary
to the embassy, from which post he was
subsequently recalled to take the posi-
tion of chief clerk in the office of Foreign
Affairs.
Accustomed as he was to having a voice
in all matters, great and small, the Abbe de
la Ville had been much chagrined through
the Due de Choiseul's habit of keeping
his own counsel, and of writing even the
most trivial of despatches in his own hand.
The D'Aiguillon faction knew therefore
that he could be depended on to support
152 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
any measure aimed at the downfall of a
minister who despised his counsel and his
experience, and actually stood in the way
of his advancement.
On the 21st of December, 1770, the
abbe was summoned with much secrecy to
the king's cabinet, and asked, in the pres-
ence of Madame Du Barry, what the Due
de Choiseul's intentions were in regard to
Spain.
To this he made answer that the de-
spatches of the prime minister had not
been shown to him, but that if His Majesty
desired to learn for himself what they con-
tained, he had only to order his minister
to write a letter to the King of Spain, as-
suring him of King Louis's desire for
peace and determination to avoid war at
all costs.
" If Monsieur de Choiseul really desires
peace, he will do this at once," said the Abbe
de la Ville ; " but if he refuses on one pre-
text or another, it may be taken as evidence
that he desires war."
King Louis repaired at once to the Coun-
cil Chamber, and ordered Monsieur de
I
A PRIME MINISTER'S DOWNFALL 155
Choiseul to write a letter to the King of
Spain assuring him of the peaceful inten-
tions of his royal brother of France. Now
the prime minister had, as the D'Aiguillon
party well knew, just sent a courier to
Spain with a conciliatory letter, and there-
fore he replied to the king, saying that
before writing again it would be best to
await an answer to the letter which he had
just sent. Thereupon the king arose and
left the chamber without another word and
in a manner that showed that his anger
had been aroused.
Two days later, after signing a state
paper, the king threw the pen angrily on
the table, instead of giving it back to the
Due de Choiseul, who had handed it to
him. This sign of displeasure towards
his prime minister was noticed by those
present, so that the court was by no means
surprised to learn, two days later, of the
minister's downfall.
The lettre de cachet in the king's hand-
writing which was delivered by the Due
de la A r rilliere to the minister was couched
in the following words :
156 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
I order my cousin, the Due de Choiseul, to
place his resignation of the post of Secretary of
State in the hands of the Due de la Vrilliere and
to withdraw to Chantellout until there is a fresh
order from me. Louis.
AT VERSAILLES this 24th of December, 1770.
The victory won, the Favorite showed
not the least particle of malice toward the
statesman whom she had helped to depose.
On the contrary, when the malevolent
D'Aiguillon sought to deprive him of
his post of Colonel- General of the Swiss
Guards without any indemnity, Madame
Du Barry used her influence with the king
against this scheme, and never rested in her
personal solicitations until she had induced
her lover to bestow upon the fallen min-
ister a hundred thousand crowns in money
and a pension of sixty thousand livres.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAGES OF SIN
HE wages of sin is
death," and no man
ever received payment
for a long life of self-
ishness, cruelty and
sensuality in such hid-
eous coin as that meted
out to His Most Christian Majesty, Louis
XV of France.
Death came to him in its most terrible
form in the spring of 1774, after a series of
warnings that had begun more than a year
before in a sermon preached in the chapel
in Versailles during Holy Week by the
Abbe de Beauvais in which he flagellated
the iniquities practised at court, and even
dared to hint at the turpitudes of the king
himself in a Biblical allusion concerning
158 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
the sensual indulgence of Solomon. Some
weeks later the same young priest, who
had now gained the protection of the re-
ligeuse daughter of the king, Madame
Louise, preached a sermon on death which
made a profound impression on the worn-
out monarch in whose breast remorse was
already beginning to assert itself.
In this sermon the courageous and truth-
telling young abbe recalled to the king's
memory the death of the Duke of Bur-
gundy, of the dauphin and dauphiness, of
the queen, of his mistresses whom he had
the grace not to name in short, of all
those who had been nearest and dearest to
him ; and he gave him to understand that
his turn had long since come, and that the
Reaper stood waiting, sickle in hand, for
his harvest. And the king, listening to
these ghastly warnings, reflected with a
keen sense of dread that he was at that
time in his sixty -third year a period re-
garded as one of unusual fatality to men of
his mode of life.
The year 1774 came round, bringing
with it several happenings that served to
R
1
THE WAGES OF SIN
161
upset the equanimity of the sovereign and
of the courtesan to whom he clung closer
and closer as the months rolled on. Early
in the year the Genoese ambassador, whom
the king was accustomed to see every day
of his life, died suddenly.
D'Aimentieres followed
him to the grave within a
very brief time, and shortly
afterwards the Abbe de la
Ville, Choiseul's old enemy,
on coming to Versailles to
thank King Louis for a
political appointment which
he had given him, was
stricken with apoplexy and
died under his very eyes.
Lastly, his old friend and
associate, the Marquis de
Chouvlain, fell dead at his feet during a
game of picquet.
It was, therefore, with his always super-
stitious mind filled with all manner of
sinister forebodings that the king took his
seat in the midst of a brilliant throng of
courtiers to hear the last of the Lenten
11
Zamore.
162 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
sermons preached by the same young abbe
whose warning voice had awakened in his
heart the terrors of death and of the life to
come scarcely a year before. From his
place in the pulpit this brave young apostle
of truth looked down into the royal pew,
and, fixing his eyes upon his sovereign,
addressed him directly, as was the custom
at that time : " Yet forty days, sire, and
Nineveh shall be overthrown." The king
turned pale, and slowly and solemnly the
preacher again enunciated the awful menace
of the Prophet. Then, growing fervidly
eloquent as he developed his subject, he
compared Paris to Nineveh, denounced the
infidelity of the age, the luxury and wan-
tonness in high places, and urged on all the
need of immediate repentance and purer,
higher living. Finally, speaking himself
with the voice of the real Prophet, he
solemnly warned the king and all his
wanton court that without repentance on
their part "the evil otherwise too surely
coming on France could never be averted."
And the king listened with increasing
pallor, sick with a nameless terror, as one
THE WAGES OF SIN 163
who saw in a vision the reign of blood and
terror and the gleam of the executioner's
knife under which his successors were to
pay the penalty for the sins of generations
of Bourbons.
It was, therefore, with minds full of dis-
mal forebodings that the king and his mis-
tress entered upon the month of April,
1774, the month in which the Almanac de
Liege for that year had already announced
that " a great lady who played a role at a
foreign court would cease to do so."
The king was moody and melancholy in
the extreme, and spoke frequently about
his sickly state of health, the possibility of
death, and what seemed to disturb him
more than all the rest the frightful
account he would have to render to the
Supreme Being for the employment of the
life which had been given him in this
world.
The Favorite, who, like all women of
her class, was intensely superstitious, said
again and again : " I shall be glad when
this nasty month of April has passed," and
the king declared that he should not know
164 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
an easy moment until after the forty days
predicted by the Abbe de Beauvais.
As the days went on, the king's melan-
choly increased, and his mistress, realizing
that it behooved her to drag him from the
depths of his despair, lest religious melan-
cholia should take possession of his mind,
organized a little pleasure trip to Trianon
for the closing days of the month. They
reached that charming retreat on the 26th,
and on the following day His Majesty
complained of headache and severe pains,
and was unable to follow the chase on
horseback. He returned from the hunt in
a carriage, and at once sought repose in the
Favorite's apartments, believing that he
was suffering from an attack of acute
indigestion.
Historians differ as to the origin of the
king's malady. The Abbe Badeau relates
that on the day of his arrival at Trianon
the king noticed a very pretty little girl
who was gathering grass for her cow.
Coming over to her he lifted up her head-
dress and hair, and found that she had very
fine eyes, and it occurred to him that she
THE WAGES OF SIN 165
would look very odd if dressed in the garb
of a fine lady. The young girl was accord-
ingly dressed like a lady in court apparel,
and her face covered with rouge and
patches. In this garb she supped and
drank with the king, and the next day fell
ill of smallpox and died. Other historians
speak of the daughter of the gardener at
Trianon and of a young girl who had been
brought to the Pare aux Cerfs at the king's
desire. The truth is that at that time
there was an epidemic of smallpox in the
neighborhood, and the king very naturally
fell a victim to it.
During the day the king's malady grew
worse, and in the night he sent for his prin-
cipal physician, Lemonier, who found him
feverish, but showing no symptoms of a
nature to cause uneasiness. The Favorite,
dreading more than anything else the awful
fear of death which came crowding into the
heart of her lover with every attack of ill-
ness, urged him to remain at Trianon and
allow her to nurse him, without sending
word to the royal family. The king con-
sented to this, but, in the mean time, news
of his indisposition reached Versailles, and
the dauphin hastened to despatch to his
grandfather's aid the surgeon La Martiniere,
who he knew exercised a strong influence
over the king and who was also an enemy
of Du Barry's.
La Martiniere reached Trianon on the
28th of April, and, being a man of strong
mind and imperative habits of speech, had
no difficulty in prevailing upon the vacil-
lating king to set out at once for Versailles.
He himself supervised the preparations for
the journey, and under his direction the
king was lifted from his couch to a carriage
and driven to Versailles, where he was
immediately put to bed. The members of
his family, including his daughters and the
dauphin, came at once to see him ; but after
a very brief conversation with each he sent
them away for the night, and spent the rest
of the evening with Madame L)u Barry.
The next day the doctors, who were still
ignorant of the nature of his malady,
prescribed three bleedings, which left the
patient in an enfeebled condition, and un-
doubtedly did much to hasten his death.
THE WAGES OF SIN 169
The next day, the 30th, one of the doctors,
drawing near to the king with a wax candle,
discovered on his cheeks and forehead red
spots in which pimples were already begin-
ning to form, and knew at once that the
disease with which he was afflicted was
smallpox. Very much relieved at having
actually learned the nature of his complaint,
the physicians announced their discovery in
tones that were so re-assuring that it was
generally believed at court that the king's
illness meant only a ten days' confinement
to his room. Bourdeau, however, Madame
Du Barry's physician, shook his head doubt-
ingly when the news was brourht to him,
and exclaimed : " Smallpox at sixty -four
with a constitution like the king's is a
terrible disease ! "
And now outside the door of the sick
room began a fierce struggle between the
two rival parties of the court. The party
that rallied about Madame Du Barry made
every effort to push into the sick room the
woman whom the king loved, in order that
the impression might prevail that her influ-
ence with him was still paramount.
170 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
The anti- Barry ites, on the contrary, cried
out against the continuance of the scandal,
demanded that the sacrament should be
administered, and called upon the pious
Monsieur de Beaumont to follow the ex-
ample of the Bishop of Soisons who, thirty
years before, when the king was thought to
be mortally ill at Metz, drove from his
side his then mistress, the Duchesse de
Chateauroux.
" Politics makes strange bedfellows," and
so it happened that in " this jobbing and this
trafficking in the conscience of the king,"
as the Cardinal de Luymes called it, we
find the devotees and the Jesuits banding
together to prevent the king from receiving
communion, while the Choiseul party of
philosophers and sceptics are in league to
compel the Archbishop of Paris to admin-
ister it.
On the 2d of INI ay, the archbishop
arrived from Paris, bringing with him
the sacrament, and hesitating between his
conscience, which demanded of him the
expulsion of the Favorite, and a sense of
gratitude for the services which that Favor-
THE WAGES OF SIN 171
ite had rendered to his party by the over-
throw of Choiseul and the elevation of
D'Aiguillon. Before the arrival of the
archbishop, Richelieu, D'Aiguillon, and
Madame Du Barry held a conference in
which it was decided to do their best to
prevent the administration of the sacra-
ment. The king's daughter, Madame
Adelaide, was easily won over to their side
by the doctors of the Du Barry party who
warned her that to even propose the sacra-
ment might easily give the patient his
death blow. Therefore the Due de Rich-
elieu met the archbishop as he was about
to enter the king's ante-chamber, and im-
plored him not to cause the death of their
sovereign by what he termed, with charac-
teristic flippancy, a " theological proposi-
tion." Then, with the graceful cynicism
which so well became him, he offered to
make his own confession to the prelate,
promising to regale him with such a collec-
tion of sins as he had not listened to in
many a year. Becoming serious again,
he represented to the archbishop that to
send away the Favorite was to insure the
172 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
triumph of Choiseul, and that to injure
the woman who was a friend was also to
serve the faction that had always been out-
spoken in its enmity to the ecclesiastics.
As a final argument, he repeated to him
what Madame Du Barry had said to him
the night before : " Let the archbishop
leave us alone, and he shall have a cardi-
nal's hat. I will take care of that, and will
answer for it."
The result of the Due de Richelieu's
logical and convincing eloquence was that
the archbishop entered the sick room,
remained there for about a quarter of an
hour, and then went away without speak-
ing about the sacrament. The king was
greatly reassured by his silence on the sub-
ject of the Eucharist, and demanded that
Madame Du Barry should be summoned
at once to his presence. When she arrived,
he kissed her beautiful arms and hands with
a greater degree of pleasure than he had
shown toward her since the beginning of
his illness.
Disappointed but still undaunted, the
Choiseul faction turned to the Cardinal de
THE WAGES OF SIN 173
la Roche-Aymon, and urged him to pro-
pose the sacrament. By this time they
had rallied to their support many of the
more devout of the clergy, among them
the Bishop of Car-
cassonne, who
appealed to
the cardi-
nal, in the
name of the
holy cross,
not to allow
King Louis to
pass out of the
world without
being anointed,
and called upon
him to so deport
himself in the sick chamber
that the king should, before
he died, show an example of repentance to
his country which he had scandalized.
As a result of the great influence thus
brought to bear on him, the Archbishop of
Paris visited the king on the 3d of May,
and there held a long conversation with
174 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
him, the result of which was that in the
evening when Jeanette Du Barry, whom he
had sent for a few hours before, entered
his chamber, radiant in the belief that
her hold on him was as strong as ever, he
beckoned her to his side and whispered :
" Madame, I am very sick ; I know what
I have to do ; I do not want to begin
over again the scene at Metz, and there-
fore we must part. Go to Ruel, to
Monsieur D'Aiguillon's ; and be sure that
I shall always feel for you the tenderest
friendship."
A moment after she had gone weeping
from his presence, he called for her in a
voice that showed he was beginning to
become delirious. " Ah ! she is gone," he
said sadly, when he realized that she was
no longer in the room. " Then we must
go, too at least we must pray to Saint
Gene vie ve."
The reign of Jeanette Du Barry had
ended. And with it had ended, too, the
dynasty of left-handed queens of France,
which began with Diane de Poictiers, and
perished from off the face of the earth
Alone with the King.
THE WAGES OF SIN 177
when the last of the line was thrust from
the royal bedchamber.
But if the end of the Du Barry reign
had been commonplace, in what terms shall
we characterize the final passing of Louis
XV, known to his subjects of half a century
before as Louis the Well Beloved, and now
stretched upon his gorgeous bed with the
hand of death upon him and his mind a
prey to the most awful terrors ?
Just one week has passed since he turned
his back upon his mistress and cried in his
extremity for the consolations of the Church.
In 1744, when he was ill at Metz, six thou-
sand prayers for his recovery were ordered
at Notre Dame by devout subjects. In
1757, at the time of the assault upon his
life by Damiens, only six hundred were
called for, and now as he lies here at Ver-
sailles, with the death agony upon him, only
three pious souls have asked that the
prayers of the Church be said for him in
the great cathedral in Paris.
Torn by the terrors of a reproaching
conscience, he has summoned the priests to
his bedside, and they have performed their
12
178 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
holy office. But even at the moment of
receiving absolution at their hands, he clings
to the idea of ruling by divine right, and
though the cardinal announces that His
Majesty repents of any scandals that his
conduct may have occasioned in his king-
dom, he qualifies it by adding that the
king considers himself responsible for his
conduct to God alone.
By nature intensely superstitious, he de-
mands that the clergy shall remain with
him in the pestilential sick room from
which all save his daughters and a few
other devoted souls have long since fled in
terror. During the few hours of life that
remain to him, he would rather listen to
the prayers of the religious faith to which
he has turned in his hour of anguish, than
permit his mind to dwell on the ignoble
life of vice and selfishness, of sins committed,
and good undone, that is fast drawing to its
pitiful close.
Little as we may envy this Bourbon king
the physical sufferings which mark his end,
we cannot help feeling that they must be
light indeed compared with the agony of
THE WAGES OF SIN 179
remorse bred by the thoughts that come
crowding upon him, despite his efforts to
fix his mind on the consolations that reli-
gion extends to him. He must remember
that " the well-beloved " of fifty years ago
has not of late dared to show his face in
his own capital for fear of mockery and
insult. He must remember what France
was in the days of his predecessor, and what
she is now, with her peasantry ground down
under the heel of the most atrocious politi-
cal system ever known, her soldiers sent to
far-off climes to be butchered in useless
warfare, her colonies gone, her prestige van-
ished, and want, shame, and rebellion stalk-
ing her streets. He has often wondered
cynically how his uncouth, stupid grandson
will contrive to bear up under the kingly
crown for which he is predestined. Can
he think of him now without a prophetic
glimpse of the axe flashing across his
troubled vision ? Above all else that is pass-
ing through his mind, sharper than the stings
of conscience, more solemn than the pray-
ers of the Church, ring the awful words of
the Prophet as they fell from the lips of the
180 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Abbe Beauvais in the court chapel : " Forty
days yet, sire, and Nineveh shall be over-
thrown." The fortieth day has come and
is drawing to a close. Already the shad-
ows are deepening in the chamber whose
splendors are a mockery to the foul disease
that has laid this mighty sovereign low. A
candle has been lighted and placed in the
embrasure of one of the tall, sumptuously
curtained windows that looks out upon a
marble courtyard. Hundreds of eyes are
watching that candle from without, for it is
known throughout the palace that so long
as the king lives it will burn.
It is late in the afternoon, and the fortieth
day is almost passed, when of a sudden the
light in the window of the death chamber
is extinguished, and the courtiers come
pouring out of the rooms where they have
been waiting, and, with a noise that is abso-
lutely like thunder, rush through the corri-
dors and down the great staircases to the
chamber in which the new king, Louis
XVI, and Marie Antoinette stand waiting
for their reign to begin. At the feet of the
new sovereign the courtiers make their first
THE WAGES OF SIN 181
obeisance, then rise and hurry away from
the house of death in which the loathsome
body of him who was once the hope of
France, Louis the Well Beloved, lies unat-
tended, save by a few of the minor clergy
and some menial attendants who must pay
with their lives for their fidelity.
Late at night the body, attended by a
scanty escort, is borne at a quick trot
through crowds of contemptuous Parisians
who line both sides of the road all the way
to the Abbey of St. Denis, where it is
hastily thrown into a vault.
It is a dark and awful picture, this final
passing of the French king. There is one
gleam of tenderness, however, bright with
the reflection of past glory, that falls across
his bier as it is carried with irreverent haste
through the gates of Versailles. A grizzled
veteran of the old wars shoulders his mus-
ket and brings his hand to salute, as the last
honor that he can pay to his dead king.
" After all," murmurs the vieux moustache,
sympathetically, " he was at Fontenoy."
CHAPTER IX
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN
Long
HE king is dead !
live the king ! "
" God help and pro-
tect us ! We are too
young to reign 1 "
Such, we are told, was
the beginning of the
reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
That the young queen lost no time in
carrying out her oft-repeated threat to dis-
miss the Favorite from court the very
moment it should be in her power to do
so, is evidenced from the following letter,
placed in Madame Du Barry's hands by a
messenger the day after the body of Louis
XV had been borne at a rapid pace from
Versailles to St. Denis, and there thrust,
with scant ceremony, into the tomb.
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 185
VERSAILLES, May 12th, 1774.
I hope, madame, that you will not have any
doubts as to all the pain I feel at being obliged to
announce to you that you are forbidden to appear
at court ; but I am obliged to carry out the orders
of the king, who wishes me to impress on you that
his intention is, not to allow you to come there till
there is a fresh order made by him. His Majesty,
at the same time, is kind enough to permit you to
go and see your aunt in the Abbey of Pont-aux-
Dames, and I am going, for that reason, to write
to the abbess in order that you may not experience
any difficulty in the matter. You will be good
enough to acknowledge the receipt of this letter
through the person who brings it to you, so that I
may be able to assure His Majesty of the fact that
I have carried out his orders.
I have the honor to be, with respect, madame,
Your very humble and very obedient servant,
DE LA VRILLIERE.
Marie Antoinette's defenders claim that
she had nothing to do with the expulsion
of Du Barry, and lay great stress on the
fact that within comparatively recent years
there has been found, in the archives of the
Prefecture of Police, an entry which shows
that this order was entered there on the
186 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
9th of May, 1774, the day before the king's
death, and the inference is, supported by
certain corroborative testimony, that the
king desired to have her put away for a
time, because she knew too many state
secrets. This is not unlikely, when we
consider the absolute indifference of Louis
XV to the feelings of every one about him,
even of those whom he believed that he
loved. His grandson, on the other hand,
was of an easy-going disposition, and it
is scarcely probably that he would have
adopted such harsh measures in regard to
a woman who had enjoyed the love and
confidence of his grandfather and prede-
cessor. The matter is touched upon, how-
ever, in a manner that should dispose of all
doubt, in a letter sent by the young queen
to her empress mother to announce the
death of Louis XV, and in which she says :
" The public expected great changes in a
moment ! The king has limited himself to
sending the creature away to a convent,
and to driving from the court everything
which is connected with that scandal."
There is something almost like a note of
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 187
warning in the words uttered by Du Barry
herself on receipt of the message which
sent her into exile :
" A nice reign indeed, that starts with a
lettre de cachet ! " she exclaimed, with a few
choice blasphemies, to the messenger who
has brought her the duke's
letter. She herself, to do her
justice, had never, so
far as authentic his-
tory asserts, asked
for a single lettre de
cachet during the
whole five years
of her reign, and this
in itself is a circumstance The Du L>arry coffee ^
that redounds to the credit
of this " unmalignant, not wholly unpitiable
thing," as Carlisle has called her, especially
when we consider the fact that during the
whole period of her reign she was the tar-
get for every sort of attack that feminine
jealousy, court intrigue, or the political am-
bition of her enemies could devise. Her
predecessor, the Marquise de Pompadour,
left a very different record behind her.
188 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Jean Du Barry, although included in
the same order, was too smart to be caught.
The instant that he learned of the king's
death, he consulted a friend, named Goy,
as to what he should do, and this gentle-
man, who appears to have possessed a high
degree of common sense, replied that there
was nothing left for him but the jewel case
and the post-horses.
" What ! " demanded the Roue, with an
assumption of dignity, " do you advise
me to fly ? "
" Well," replied his friend, " you can
alter it to the post-horses and the jewel
case, if it sounds better."
The Roue took this advice, and in a few
hours was well on his way to Germany,
which country he reached in safety, thanks
to the fact that the period ante-dated that of
the telegraph and telephone. Two years
later, he returned to Toulouse, married
again, and for some time led what must
have seemed a very monotonous life to one
accustomed to such high intrigues as those
that had previously engrossed his attention.
It was his boast that, during his sister-in-
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 189
law's reign, he had " flung into the pave-
ments of Paris " eighteen million of francs ;
but that did not prevent him from harass-
ing her constantly for money until the
last days of her life.
When Louis XV died, one of the cords
and there were not many of them left, -
that had bound the French people to the
monarchy snapped in twain. By a curious
coincidence, on the same day, and almost at
the very moment of his death, news of
the passage of the Boston Port Act in the
English Parliament was first received in
this country. This bill was a measure of
retaliation for the Boston Tea Party of the
previous December 16th, and by its provi-
sions the port of Boston was to remain
closed to ships of all kinds until its inhabi-
tants should reimburse the East Indian
Company for the loss of the tea which had
gone to flavor the waters of the harbor.
The receipt of the news that the obsti-
nate old English king was still determined
to discipline the great lusty colony like a
refractory child, was marked by an exhibi-
tion of feeling that convinced statesmen
like Adams, Hancock and their peers that
a revolution of the thirteen colonies was
one of the absolute certainties of the near
future.
So it happened that while Louis XVI,
with his queen at his elbow, was beginning,
with a spiteful lettre de cachet, a reign that
was destined to end in blood and ignominy,
the men who were dominant in the Ameri-
can colonies were beginning to prepare for
the great seven years struggle that destiny
had marked out for them.
As for Madame Du Barry, her reign hav-
ing ended with that of the king, she pro-
ceeded to the abbey designated in her lettre
de cachet, and Marie Antoinette began her
reign as the lawful queen of France.
If we marvel at the way in which Louis
XV and his court went dancing, drinking
on toward the deluge that the Pompadour
had predicted, we marvel all the more at
the way in which his grandson and his light-
headed young queen bore the sceptre of
government.
Neither one of them seems to have had
any sense whatever of impending disaster,
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 193
though even the old King Louis had often
remarked, " When I am gone, I should like
very much to know how Berry [the family
name for the dauphin, whom he thoroughly
despised] will contrive to stand up under
it all," meaning the republican element
which he himself had found it so difficult
to cope with.
It was not merely that they were " too
young to reign," they were too ignorant to
be intrusted with such an awful responsi-
bility as that of the government of the
kingdom of France.
Louis XVI was as much unlike his noble-
looking, aristocratic grandfather as it was
possible for a man to be. His manners
were awkward, his voice harsh and uncul-
tured, his clothing soiled and untidy, and
his mind dull, and his will weak and vacil-
lating. His appearance betrayed his habits
of gluttony, for he was obese of figure and
heavy of feature. When he dined in pub-
lic, in deference to the ancient French cus-
tom which decreed that the inviolable right
of the people of France was to see their sov-
ereign eat, he gorged himself to an extent
13
194 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
that proved disgusting to those who had
been used to the elegancies of Louis XV
and his associates. He devoted himself
chiefly to the chase, and to amateur lock-
making and map-drawing, and kept a diary
which is very interesting reading. The
day in which he killed nothing was deemed
worse than wasted, and left no record be-
hind it save the single word " Nothing "
scrawled in the diary.
So unfavorable was the impression that
he created in the minds of his subjects that
his advisers deemed it prudent to counter-
act it by means of the suggestion, artfully
circulated, that after all such a simple and
frugal king was formed for his whole peo-
ple rather than for his court alone.
And yet some gleam of the impending
axe may have crossed even his dull, uncom-
prehending brain, for we are told that at his
coronation, at the very moment when the
crown was placed upon his brow, he raised
his hand suddenly to relieve his head for
the moment of the weight, and exclaimed
petulantly : " It hurts me ! "
As to the real character of the young
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 195
queen, it is not an easy matter to get at
the truth, so fierce has been the abuse of
her detractors, so fulsome the panegyrics
of her supporters. With the question of
her morals, we need not meddle, nor should
we lend a too ready ear to the stories that
were circulated in regard to her stories
of the kind that always will be circulated
so long as women of youth, beauty, and
high spirits shall be exposed to the fierce
white light of public fame.
That Marie Antoinette proved a far
greater calamity to the French people than
had Madame Du Barry, is a fact that it
would be difficult to gainsay, nor should
the circumstance that she was the legiti-
mate queen of France, and not the mere
mistress of a dotard king, serve as an ex-
cuse for her follies. Born in the purple,
and having as a mother the wisest of sov-
ereigns and the most prudent of counsel-
lors, a great deal more might have been
expected of her than of a young woman
with no inheritance but beauty, a sort
of bright native wit, and unfailing good
temper, who, transplanted from the shop
196 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
counter to a seat which, though unlawful,
was none the less secure, on the steps of
the throne of France, had plunged into
luxuries and extravagances of the sort that
have a stronger fascination than anything
else in the world for women of her class.
She spent millions of the public money,
because it was given to her to spend, and
she spent it, too, without asking herself
whence it came. It was enough for her
that she held the envied place of Favorite,
and as she was not a lawful queen she
could not take upon her own shoulders the
responsibilities of the kingdom.
Marie Antoinette, however, came of a
class in which governing is as much of a
trade as is the profession of cooking in the
province of Ticino in Italian Switzerland,
from which have come the greatest cooks
and restaurateurs in the world.
The French people had the same right
to the services of their extravagantly paid
queen that the hotel-keeper has to those of
the high salaried chef, nurtured in an at-
mosphere of sauces, as she had been in that
of the Austrian court.
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 197
But although a brilliant and bea.utiful
figure in her husband's court, carrying her-
self with queenly dignity when occasion
demanded, and encouraging, by her patron-
age, the arts of music, painting, and statu-
ary, she was absolutely selfish in her pursuit
of her own enjoyment, reckless of the
results of her folly, and cruelly vindictive
in her treatment of those who, like Du
Barry, had incurred her dislike.
History has laid many evil things at the
door of the fallen Favorite, and one story,
which her enemies never tire of repeat-
ing, is to the effect that on one occasion,
when her royal lover was greatly exercised
over the partition of Poland, she inquired
innocently : " Where is Poland ? " This
anecdote does not do much credit to her
education, but after all it was not her
business, as the king's mistress, to know
anything about Poland. There is some-
thing far worse than mere ignorance on
the part of one who should have been well
informed, in the query of Marie Antoinette,
" Why do the people cry for bread, when
they can get such nice cakes for a penny ? "
198 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
Many and interesting are the stories
related of the young queen during the
early years of her reign, and with many of
them we can sympathize ; while her impa-
tience of the elaborate ceremonial of court-
life, with its ponderous rules and etiquette,
as burdensome to her as the enormous
coiffure which she was compelled to wear
on her head, cannot fail to commend her
to us of a simpler, and, we hope, a more
sensible age. It is pleasant to read of her
mockery of Madame de Noailles, whose duty
it was to follow her about and remind her,
in low, respectful whispers, of neglected
points of etiquette. What more entranc-
ing picture is there than that of this beau-
tiful young queen lying prone on a bed of
forest leaves, and laughingly refusing to
rise until Madame de Noailles should be
summoned to tell her what particular form
of etiquette the rules of the French court
prescribed for a dauphiness who had been
thrown from her donkey.
Moreover Marie Antoinette will be en-
deared to Americans for all time because
of the influence which she used in our
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 201
behalf during our struggle with the mother
country. She helped to make Benjamin
Franklin, then accredited to her husband's
court, the rage of Paris, and under the
spell of his wit and diplomacy espoused the
cause of the colonies with all her heart.
This beautiful queen, the chivalrous Mar-
quis de Lafayette, and the American com-
missioner, who was none the less crafty
and adroit because of his Quaker garb and
unpowdered locks, did a vast deal to influ-
ence public opinion in France, and that, in
its turn, brought over the ministry to the
American side. The king, however, was
very averse to having anything to do with
the American disturbance, and even at the
moment of signing the treaty with the
United States of America, in 1778, said:
"You will remember that this is against
my better judgment."
That the king viewed the matter rightly
from his own point of view was amply
proved by subsequent events. For not
only did his contributions of men and
treasure to the American cause add enor-
mously to the great public debt under
202 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
which France was then groaning, but the
success of our arms aided as we were at
a most critical moment by the French
served to spread abroad through the king-
dom the seeds of democracy. Soldiers re-
turning from America told stories of the
new land of liberty which served only to
fan the flames of discontent, and it is not
too much to say that one of the greatest
mistakes of the reign of Louis XVI, so far
as the stability of the monarchy was con-
cerned, was his taking part in a costly war
which gained for him the undying hatred
of England and failed to secure for him
the friendship of the new republic.
During the first years of her reign, the
young queen remained childless, and de-
voted herself exclusively to the pursuit of
pleasure. In the mornings she received
visitors in her bedchamber, as Du Barry
had done, and was scarcely less particular
than the former Favorite in her manner of
>v
exposing her charms to the gaze of her
admirers. In the afternoons she amused
herself with high play at the card-tables or
in the gardens of Little Trianon, and in
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN
203
the evenings she went to masked balls and
late suppers in company with the worst
libertines of the
part in private the-
whieh the language
loosest sort, lost great
sums of money
at the gaming
table, and, in
short, lived in
such a man-
ner as seriously to
weaken her popular-
ity with the French
people and to alarm
her prudent mother in
Vienna. So long as the
Empress Maria Theresa
lived and Mercy-
Argenteau
tained the post
of Austrian
ambassador at
the French
court, Marie
Antoinette re-
court, took
atricals in
was of the
re-
Veritable night table actually used by
Du Barry at Versailles.
204 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
mained to a certain extent under the
maternal control, and the correspondence
between the sovereign and the diplomat, as
well as that of the mother and daughter,
afford a marvellously interesting insight into
the history of that period.
No less interesting is the picture of court
life drawn by Mr. Thomas E. Watson in
" The Story of France " :
" As Frederick the Great loved Sans
Souci, and Washington Mt. Vernon, as
Mirabeau would slip away on Sunday to
lounge in the rose gardens at Argenteuil,
and Napoleon loved to saunter, hands
crossed behind him, along the quietudes of
Malmaison, Marie Antoinette sought to
create for herself an ideal retreat, an Eden
of the fancy, where she was to find true
friendship, true happiness, blissful repose.
The Little Trianon was a delicious bit of
marble architecture built by Louis XV in
a retired portion of the park of Versailles.
It was here that he had loved to lay aside
the trappings and formalities of royalty and
play the private gentleman, entertaining a
few choice spirits in the little palace, and
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 205
amusing himself with amateur farming and
flower culture in the lovely grounds.
" Louis XVI gave Little Trianon to his
wife, and with the eager delight of a child
she set about making it a paradise. The
world was ransacked for the finest trees,
the choicest shrubs, the loveliest flowers.
The rarest skill was employed in laying
out gardens, lawns, shrubberies, walks,
creating grottoes, hills, lakes and winding
rivers. No expense was spared ; the queen
demanded a fairy-land, and the gardener
gave it ; the taxpayers footed the bills, and
the queen was in ecstasies. The Little
Trianon became a gem, a marvel of beauty,
which all travellers went to see.
" Brilliant parterres, emerald stretches of
velvet lawn, waving masses of luxuriant
foliage, glimpses of marble statuary and
silvery waters, all were there to fascinate
the eye and kindle enthusiasm. Fountains
sprang up in the sun, sparkling and dancing
and splashing ; the rivulet wound in and
out, round and round, through the garden,
the lawn, the meadow ; the nightingales
sang in the shadow of the groves ; the
206 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
marble Belvidere crowned the steep ; and
upon the enchanted island which rose from
the bosom of the lake rested the Temple
of Love. A model rustic village lined the
borders of the lake, and there was the mill,
the grange, and the manor-house for the
master, all complete. The dairy must not
be overlooked, that El Dorado dairy where
Blanchette, the cow, was milked by the
' daughter of the Caesars.' The milk ves-
sels were of porcelain, rested upon marble
slabs, and conveyed Blanchette's milk to a
churn of silver.
" In this Eden the queen lived with a
select few of the younger members of the
nobility. The king himself was not to
come unless invited. Only the few were
welcome, only the congenial, the young,
the gallant, the gay. Dull care must not
enter here, nor gloom, nor weariness, nor
pain.
" In the lexicon of the queen's youth,
there was no such word as duty. To
frolic, to feast, to dress, to outshine the
brightest, to dazzle the eye of the be-
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 209
holder, to create a radiance in her own
immediate circle, to laugh, jest, play and
enjoy, was the whole of her gospel.
Such was high life all around her. Why
should n't she be gay ? Let others talk
of public distress, prate of economy and
preach of woes to come. It was an old
song that had been heard now since the
good year 1700 : ' We must amuse our-
selves.' On with the dance ; on with festi-
vals and theatricals ; on with the horse-
races, sleigh-rides, and lawn-parties ; on to
the opera, the opera-ball and the opera-
supper. Let us lose royally at faro, the
State pays ; let us enrich our pets, the
State pays ; let us lavish millions upon
Little Trianon, the State pays. Let us
whisper over the latest scandal, and titter
as we do so. Let us skate along the con-
versational surface as close as we can go
to the forbidden ground of the utterly
obscene. Let us mock at all things seri-
ous, decorous, and coldly prudent ! Such
was Marie Antoinette before trouble sobered
her thoughts, silvered her tresses and struck
the light out of her life.
14
210 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
" At Paris, in the Bibliotheque Nationale,
you may see a book which speaks but too
convincingly of the true character of the
unfortunate queen. The cover is that of
the Catholic missal, for Marie Antoinette
was a devoted Catholic, and she was faith-
ful in her attendance at chapel ; but within
the sacred cover of this book of worship is
enclosed the contents of an obscene novel.
The priest could only see the cover, and he
would glorify God for so devout a worship-
per ; but the bowed head of the queen was
bent over a filthy love-story, and while the
priest talked of God, the queen was reading
the history of polite adultery.
" Marie Antoinette should be judged by
the standard of her own times, not by that
of ours. She should be compared to those
around her, not to those around us. En-
vironment is the father of us all environ-
ment and heredity."
In due course of time a daughter was
born to the queen, and afterwards, in
October, 1781, a son, and the whole nation
went wild with delight because their king
had an heir. Sir Samuel Romilly, who
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN
happened to be in Paris at this time, was
saddened by the sight of the swarms of
hungry, ragged, dirty people who danced
in the public parks to the music of the
royal band to show their delight at the
advent of a child who was to be brought
up as a common oppressor.
The birth of this child served to restore
for the moment the popularity of the
young queen, which had waned materially
during the half dozen years of her reign,
because of her own conduct. Mr. Watson
has given us the picture of the rejoicings
with which the birth of the little dauphin
was celebrated, which is well worth quot-
ing as it shows us Louis XVI and his
Austrian queen at the one moment during
their reign when they really seemed to be
beloved by their subjects.
" People embraced each other in the
street, as though the happiness of the event
was personal to every citizen of France.
Addresses of congratulation poured in from
all the departments and public bodies.
Illuminations lit up the towns and cities,
processions thronged the streets, loyal songs
212 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
were sung at the theatres amid deafening
applause, Te Deums were chanted in cathe-
drals, and melodious organs pealed forth
their richest notes. All France was glad,
deliriously glad. God had given the king
a son, and the people would not be left
without a royal staff to lean upon. The
guilds and trades-unions of Paris were as
exuberant in their manifestations of joy as
any place-hunter of the court. They spent
money freely to make a fitting display at
Versailles. Arrayed in the new uniforms
of their various organizations and accom-
panied by bands of music, the mechanics,
artificers, and tradesmen of Paris marched
out to Versailles and paraded in the court
of the palace. Chimney-sweepers, ele-
gantly dressed, carried an ornamented
chimney upon the top of which was
perched a chimney-sweep of the smallest
size. The butchers passed in review bear-
ing a colossal beef. Smiths hammered
away upon an anvil ; shoemakers made a
pretty pair of shoes for the son of the king,
and the tailors presented a tiny uniform of
the dauphin's regiment. For a long time
"I
53
C
MARIE ANTOINETTE'S REIGN 215
Louis XVI, the happy father, who could
not say * my son ' too often that blessed
day, stood on the balcony viewing the
parade, intoxicated by the enthusiasm which
prevailed. No happier day was his. King,
queen and people were united then, drawn
together by the dimpled hand of a child.
" Amid all these rejoicings what spectre
pushes its way to the front, marring the
universal pleasure ? It is the procession of
the worshipful coffin-makers, to whom it
had not occurred that a hearse or a casket,
borne in procession, would not add to the
exhilaration of the hour. Old Princess
Sophie, the king's aunt, weak of nerves
and querulous, thrilled with horror at the
sight, and had the worshipful coffin-makers
put out of the procession.
" The market-women of Paris came in a
body to see the queen, to congratulate her.
These women were dressed in black silk
gowns, wore diamonds, and had their ad-
dress inscribed upon the leaves of a fan.
The queen received these Dames of the
Hall most affably, and the king dined them
in the palace. The fish- women also came,
216 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
also gained access to the queen, and made
three speeches of congratulation, one to
the king, one to the queen, and one to the
child. A more fervent spirit of attachment
than that which inspired these addresses of
the working people of Paris never found
expression. Gaze once more upon this
scene the king on the balcony at Ver-
sailles, tears of joy in his eyes, his heart
overflowing with happiness, and around
him the splendid and spontaneous tribute
of boundless affection laid at his feet by
the laboring classes of Paris. This was
October, 1781.
" The outburst of loyalty and affection
was not confined to Paris and Versailles.
It prevailed throughout the provinces. It
was universal and genuine. Songs, danc-
ings, music, festivals, celebrations, did not
cease till way into January, 1782."
CHAPTER X
IN RETIREMENT
ISTORY, that is to
say authentic history,
has very little to say
of the fallen Favorite
during the years that
passed from the mo-
ment when Louis XVI
began his ill-fated reign with a lettre de
cachet until that in which she fell a victim
to the Reign of Terror.
She remained in the abbey until early
in 1775, when she was permitted to regain
her liberty. Forbidden to live within ten
leagues of Paris, or the court, she purchased
the Chateau of Saint Vrain, situated a few
miles from Artajon and consisting of a
handsome house, provided with chapel,
stables, forecourt, etc., and a domain of
218 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
about one hundred and forty acres. This
property, which still exists, had belonged
to the second son of Madame La Garde,
with whom, early in her career, when she
was simply little Jeanette Becu, she had
found employment as lady's companion.
Here she remained for
two years, giving balls and
other entertainments, re-
lieving the necessities of the
poor, and enjoying as best
she could the pleasures of
French country life. She
also founded two scholar-
ships in a school of art for
workmen, which her old
friend, M. de Sartines, the
ex-chief of Police, had estab-
lished in Paris. The deed
for these scholarships bears
the date of September 21,
1775, and on the same day
Bodyguard of she purchased, for fifty-three
thousand francs, a house and
thirty acres of land, which she presented
to her mother and stepfather, thus enabling
IN RETIREMENT
them to live in comfort for the rest of their
days.
Having obtained permission to return to
Louveciennes, Madame Du Barry repaired
to that house with her great retinue of ser-
vants, and there lived for years a life that
was almost wholly devoid of exciting inci-
dent and was devoted largely to "charitable
work among her poorer neighbors.
One of her last appearances in the great
world in which she had once played her part
was on the occasion of the debut of the
beautiful Mademoiselle Contat, afterwards
the Countess de Parny, at the Theatre
Fran^ais. It was a brilliant audience that
gathered in honor of this lovely young de-
butante. Marie Antionette was there in the
royal box in company with her brother, the
Emperor of Austria, then journeying under
the incognito of Count von Falkenstein.
With them, were the Princesse de Lamballe,
the Countess de Polignac, the courtly and
elegant Baron de Besenval and the Count
de Vaudreuil, who shared with the tragedian
Le Kain the distinction of possessing the
most courtly and gracious manners toward
THE STORY OF DU BARRY
the fair sex in all France. In boxes adjoin-
ing that of the queen, were the Due and
Duchesse de Chartres, in company with the
fascinating Mademoiselle de Genlis, whose
name the gossips associated with that of the
duke, Madame and Mademoiselle de Pro-
vence and the Countess d'Artois and a
host of other Parisian exquisites, while the
rest of the audience was made up of the
leading critics, poets, dramatists and artists
of Paris.
By many in the throng that clustered
about the royal box the Countess Du Barry
was recognized, simply dressed and closely
veiled, as she passed along the corridor on
the arm of the Due de Cosse-Brissac.
Watchful eyes saw her afterwards, still
veiled and hiding behind the thick silk cur-
tains of her box, for she had come from her
lovely chateau, not because she desired to
be seen in the gay world, but because of her
deep interest in the event of the evening.
Escorted by the duke, Madame Du Barry
left the theatre before the conclusion of the
play, noticing, perhaps, that she had been
recognized by the royal party, and being
IN RETIREMENT 223
fully aware of the queen's antipathy to her.
Indeed Marie Antoinette that very evening
replied to her brother's question as to the
identity of the veiled beauty that she was
" that creature," a term which had pre-
viously shocked the good sense and taste of
Maria Theresa, when she encountered it, as
she frequently had, in her daughter's letters.
Concerning this incident, Lady Jackson
speaks her mind with her accustomed free-
dom, and at the same time relates how the
Austrian Emperor proceeded to gratify the
curiosity which had been awakened in him
at the sight of the famous Madame Du
Barry, and the buzz of interest and conjec-
ture that had gone round the theatre the
moment she was recognized.
" The retired life of ' the creature ' at
Louveciennes," says Lady Jackson, " natu-
rally provoked comparison with that of ' the
creatures ' of Versailles, and was not always
in favor of the latter. With the Parisian
public, the Favorite of the late king was far
less unpopular than the new favorites of the
queen, while at and around Louveciennes,
she was greatly revered and beloved for her
224 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
kindness of heart, the interest she took in
the poor and her extreme benevolence. She
could not, on this occasion, have heard the
queen's petulant exclamation or the whis-
pered rebuke of the incognito Emperor.
" On the morrow, however, she was in-
formed that the Counts von Falkenstein
and Cobenzel begged permission to pay
their respects to the lady of Louveciennes,
and to be allowed to walk through the pic-
turesque grounds surrounding the chateau.
Madame Du Barry took much pride in her
park and grounds. She was accustomed to
walk in them daily -often for hours to-
gether. They were charmingly laid out in
the English style, and the fine range of green-
houses was filled with the choicest and most
beautiful flowers a luxury then only at-
tainable by the wealthy and great. The
pavilion was a perfect museum of objects
of art. Joseph and his friend seem to have
been greatly interested in them, and gener-
ally well pleased with all they saw not
omitting the fair chatelaine herself.
"She was then in her thirty-second year,
and still retained, without any tendency to
IN RETIREMENT 225
embonpoint, the youthful grace of her tall,
slight, elegant figure. Powder dimmed
not the golden tinge of her wavy light
brown hair, and no rouge disfigured her
face. A strange contrast this must have
presented to eyes accustomed to the
painted faces of Versailles. She now
dressed with great simplicity, but always
in excellent taste. Leaning on the arm
of her Imperial guest, she conducted him
through those fine avenues of lofty forest
trees for which her domain was famous,
and to those sites whence the finest pros-
pects were obtained. And when, after
spending with her the greater part of the
day in admiring the beauties of nature and
art, in both of which Louveciennes was so
rich, Joseph took his leave, he replied to
her thanks for the honor of his visit to a
poor recluse : * Madame, beauty is every-
where a queen ; and it is I who am honored
by your receiving my visit.'
" Cynical as he was, and sometimes very
offensive, yet the Emperor Joseph, when
he pleased, could make very gallant
speeches and pay very flattering com-
15
THE STORY OF DU BARRY
pliments. Nowhere does he seem to have
shown to so much disadvantage as at Ver-
sailles, for all he beheld there was out of
harmony with his ideas of what ought to
have been. He had a strong presentiment
of evil looming in the future for France,
and that the gloomy horizon was fraught
with danger both to her inert sovereign
and his thoughtless queen."
Another event which drew Madame Du
Barry from her retirement was the return
of Voltaire to France, and his apotheosis at
the Theatre Francais. The ostensible ob-
ject of the philosopher's visit to Paris was
to rehearse the actors who were to play his
new tragedy, " Irene," and for a time it
seemed doubtful whether this great French-
man would be allowed to return to Paris
after his years of exile. The clergy were
almost unanimous in urging the king to
forbid his return. But on the other hand
all Paris was aroused at the thought of
welcoming once more the great dramatic
poet, philosopher and enemy of shams, who
was anxious to undertake this long and
arduous winter journey in order that he
IN RETIREMENT 229
might see once more the city that he loved
so well.
Worn out by the fatigue of his long
journey and the excitement and annoyance
of constant rehearsals, the venerable dram-
atist was unable to take part in the glories
of the first representation, accounts of the
progress of which were carried to his bed-
side, from time to time, during the even-
ing. It was for this performance, and
with a view of meeting Voltaire once
more, that Madame Du Barry came up to
Paris from Louveciennes, and it was at this
time that she met again, and for the last
time, the Due de Richelieu, and for the
first time Benjamin Franklin, who had
brought his grandson with him to obtain
the philosopher's benediction.
" Kneel, my son," said the famous
American, " kneel before the great man ! "
The youth obeyed, and Voltaire, laying
his hand on his head, said in English,
"God and Liberty!"
Voltaire was able to attend the sixth
representation of his play, but only after
having been nerved for the occasion by
230 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
strong stimulants. He was carried from
the theatre to his home in an almost sense-
less condition, and a few days later was
dead.
The winter of 1783 did much to hasten
the downfall of the monarchy. It was a
period of unheard-of severity, memorable
above all preceding winters for its seventy-
six days of intense cold. In the splendid
abodes of the rich, where there was but
little provision for warmth, it was found
necessary to hang carpets and tapestries
over the huge doors and windows, and to
keep the chimney-places filled, night and
day, with blazing logs, whose heat, how-
ever, was more seen than felt, as it disap-
peared up the enormous chimneys. But in
the squalid streets of old Paris, where the
poor dwelt, the poverty was more bitter
and the spirit of discontent fiercer than
ever before. It was a difficult matter for
the police to keep the people in check and
prevent them from satisfying their own
hunger from the abundance so freely dis-
played by the wasteful and selfish nobility.
In the public squares, small doles of black
IN RETIREMENT
bread were distributed to the hungry, many
of whom were also employed for a few sous
a day in the work of removing the snow
from the entrances to the great palaces and
hotels of the nobility and modelling it into
huge, uncouth statues, presumably of the
king and queen. The object of this was
to raise the cry of " Vive le Roi ! " and with
it " Vive la Reine ! " But as a general
thing, the cry of " A bas 1'Autrichienne "
made itself heard high above the perfunc-
tory clamor of the poor wretches who were
trying to hold their jobs by a display of
patriotism. So often, indeed, was this cry
heard and so bitter was its tone, that when
Marie Antoinette wished to enjoy herself
again with her sledges, it was deemed ex-
pedient to prevent it, for fear the sight of
such luxury should prove an irritation to
the suffering people.
At this time, too, the French soldiers
returning from their term of service in
America, full of enthusiasm for the cause
for which they had been fighting side by
side with the Colonists, urged upon their
countrymen the expediency of obtaining for
232 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
themselves what the Americans, with their
aid, had procured by their long war of
revolution. These returned soldiers were
justly proud of their achievements in our
War of Independence, in whose benefits
they could have no part. But they natu-
rally expected that their valor in serving
their king would stand them in good stead
at home. They found, however, that Gen-
eral Count Sagur, whom the queen had
made minister of war, had issued orders
making it impossible for any but noblemen
to reach the grade of officer in the army.
The war being over, a great many promo-
tions were made, but not in the way of
rewards to men who had rendered service
to their country.
The only question asked of a candidate
was, " Have you four quarterings ? " If he
had not, nothing could enable him to rise
from the ranks.
It is worth remarking that in the mid-
dle of this very winter, young Napoleon
Bonaparte, then in his fifteenth year and a
student at the military college of Brienne,
divided his schoolmates into two armies,
IN RETIREMENT
233
A corner of Du Barry's bedchamber in the palace at Versailles.
directed them in the construction of a snow
fortress, and himself led the attacking
party. For ammunition, they had snow-
234 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
balls hard as ice, and in some cases, weighted
with stones. And history declares that not
until the fortress was entirely demolished
did its defenders surrender to the future
Emperor of France.
There were many in the court circle at
this time who recalled with feelings of dire
apprehension the extraordinary prediction
once made in the salon of Madame de
Coigny by that charming epigramist and
poet, Cazotte, who, at that time, divided
with Cagliostro and Mesmer the honors of
clairvoyance. Cazotte was a man of
dreamy religious sentiment, highly imagi-
native and a mystic. He did not pretend
to make diamonds and gold, to heal the
sick, or give public exhibitions of science
combined with quackery, as his rivals did,
but occasionally he went into a trance, and
it was then that he was supposed to be
endowed with second sight.
It was on one of these occasions that he
simply heaved a deep sigh and gave no an-
swer to the question of two or three ladies
of the court circle who demanded eagerly
the nature of his vision.
IN RETIREMENT 237
" Speak, Cazotte ! " cried the ladies. " Tell
us what you see ! "
" Do not ask me. It is too sad ! "
" You must tell us what it is," per-
sisted the ladies, as they gathered about
him.
" Fearful things are coming on France,
coming upon you all even upon you who
speak to me," he replied at last in tones of
a half-conscious person.
" But what is it that you see ?" they
demanded.
" I see a prison," said Cazotte, shuddering,
" a cart, a large open place, a strange kind
of machine resembling a scaffold, and the
public executioner standing near it."
"And these things the scaffold and
the executioner are for me ? " asked Madame
de Montmorency.
" For you, madame," replied the seer.
" Do you see me there, Cazotte ? " asked
Madame de Chabot, laughingly.
" I see you there," he said.
" You are mad to-night, Cazotte," cried
Madame de Chevreuse, " or you are trying
to frighten us."
238 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
" Would to Heaven, for your sake,
madame, that I were," he exclaimed.
" You say you see a cart ; is it not a
carriage, Cazotte ? " inquired Madame de
Montmorency.
" It is a cart," he answers. " To none,
after the king, will the favor of a carriage
be allowed."
" To the king ! " exclaimed several of the
company who had not hitherto joined in
questioning the dreamer. " To the king ? "
demanded Madame du Polignac, addressing
herself directly to Cazotte.
" To the king," he muttered, despond-
ingly.
" But the queen, myself ? " she asked
eagerly.
" The queen, too, is there. Madame de
Polignac stands in the distance and a mist
envelops her," was his reply.
" And yourself, Cazotte ? "
" As regards myself," he answered sadly,
" I am as the man who for three days went
round the City of Jerusalem, crying aloud,
' Woe ! Woe ! ' to the inhabitants thereof,
but who on the fourth day cried * Woe !
IN RETIREMENT
239
Woe!' unto himself 'woe is me!' A
stone from a sling was aimed at him, struck
him on his temple and he died."
Cazotte was guillotined in 1792. The
rest of his predestined victims perished at
about the same time, though Madame de
Polignac lived until the following year and
died in December, at Vienna, a place of
safe distance, that was perhaps signified
by the mist in which Cazotte saw her
enveloped.
CHAPTER XI
THE STORM BREAKS
OR more than fifteen
years Jeanette Du
Barry had lived quietly
on her beautiful estate
Louveciennes, keeping
up a few of her old
court intimacies, re-
ceiving visits now and then from foreign
princes and other distinguished travellers,
and enjoying a calm, happy life in which
there was neither intrigue nor agitation nor
danger of dismissal and disgrace. Her
affairs were prosperous, her debts settled,
and she was able to live handsomely and
have money to spare for her friends and
for charity. She was greatly beloved by
the poor and sick of the neighborhood
whom she visited and aided, and there was
THE STORM BREAKS 241
no one in the town who had not a kind
word for the ex-Favorite of Louis XV.
Undoubtedly these years of exile were
the happiest in her whole life, and well
they might have been, for through them
all she was sustained and cheered by the
devoted love of Cosse-Brissac.
As years rolled on travellers ceased to
visit her, her name dropped out of the
public prints, and finally she came to be
forgotten of all the world save the little
one of her immediate vicinage. Her sym-
pathies were still with the royal family, and
she was outspoken in her denunciations of
the revolutionary party, which was gaining
in strength every hour, for the indignities
which it sought to heap upon the heads of
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
The deluge long since predicted by the
Marquise de Pompadour was underway at
last, and the axe that may have disturbed
the visions of Louis XV, that certainly
gleamed through the prophetic warning of
Damiens " the shabby man with the
penknife" who was so far ahead of his
time the axe that the actress sees in
16
242 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
the very first act of the drama has become
a stern reality now. The days are begin-
ning to be busy ones for the executioner,
and those who value their heads are hasten-
ing to declare their friendship for the
nation and their hatred of royalty and
aristocracy.
So completely forgotten was the woman
who had played such a conspicuous part at
the court of the king that up to the begin-
ning of the year 1791 no attention was
paid to her by the aggressive patriots of
the revolutionary party nor had her name
been dragged into the papers or political
discussions for many years, save once when
some demagogue declared that the National
Assembly cost but a quarter of the sum
that Louis XV squandered on the woman
whom he himself had seen covered with
diamonds and giving away basketfuls of
louis d'or to her relatives.
In all probability the black storm which
was now gathering over France might have
broken and spent its terrific force without
making itself felt in the little chateau
where this still beautiful survivor of the
THE STORM BREAKS 245
court of Louis XV was living out her
days peacefully and secure in the good
will of all around her, had it not been for
a comparatively unimportant happening
which served to alter the whole course of
her life.
On the night of January 10, 1791, dur-
ing the absence of Madame Du Barry,
who was visiting the family of Brissac in
Paris, the chateau was opened by robbers
and a vast number of diamonds and other
precious stones were stolen. In her en-
deavors to recover her property, she took
into her confidence the jeweller Rouen, and
he, in an ill-considered moment, caused
the dead walls of Paris to be placarded
with a long list of the precious stones, de-
scribed in detail under the words " Two
Thousand Louis To Gain."
This happened at a moment when
hunger, cold and misery, combined with
the insidious oratory of demagogues and
the inspiring words of patriots, were lead-
ing the people at a rapid pace toward an-
archy Nature's primitive remedy for all
social ills. These placards were displayed
246 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
before the eyes of men and women who
were suffering for want of the bare neces-
sities of life. Being without occupation
they could find time to read and talk over
among themselves the great list of dia-
monds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies arid
pearls. And as they read, and wondered
how one human being could be so fortu-
nate as to possess all this wealth while they
went naked and hungry, they remembered
who and what this almost forgotten woman
had been. They had heard, perhaps, in an
exaggerated form, of the way in which
kings were wont to cover the bodies of
their favorite women with diamonds while
the peasantry perished of hunger and cold.
They had heard vaguely of luxury in high
places, of the wastefulness in Versailles,
while the poor were clamoring for bread
at the very palace gates. They had heard
all these things from the lips of their ora-
tors, half believing perhaps and wholly un-
comprehending the significance of it all.
Now, all at once, there was flashed into
the wan faces of these desperate ones a list
of the very jewels that had gone to deck
THE STORM BREAKS
247
the body of their king's courtesan at the
time when they themselves perhaps had
seen their loved ones sicken before their
eyes and perish for lack of food. The mere
fact that a man of affairs
like Rouen should placard jl
the streets with such an -4-*
incendiary docu-
ment as th
without ever
thinking of
what it might
provoke, indi-
cates how
little even
the intelligent
part of the
French peo-
ple knew of
the dangers
that threatened. This, too, at a time when
the Revolution had actually begun.
About the middle of February of the
same year five men entered the shop of M.
Simon, the rich London lapidary, and
offered to sell him a quantity of precious
Spinnet of the period.
248 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
stones for which they asked only about
one-sixth of their actual value. The lapi-
dary purchased them for fifteen hundred
pounds, and on learning from the men that
they had others of still greater value to
dispose of, promised to take them also, and
then quietly notified the authorities. The
men were arrested that night, and although
they contrived to destroy one or two of the
larger gems by throwing them into the fire,
the bulk of their booty was recovered and
word sent to the Countess Du Barry.
Overjoyed at the news, she left at once
for London, saw the jewels and identified
them, declaring under oath that they be-
longed to her. Unfortunately other legal
proceedings were necessary before the gems
could be turned over to her and she was
obliged to return to France, after leaving
them deposited with her bankers, sealed
with her own and their seal.
On the 4th of April she started again,
taking with her this time the jeweller,
Rouen, and remaining until the 21st of
May, when she returned again without
her property. A third journey followed
THE STORM BREAKS 249
from which she returned late in August,
feeling much cast down and disappointed
over the tediousness of English law pro-
cesses. After Madame Du Barry's return
to France the National High Court entered
upon its functions at Orleans and the new
method of beheading prisoners by the
guillotine was adopted. It is said that a
model of this machine fell under the eyes
of Louis XVI at the time that it was under
legislative consideration, and he, being an
expert amateur machinist, suggested an
improvement which was actually utilized
by the inventor and is still in use in the
machine that is used in France at the
present day.
Things were marching briskly now and
the work of the executioner was growing
heavier every day. Lafayette, who, since
his return from America, had been a domi-
nant figure in the changing fortunes of his
country, was compelled to leave France
and fell into the hands of the Austrians,
who kept him in prison until years after-
wards when Napoleon Bonaparte demanded
his release. The king and royal family
250 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
were made prisoners and, what was of far
greater concern to Madame Du Barry, her
devoted lover, Cosse-Brissac, who had
been removed from his command of the
king's military establishment, was beheaded,
together with hundreds of other prisoners
in the September massacres. His head
was carried to L,ouveciennes and thrown
through the window of the room in which
Madame Du Barry was seated.
In October of the year following, Mad-
ame Du Barry started once more for Lon-
don from which she returned in March,
1793. During this, as well as other visits
to England, she received attentions from
the hands of many of the most noted men in
the kingdom, and as it afterwards transpired,
her movements were carefully watched and
noted by spies in the employ of her ene-
mies at home. During her last visit the
Revolution had gained terrific headway,
the king and queen had perished on the
scaffold, and William Pitt, whom she saw
a number of times and who gave her a
medal that had been struck in his honor,
urged her to remain in England, knowing
With Breaking Heart.
THE STORM BREAKS 253
perfectly well the risk that she ran in
returning to a country that was inflamed
against the old monarchy and everything
connected with it.
Madame Du Barry, however, had full con-
fidence in the protection that would be af-
forded her in Louveciennes, which she had
left but a short time before a peaceful com-
munity, undisturbed by the storms that
were shaking the country to its founda-
tions, and inhabited by people who were
one and all grateful to her for what she
had done for them.
During her absence, however, a man
named George Greive, who claimed citizen-
ship in the United States of America, and
described himself as " factionist and anar-
chist of the first rank and disorganizer of
despotism in both hemispheres," had settled
in the village and impregnated its inhabi-
tants with the doctrines which he preached.
This demagogue was a friend of Marat and
was actually to have dined with him on the
day that Charlotte Corday rid the world of
his presence. Marat always hated Du Barry,
and it is more than likely that he suggested
254. THE STORY OF DU BARRY
her to Greive as one whom it would be easy
to destroy and whose wealth was sufficient
to yield something to the instrument of her
destruction.
Through the exertions of this patriot,
who at Marat's suggestion had lost no time
in domiciling himself in Louveciennes, the
villagers were persuaded that Madame Du
Barry had really turned emigree, and had
settled in England without any intention
of returning to her own country. Imbued
with this belief, seals were set on the doors
of her chateau as a preliminary step to con-
fiscation. But the sudden appearance of
the owner put a stop to this work, and the
mayor of the town was easily induced to
remove the seals. Undismayed by the fail-
ure of this plot, and knowing Du Barry's
popularity among the villagers, Greive' s
next attempt took the form of an address
to the authorities of the Department of the
Seine et Oise, in which, backed by the sig-
natures of thirty-six citizens of the village,
he complained of the presence there of many
aristocrats and suspected persons. On the
strength of this address, Madame Du Barry
THE STORM BREAKS 255
was placed under arrest in her own house,
and, after official inquiry, was set at liberty
again, the authorities of the Seine et Oise
showing no disposition to deal harshly with
her. One of its members, indeed, Lavallery
by name, is said to have shown a decided
partiality for this still handsome and attrac-
tive woman of fifty.
Had Madame Du Barry procured her
passports and repaired to England the mo-
ment she was released, she would undoubt-
edly have enjoyed a much longer life than
she did. Unfortunately for herself, she
chose to remain in her chateau, trusting
to the integrity of her respectable neigh-
bors, and fearing that if she did leave the
country, her house, with all its exquisite
furniture and works of art, would be confis-
cated by the republicans. It may have
been that another lover engrossed her at-
tention at that time it seems that she
was never at a loss for a sweetheart but
certain it is that she chose to remain and
she paid dearly for the mistake.
Early in September, 1793, Greive began
again his denunciations of her, and on the
256 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
22d of that month she was arrested and
lodged in the prison of Sainte Pelagic,
while seals were placed upon the doors of
her chateau. Madame Roland was incar-
cerated there at this time, and it has been
said that the widow of the recently guil-
lotined General Beauharnais, afterwards
Empress of France, was arrested on the
same day.
There is a story told of the ex-Favorite
during her imprisonment which, although
characteristic of her in many ways, can
hardly be reconciled with her conduct a
short time later, when brought face to face
with death on the scaffold. An Irish priest,
who had contrived to obtain access to her
in her cell, offered to save her if she could
supply him with a certain sum of money
with which to bribe the jailers. She asked
him if it would be possible to save two
women, and on learning that it would not,
she gave him an order on her bankers for
the necessary sum, and bade him save the
Duchesse de Mortemart, who was at that
time lying concealed in a loft in Calais.
The priest, having urged her in vain to
THE STORM BREAKS
257
permit him to save her instead of her friend,
took the order, and with the money which
he obtained on it, went to Calais and
rescued the duchess from her attic retreat.
Then taking her by the arm, he set out on
foot, explaining to all who noticed his cleri-
cal garb, that he was a good constitutional
priest and as such had married the woman.
In this way he managed to pass through
the French lines to Ostend, where he em-
barked for England, taking with him the
duchess, who, in after years, related the
whole story to Dutens, the author of " Me-
moirs of a Traveller taking a Rest," in which
entertaining volume it is chronicled.
17
CHAPTER XII
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE
HE methods employed
in the trial of Madame
Du Barry would seem
incomprehensible to
American readers, were
it not for the fact that
the Dreyfus trial, con-
ducted on similar lines a very few years
ago, served to familiarize us with the man-
ner in which French tribunals administer
the Gallic equivalent of justice. We all
remember the important testimony offered
by the different French officers, who knew
that Dreyfus was guilty, " because it could
not be otherwise," and the weighty evidence
of those who made a profound impression on
the court by declaring that the prisoner was
certainly guilty, " because if he was not,
who was ? " We can also recall the pub-
^
s
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 261
lished accounts of the execrations hurled by
the populace at those who endeavored to
stem the fierce tide of racial hatred evoked
by the trial, and of the applause which
greeted that " hero of the hour," who was
shown to have taken away the captive's
writing paper and ink.
For the name Dreyfus, substitute that of
Jeanette Du Barry, go back a little more
than a century in time, and not a single
degree in civilization or mercy, and we
have the trial of the last of the race of
queens of the left hand that France has
ever known.
She was accused of conspiring against
the French Republic and favoring the suc-
cess of English arms ; of wearing mourning
for the late king ; of having in her posses-
sion a medal of Pitt, the English states-
man ; of having buried at Louveciennes the
letters of nobility of an emigre, and also the
busts of persons prominent at the court of
her royal lover ; and of having wasted the
public money by her extravagance.
The first witness against her was Greive,
who testified that he had found near her
262 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
house a quantity of precious stones, together
with portraits of Louis XV, Anne of Aus-
tria, and the Regent, and a medal bearing
the likeness of Pitt. He also testified that
an English spy named Forth made fre-
quent journeys between Louveciennes and
London, ostensibly on business connected
with the diamond robbery, and that the
general opinion of the villagers was that
the robbery was nothing but a pretence.
A man named Blache swore that Madame
Du Barry wore mourning for Louis XVI
when she was in London, and one of her
discharged servants, Salanave, declared that
his dismissal from the household was due
to the fact that he was a patriot, whereas all
the other servants sympathized with the
aristocracy.
Then Zamore, the black dwarf, who owed
everything that he possessed to the favor of
his mistress, swore that most of her guests
were not patriots, and that he himself had
heard them rejoice over the defeats of the
armies of the Republic. He declared that
he had frequently rebuked Madame Du
Barry for associating with aristocrats and
DREYFUS LIRE-JUSTICE 263
that he was positive that there had been
no actual robbery of jewels.
These were the most important wit-
nesses for the prosecution. There were
also a surgeon named Augustin Devrey,
who testified that he had " once heard the
Widow Collet say that some time after
the arrest of Brissac, Du Barry spent
the night in destroying papers ; " and one
Claude Reda, a fencing master, who
gravely declared that he "had heard it
said that when Du Barry was in London
she saw the Colonnes."
Certainly there is a Dreyfus-like ring, as
well as a suggestion of the mental capac-
ity of the jury, in these passages taken from
the speech of Fouquier-Tinville for the
prosecution : " You have judged the con-
spiracy of the wife of the last tyrant of the
French, and you have at this moment to
judge the plots of the courtesan of his in-
famous predecessor. You have to decide
if this Messalina born amongst the peo-
ple, enriched by the spoils of the people
and who, by the death of the tyrant, fell
from the rank in which crime alone had
264 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
placed her has conspired against the
liberty and sovereignty of the people ; if,
after being the accomplice and the instru-
ment of the libertinage of kings, she has
become the agent of the conspiracies of
tyrants, nobles, and priests against the
French Republic. You know what light
the evidence of the witnesses and the
documents have thrown upon this plot !
It is for you, in your wisdom, to weigh
the evidence. You see that royalists,
federalists, all these factions, though di-
vided amongst themselves in appearance,
have the same centre, the same object, the
same end.
" The war, abroad or in La Vendee, the
troubles in the South, the insurrections in
Calvaldos all march under the orders of
Pitt, but now the veil which covered so
much wickedness has been rent in twain
and nothing remains of the conspirators
but shame and the punishment of their
infamous plots. Yes, Frenchmen, we
swear that the traitors shall perish and
liberty alone shall endure ! In striking
with the sword of the law a conspiratrice,
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 265
A corner of the, property room.
a Messalina guilty of plotting against the
country, you not only avenge the Re-
public, but you uproot a public scandal,
and you strengthen the rule of that mo-
266 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
rality which is the chief base of the liberty
of the people."
With Madame Du Barry were tried also
the three Vandenyvers, members of the
firm of Dutch bankers with whom she
kept her account. The chief charge
against these men was that they had fur-
nished the accused woman with money in
the shape of letters of credit to be used by
her during her visit to London. Accord-
ing to their own admission, they furnished
letters of credit to Madame Du Barry
" because she had established the fact and
satisfied them as to her having passports,
and, not being judges of their validity,
thought there was nothing in supplying
her with the sums she demanded."
There was not a particle of evidence of
any sort of crime on the part of these finan-
ciers. The principal figure in the trial was
known to be a woman of loose morals,
upon whom had been squandered millions
of the public money, and it was not un-
natural that the vengeance of a long suf-
fering and now bloodthirsty people should
fall upon her head. For the murder of
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 269
the Vandenyvers, however, there was not
one shadow of an excuse.
No witnesses were called for the defence.
Nor is this fact likely to prove a surprise
to any one familiar with the proceedings
in the Dreyfus case, or with certain still
more recent happenings in New York.
We all know how it fared with Zola be-
cause of his championship of the weak
against the strong, and such of us as live
in New York, believe that if there is one
thing more unlucky than walking under a
ladder, it is giving testimony in the courts
against a police detective.
That the jury had some qualms of con-
science about this blood-letting is indicated
by the fact that it deliberated for an hour
and a quarter, which is one quarter of an
hour more than was given to the considera-
tion of the case of Marie Antoinette. At
the end of that time it returned a verdict of
guilty on every count in the indictment,
and, Fouquier-Tinville having demanded
the " application of the law," all four pris-
oners were sentenced to suffer death within
the space of twelve hours.
270 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
But Madame Du Barry, hoping to gain
time and perhaps mercy, sent for Denisot,
one of her judges, Claude Rougere, the
Deputy Public Accuser, and Tavernier, a
greffier, and to them made a confession or
declaration in regard to her concealed prop-
erty. To these men she gave a list of
about two hundred and fifty articles of jew-
elry and gold and silver plate which, to-
gether with several sacks of money, she
had buried in different parts of her garden.
In her terror, and perhaps without a thought
of what she was doing, she did not hesitate
to implicate in her confession those who
had helped her in her work of concealment,
some of whom paid with their lives the
penalty of their devotion to her. She firmly
believed that if she gave up everything her
life would be spared. But no sooner was
the confession ended than orders were
given for her execution on the following
day.
In the memoirs of the de Goncours we
find this striking picture of the last of the
favorites during the few hours that imme-
diately preceded her death :
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 271
" At the reading of this sentence, pros-
trated, overwhelmed by stupor and horror,
Madame Du Barry suddenly lost the cool-
ness and the remnant of dignity which she
had exhibited during the trial. When she
saw that all was over, that she was about
to be led away and that the witnesses who
had been present during the scene rubbed
their hands and enjoyed her agony shame-
lessly, she was stricken with such a physi-
cal weakness that the gendarmes were
obliged to support her with their arms,
while the fear that she would die before
reaching the scaffold took possession of the
anxious multitude.
" The trouble, the fright, the utter help-
lessness, the prostration of the woman in
the presence of death and of such a death
- was so great that she, who all her life
had thought only of living, in one moment
forgot everything, affection, gratitude, debts
of love, sacred engagements, the secrets
and the devotion of those who had compro-
mised themselves for her. Hoping to save
her life by selling the lives of others,
believing that she could buy pardon, or at
272 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
least a reprieve by giving up what remained
of hidden treasure, we find her on the day
of her execution at ten o'clock in the morn-
ing, quite pale after a night of terror,
trembling and supplicating between the
two wickets of the Conciergerie, flinging
toward the advancing executioner, toward
the hour of doom so nigh, toward the guil-
lotine looming about her, the precipitate
and breathless confession of everything that
she had buried, concealed and kept back
from the scent of the Republic and from
the cupidities of the year II ! To Justice
Denisot, to Claude Rougere, substitute of
the public prosecutor, Madame Du Barry
gives detail as to the precious objects buried
in the garden of Louveciennes, buried in
the thickets, concealed in the corridors and
in the cellar, in the garden of her valet,
that faithful Morin who will afterwards pay
with his head for his mistress's disclosure,
concealed in the house of the woman
Deliant, concealed on the premises of Citi-
zen Montrouy.
" Under the stroke of terror, she remem-
bers and finds everything again, bit by bit,
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 273
louis by louis, down to a plate, down to a
spoon, for it is her life that she is going to
recover. In her zeal, in her anguish, fearing
that all this treasure will not suffice still to
pay for her pardon, she undertakes to write
to London, if it is the good pleasure of the
Tribunal, to get back all the articles in the
theft of 1791 deposited with Morland, with
Moncelet and with Ramson. Unhappy
being ! She forgot that the Revolution
would be her heir."
Jeanette Du Barry met death in a way
that even moved the blood-thirsty onlook-
ers to something like pity. It was a time
when the knife was for women as well as
men and when courage at the supreme mo-
ment of death was not a matter of sex.
Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland, Char-
lotte Corday and scores of others mounted
the scaffold with faces that were calm and
often smiling, and died without giving sign
of fear. These women died for some prin-
ciple in which they believed. Poor Du
Barry, however, died only because of her
beauty, which had turned the head of a king.
And with that beauty faded, her royal lover
18
274 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
dead and gone, as well as the old order of
things for which he stood, she had nothing
to sustain her in her final hour.
Crouching in the cart, and with a face
as white as the robe she wore, she passed
through the great crowd that had assembled
to look upon the mistress of its former king.
AVith her were the Vandenyvers and they
sought to sustain her with words of cheer
and encouragement. Her only replies, how-
ever, were sobs and moans and inarticulate
cries for mercy. Greive, the anarchist, was
there among the rest, laughing heartily, as
he afterwards said, at the grimaces of the
unfortunate woman whom he had hounded
to the scaffold. The cart entered the rue
St. Honore and passed directly in front
of Labille's shop, where, a quarter of a cen-
tury before, she had learned her trade of
bonnet-making. A score of girls, employed
there now just as she had been in her young
days, had stationed themselves on the bal-
cony to obtain a glimpse of this world-famous
beauty who had once been an apprentice
herself in that very shop, had lived to rule
her king and to make and unmake cabinets,
" Swear on the Cross ! "
R
5
1
,<a
sj
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 277
and was now to crown her whole marvel-
lous career with a single moment of anguish
on the block.
At the sight of these girls looking down
upon her with pitying eyes, the condemned
woman seemed to awake to a sudden and
hideous realization of what was before her,
and shriek after shriek rang through the
crowded street. The executioner and his
assistants used all their force in their efforts
to prevent her from throwing herself to the
ground. Foiled in this desire, she leant over
the edge of the cart and frantically begged
for her life.
" My friends, save me ! I have never
done harm to any one in my life ! In
Heaven's name, save me ! "
It was almost the first time that the
spectacle of a woman dying in abject terror,
and without even a show of bravado, had
been seen in Paris, and something like a
murmur of pity began to make itself heard.
" Life ! Life ! Give me my life, good
people, and all my goods shall be yours ! "
she implored.
" Your goods ! Bah ! They all belong
278 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
to the nation already ! " cried a man con-
temptuously, and a coalheaver standing in
front of him turned and levelled him to the
earth with a single blow in the face.
The people approved the act. The pity-
ing murmurs grew louder, and if the driver
had not urged his horse to a gallop, there
might have been a rescue.
Arrived at the gallows, it was necessary
for the executioners to lift her bodily from
the cart and up the steps. Even when tied
to the plank she struggled frantically and
begged piteously for just one second more
of life. The descending knife silenced her
cries, and the executioner held up before the
eyes of the crowd the bleeding head of the
woman who had done little, indeed, to de-
serve such a death.
The last act of the play compresses into
three short scenes the tragic, pitiable story
of Du Barry's persecution and death. In
the first of these scenes we see her living
on her estate in Louveciennes, attended by
her faithful servant Denys and one or two
friends of her former years. Here, at the
instigation of Greive, she is arrested,
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 279
although nineteen years have passed since
death put an end to her relation witli the
king. These years have been full of
changes, not only for her, but for all France
as well, and in no respect are these changes
shown more plainly than in the dresses of
the revolutionary patriots. In the pre-
ceding acts of the drama, we have only
seen the laces, ruffles, small clothes and
elaborate coiffures of a luxurious and disso-
lute age. Now we see the ugly beginnings
of the sort of dress to which we, of the
present generation, have been condemned.
Escorted by soldiers of the Republic, and
with the angry murmurs of the mob ringing
in her ears, she is taken away to Paris, and
the scene changes to her prison cell in the
Conciergerie. Here she is visited by
Denisot, the judge of the revolutionary
court, and two associates, who, while buoy-
ing her up with vague hopes of a pardon,
take from her a finger ring, the very last
bit of property in her possession. This
done, they withdraw, the sound of work-
men, busy at the scaffold, is heard, and a
moment later the priest enters to apprise
280 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
her of the failure of her appeal and to hear
her last confession.
At no moment during the play does the
actress make a more profound impression
on her audience than in that in which she
realizes for the first time that her last hope
is gone and that she must die.
Springing forward with a cry that is sur-
charged with the bitterest anguish and de-
spair, she begins the pleadings for life which
do not cease until the very end. But the
sentence has been pronounced, her petition
for clemency refused, and her life must
come to an end with to-morrow's sun.
But it is the last scene which, more than
all of the others, leaves its indelible mark
on the memory. And this one is almost
completely in accord with the happenings
set down in history. In only one particular
has Mr. Belasco made use of his license as a
dramatist, and that is in bringing Cosse-
Brissac on to the scene for a final word of
farewell with the woman whom he had loved
so fondly. The reason for this is obvious,
though, as a matter of fact, Cosse had
already been guillotined.
DAVID BELASCO.
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 281
Surely the sternest preacher of morality
could ask no more convincing portrayal of
the ending of a dissolute life . than Mr.
Belasco has given us in this awful repre-
sentation of the passage of the once pam-
pered and envied Favorite through the mob
that surges about the cart that is taking
her to the guillotine.
It is midwinter in Paris, and the curtain
rises on a scene through whose darkness
nothing can be seen but the flakes of fall-
ing snow. Almost imperceptibly the night
fades before the cold gray light of early
dawn, until there comes a moment when it
is hard to realize that we are not actually
gazing at a deserted street in which the
snow is swiftly and silently falling. Little
by little the day grows, and then we see
that this deserted street is the rue St.
Honore, and that the house directly in
front of us is the shop of Madame Labille,
where the milliner's apprentice, Jeanette
Vaubernier, gained some of her earliest
knowledge of the life in which she played
such a picturesque and wanton part.
The door of the shop opens and Hor-
282 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
tense, the forewoman, who still carries in
her heart a loving remembrance of the
pretty, wilful Jeanette of other days, peers
down the street through the falling flakes.
The procession is on its way, and one after
another the windows along the street are
opened and heads thrust out to peer anx-
iously in the direction from which the
tumbrel bearing the condemned is ap-
proaching, to the accompaniment of a
hoarse clamor that grows in volume as it
draws nearer.
Soldiers take possession of the street
and stand ready to keep back the mob of
men, women and children that gather
from every side, filling every doorway,
climbing up on the steps of houses, and
even swarming up to places of vantage on
the statue in the square.
Now comes the advance guard that in
those days accompanied every victim of
the reign of terror to the place of execu-
tion. A bevy of brazen-faced young girls,
called " cart swallows," appear dancing
round the cart in which the last of the
royal Favorites is taking her final journey.
On the Way to Execution.
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 285
As they turn the corner, the mob bursts
into hoarse shouts of triumph, and surges
against the restraining lines of soldiers in
a mad attempt to forestall the execu-
tioner's work.
It is a triumph of stage management,
this mob, but which one of us, so absorb-
ing is the interest in the play, stops to
think of it ? Stage mobs there have been
in New York a plenty, but never one like
this.
It was a wonderful mob, organized and
directed according to the system in vogue
in the Saxe-Meiningen Company, that
roused itself under the spur of Marc
Antony's oratory when Ludwig Barnay
played at the Thalia Theatre nearly
twenty years ago. There was another
great mob in " Paul Kauvar " organized
and directed by Steele Mackaye. Very
effective, too, was the work of Heinrich
Couried's mob when " The Weavers " was
given at the Irving Place Theatre. There
have been dozens of stage mobs that could
be cited, but not one in any serious drama
that was not black-browed and sullen in
286 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
its whole attitude. Here, at one of the
most tragic moments that can be imagined,
the whole scene swarms with a mob which
is exultant and greedy for the blood that
is to come and which is nevertheless not
sullen but sardonic. It is a mob that
taunts its victim with her immoralities
and fills the whole street with bursts of
hideous laughter at the mere idea of this
wretched woman ever having known a
love that was pure and honest.
There are a score of different well-con-
ceived and carefully costumed Parisian
types in this mob, but no one notices them.
The entire interest of the audience is cen-
tred in the jolting two- wheeled cart which
pauses for a moment on its way to the
scaffold in the Place de la Revolution.
The cart has three occupants, the exe-
cutioner, red-capped and grim ; Jeanette
Du Barry, white with fear ; and the priest
in his black robe who remains with her to
the end.
It is difficult to conceive of such abject,
pitiful terror as that shown by this wretched
woman, who crouches at the feet of her
DREYFUS-LIKE JUSTICE 287
confessor, her beautiful hair cropped close
for the knife, the ashen pallor of death
already in her face.
" Ha, ha ! You 're afraid to die ! "
screams a woman in the mob.
" Yes, I know I 'm afraid to die," she
responds in piteous tones, and the street
echoes with shrill, sardonic, mirthless
laughter.
From the balcony of the milliner's shop,
Hortense, faithful and courageous, throws
a bunch of violets into the cart, and utters
a few words of farewell. The mob turns
toward her with the fierce remonstrance of
wild beasts threatened with the loss of
their prey.
Cosse, the one pure love of her life,
presses close to her for a parting word,
while the mob beats against the line of
soldiery and curses and howls till the priest
with uplifted cross commands them, in the
name of the Lord, to allow the condemned
woman to go in peace to her death.
" It 's too bad, Cosse," she says at last,
in a voice low and despairing and which
finds its way into every heart in the audi-
288 THE STORY OF DU BARRY
ence, " it 's too bad we never went into the
country to pick those violets." The driver
cracks his whip, the wheels turn, and again,
with blood-curdling shouts, the crowd
surges around the cart as it passes on to
the scaffold, and we who have watched the
play can almost see the knife that awaits
her coining, the same knife that gleamed
across the actress's fancy the moment she
set foot on the stage.
PRINTED FOR FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, JOHN WILSON
AND SON (INC.), CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
A 000 674 292 8