CHAPTER NINE

MADAME DU BARRY

THE SEVEN-MILLION-DOLLAR SIREN.

She came from the same neighborhood that had produced Joan of Arc. She even claimed relationship to the long-dead Maid. But at that point all likeness between the two comes to a very abrupt end.

She is known to history as "Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier, Comtesse du Barry." The parish register of her birthplace describes her, less flamboyantly, as "Marie Jeanne, natural daughter of Anne Becu, known as Quantigny; born Aug., A.D. 1746."

There are many details in Marie Jeanne du Barry's story that I am going to omit--at my own request; not only because they are unwriteable, but because their sordid vulgarity is also drearily stupid. I apologize in advance for the omissions. But even after the process of weeding out, I think there will be quite enough left to hold the interest.

When Marie was six, Anne Becu drifted to Paris--the Mecca of her trade. And soon afterward, an admirer of Anne's, one Dumonceau, was coaxed into lavishing two dollars and forty cents a month on Marie's education. Dumonceau had been one of Anne's wooers in the village days, and it has been suggested that his interest in little Marie was prompted by more than mere kindness--in fact, that he and the infant were "more than kin and less than kind."

In any case, the monthly two dollars and forty cents paid Marie's expenses in a convent school, where she spent the next ten years. This Sainte-Aurore convent, in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, was a philanthropic refuge "for all young persons of honest parentage who are in circumstances where they run the risk of ruin."

The rules of the Sainte-Aurore were far stricter and icier than those of the most investigatable of modern orphanages. Among the punishments inflicted on these little wards of God were starvation, beatings, and imprisonment in cold and stone-floored dark cells--for the very mildest transgressions.

Three dire sins, calling always for instant retribution, were: "To laugh, to sing, and to speak above a whisper." For such hideous and unnatural crimes as laughter, song, and ordinary speech, these poor loveless babies were treated like the vilest criminals. One hopes, morbidly, that the theologians who abolished Hell left at least one warm corner of it in commission, for the framers and enforcers of those gentle rules.

All the foregoing is not sentimental mush, but is mentioned to show how dire must have been a pupil's sin that the convent authorities could not cope with.

And such a sin--no one knows what it was--Marie committed when she was sixteen. For which she was expelled in black disgrace from her happy childhood home at Sainte-Aurore, and turned loose upon the world.

Her mother's loving arms were open, ready to receive and succor the disgraced girl, and to start her afresh in life--as only a mother can. So, to keep Marie from feeling unduly dependent upon a poor working woman like herself, she taught her her own trade--the oldest on earth.

With a little basket of cheap jewelry--which served the same purpose as a present-day beggar's stock of lead pencils--Marie went the rounds of the streets. Her career was cut out for her by her mother's fond forethought. And in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, a girl thus launched would have ended in the gutter. But Marie was the thousandth woman--a true super-woman, in every sense of the word. The filth of the streets could not smirch her--outwardly. And luck was waiting around the corner for her.

A rich and eccentric old woman of fashion--Madame Legrade--had a craze for amateur theatricals. Catching sight of Marie one day, she was struck by the girl's beauty, and hired her, partly as a companion and partly as a comedian for her private theatre.

At Madame Legrade's, Marie got her first view of semidecent society. And, being adaptable, she picked up a smattering of manners and of grammatical speech; only a smattering, but all she cared to acquire. There, too, she met such men as the withered old wit, de Richelieu, and the Prince de Soubise; and the Duc de Brissac, whose son was one day to be the one real love of her life. Here, too, she met a genius whom she describes in her "Memoirs" as "a cunning fox; witty ... very ugly and very thin." He was Grimm, the fairytale man.

Marie was in clover. But the fortune was too good to last. And because a far more glittering fortune was awaiting her just around the corner, Destiny soon joggled the girl out of her snug berth. Madame Legrade had two sons. Both of them fell crazily in love with Marie. It is not on record that she told them she would rather be the poor working girl that she was. And Madame Legrade, in horror, ordered her out of the house.

Back to her dear, old loving mother, as before, went Marie. And once more mother love came to the rescue. Anne Becu had recently married a lackey of some great house. She was now "Madame Racon." Marie adopted her stepfather's name--the first to which she had ever possessed even a semilegal claim--and permitted her mother to get her a job in the millinery shop of Madame Labille. This shop was of a sort extremely common in that day. It sold not only hats for woman, but sword knots and shoe buckles for men. It employed only girls of extreme beauty. And it was a favorite lounging place for men about town. Altogether, there was no startling change in Marie's vocation from the era when she had hawked artificial jewelry.

Her presence drew scores of young dandies to the shop. And she might readily have had her pick of the lot. But during a momentary weakness of intellect, she plunged into a love affair with a handsome young pastry cook, Nicolas Mothon. The other and more ambitious girls guyed her right unmercifully for her plebeian tastes. But it was terribly serious with Marie. Mathon was the first man to whom she had lost her heart. Many years later she wrote:

When I call to memory all the men who have adored me, I must say it was not poor Nicolas who pleased me least. For I, too, have known what first love can mean.

But she forgot what "first love can mean" as readily as she had learned it. For soon she threw over Nicolas for a man of wealth, named De la Vauvenardiere; and she abandoned the latter for a suitor named Duval; and ousted Duval from her affection for Lamet, the court hairdresser.

No, in choosing Lamet, she was not lowering her standard. A court hairdresser was far more than a mere barber. He was a functionary of vast importance, the confidant of the great, the counselor of the unwary, a man of substance and position, the only tradesman in all France who was permitted by court edict to wear a sword.

Marie was envied as Lamet's sweetheart; until he went broke, overnight, and had to flee to England to dodge a debtor's cell.

Then came the Cosse incident; at least, then it began. Cosse--or Louis Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac--was the Duc de Brissac's son. He met Marie in the street one day, so runs the story, followed her to the shop, and there, under the pretext of buying a sword knot, fell into talk with her. He loved her at first sight, and she loved him. Theirs was not such a love as either had hitherto known. It was the genuine article.

Cosse was young and good looking and afflicted with republican ideas. He did not see in Marie the vender of cheap jewelry and cheaper affections, nor the girl who used her millinery job as a mask. To him, she was an angel. And--so far as concerned him--she was.

They were young, and they dreamed. Cosse was unlike any man Marie had known. His love was utterly unlike any love she had known or heard of. Altogether, it was a pretty little romance, on both sides. And if we smile at it, let the smile be kindly, with nothing of the leer about it. For there was nothing to provoke a leer--at least, not then.

This Cosse affair's early stages are so intertangled with romance, legend, court rumor, and later inventions, that I hasten to forstall corrections, from readers wiser than I, by confessing that all I know of it, or can learn from supposedly reliable sources, is that Marie and Cosse parted somewhat suddenly; and the causes variously given are that his father put a stop to the romance and that Cosse learned something of Marie's real character. It is gravely declared that he wanted to marry her, and that his indignant ducal parent not only opened his eyes to the bride elect's past, but threatened to throw Cosse into the Bastille by means of a ~lettre de cachet~. As I said, I vouch for none of these reasons for the break between the two lovers. It is all surmise. But what follows is not.

The next man to lose his head and heart to Marie was a young nobleman whose repute may be guessed from the fact that--even in dissolute eighteenth-century Paris--he was known, not as a roue, but as "~The Roue~." He had come to Paris a few years earlier, leaving a wife somewhere on the way.

He had squandered his patrimony en route, and reached the capital penniless. But he quickly caught the fancy of Madame Malouse, who had influence at court. She arranged that he should have practically the sole monopoly of supplying the French navy with all its various forms of merchandise. This meant fat profits, and he fattened them still further by running a select gambling house.

He was Jean, Vicomte du Barry.

Jean met and fell victim to Marie. Realizing what a cash attraction her beauty and charm could be made, he installed her as presiding genius of his gambling house, as a lure to draw youthful nobles to the place. Marie--or Madame Lange, as, for no known reason, she had begun to call herself--was the bright star at the Chance Goddess' shine. And the money poured fast into the crooked games whereby the house made Jean rich.

For a time there was wholesale prosperity all around, with plenty more of it to come. Before I go on, may I quote a contemporary writer's word picture of Marie, as she appeared at this time?

Her hair is long, silky, curling like a child's, and blond with a natural ash tint.... Her eyebrows and lashes are dark and curly. Behind them the blue eyes, which one seldom sees quite open, look out with coquettish, sidelong glances.... Her nose is small and finely cut, and her mouth is a perfect cupid's bow.... Her neck, her arms, and her feet and hands remind one of ancient Greek statuary; while her complexion is that of a rose leaf steeped in milk.... She carries with her a delicious atmosphere of intoxication, victorious, amorous youth.

Voltaire once exclaimed, before a portrait of her:

"The original was made for the gods!"

Even as the cherry tree was posthumously invented for Washington and, perhaps, the apple for William Tell and the egg for Columbus, so around Marie in after years sprang up countless tales of her youth. Some may have been true. Some were palpable lies. To which does the ensuing anecdote belong?

In the spring of 1768, during her sojourn as "come-on" for the du Barry gambling hell, Marie noticed, three days in succession, that she was closely followed on the street by "a young man of a sober cast of countenance and elegant attire." Now, to be followed was no novelty to Marie. And more than one man of "elegant attire" had sued in vain for her favor. Yet this youth made no advances. He simply followed her wherever she went. And in his absence his face haunted her strangely. So, on the fourth day, as she turned suddenly in the street and saw him close behind her, she asked, with affected indignation:

"What do you want of me?"

The man bowed low, with no shadow of hesitancy, made this cryptic answer to her query:

"Mademoiselle, will you grant me the first reasonable request I may make of you when you are Queen of France?"

Thinking he was a crank--as perhaps he was--she sought to humor him, and replied:

"Certainly, monsieur. I promise."

"You take me for a madman," he returned, with a second grave bow. "But I am not insane. Adieu, mademoiselle. There will be nothing more extraordinary than your elevation--except your end."

He spoke and vanished, either into the street crowd or into thin air.

You may recall the story of the "Man in Black's" midnight visit to Ninon de l'Enclos, with a gift to the essence of youth and the warning of her death? This was a well-believed and oft-repeated narrative in Marie's day. It is highly possible that she built from it her recital of the adventure of the "elegantly attired" stranger.

At all events, she told Jean du Barry about it. Whether or not he believed it, is no concern of yours or mine. But it assuredly gave him an idea; the supreme idea of his rotten life. He saw a one-in-fifty chance of making more money through Marie than she could have earned for him in a century as divinity of his gambling rooms. And, remote as were the scheme's prospects for success, he resolved to make a gambler's cast at the venture.

Louis XV., King of France, had been ruled for nearly twenty years by the Marquise de Pompadour, who had squandered royal revenues, had made and unmade men's career by a nod or a shake of her pretty head, and had played at ducks and drakes with international politics. And now Madame de Pompadour was dead. Many a younger and prettier face had caught Louis' doddering fancy, since her death. But no other ~maitresse en titre~ had ruled him and France since then.

Briefly, Jean coveted the vacant office for Marie.

Not for her own sake. Jean did not care for her happiness or welfare, or for the happiness or welfare of any mortal on earth except of one Jean, Vicomte du Barry. But he foresaw that with Marie as the royal favorite, he himself, as her sponsor, could reap a harvest such as is not the guerdon of one man in a million.

He set to work at his self-appointed task with the same rare vigor and cunning that had so long enabled him to elude the hangman and to live on better men's money. The first step was to engage the help of Lebel, the king's ~valet de chambre~.

Lebel was nominally a servant, but, in a sense, he was mightier than any prime minister. For Louis relied implicitly on the valet's taste in feminine beauty. It was Lebel, for instance, who had first brought Madame du Pompadour to the king's notice. He had done the same good turn to many another aspiring damsel. And now, heavily bribed by Jean du Barry, he consented to see if Marie was worth mentioning to Louis.

At sight of Marie, the connoisseur valet realized to the full her super-woman charm. He recognized her as the thousandth woman--even the millionth.

Yet Lebel was ever cautious about raising false hopes. So, not knowing that Jean had gone over the whole plan with Marie, he asked her if she would honor him by attending a little informal dinner he was soon to give, in his apartment, at the Versailles palace; a dinner in honor of "the Baron de Gonesse."

Marie, with sweet innocence, accepted the invitation; then timidly asked Lebel if she might sit beside him at the dinner, as all the others would be strangers to her. The bare thought of his presuming to sit down in the presence of the king--otherwise "the Baron de Gonesse"--so filled Lebel with horror that he forgot his role of diplomacy and blurted out:

"~I?~ Sit at the table with ~him~? I--I shall be unexpectedly called from the room, as usual, just as dinner is served. And I shall not return until it is over."

When Marie--carefully coached as to behavior, repartee, and so forth, by the ever-thoughtful Jean--arrived at Lebel's apartments in the palace, on the night of the dinner, she found, to her disgust, that the king was nowhere in sight--not even disguised as "the Baron de Gonesse"--and that her fellow guests were merely a group of Versailles officials.

Not being versed in palace secrets, she did not know that Louis was seated in a dark closet behind a film-curtained window, looking into the brightly lighted dining room and noting everything that went on, nor that cunningly arranged speaking tubes brought every whispered or loud-spoken word to him.

Finding the king was not to be one of the guests, the girl philosophically choked back her chagrin and set herself to get every atom of fun out of the evening that she could. She ate much, drank more, and behaved pretty quite like a gloriously lovely street gamin. There was no use in wasting on these understrappers the fine speeches and the courtesy she had been learning for the king's benefit. So she let herself go. And the dinner was lively, to say the very least. In fact, it was the gayest, most deliciously amusing dinner ever held in those sedate rooms--thanks to Marie.

Louis, in paroxysms of laughter, looked on until the sound of his guffaws betrayed his royal presence. Then he came out of hiding.

Marie, for an instant, was thunder-struck at what she had done. She feared she had ruined her chances by the boisterous gayety of the past hour or so. Then--for her brain was as quick as her talk was dull--she saw the fight was not lost, but won, and she knew how she had won it.

Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. He lived in France's most artificial period. No one dared be natural; least of all in the presence of the king. All his life he had been treated to honeyed words, profound reverence, the most polished and adroit courtesy. People--women especially--had never dared be ~human~ when he was around.

Marie saw that it was the novelty of her behavior which had aroused the king's bored interest. And from that moment her course was taken. She did not cringe at his feet, or pretend innocence, or assume ~grande-dame~ airs. She was ~herself~, Marie Becu, the slangy, light-hearted, feather-brained daughter of the streets; respecting nothing, fearing nothing, confused by nothing--as ready to shriek gutter oaths at her king as at her footman. And, of course, she was also Marie Becu, the super-woman whose magnetism and beauty were utterly irresistible.

The combination was too much for Louis. He succumbed. What else was there for him to do? After the myriad poses of the women he had known, Marie's naturalness was like a bracing breeze sweeping through a hothouse; a slum breeze, if you like, but none the less a breeze, and delightfully welcome to the jaded old monarch.

Louis fell in love with Marie. It was not a mere infatuation of an hour, like most of his affairs. He fell completely and foolishly in love with her. And he never fell out of love with her as long as he lived.

Lebel was in despair. He had hoped Marie might amuse the king. He had had no shadow of an idea that the affair would go further. By reason of his privileges as an old servant, he actually ventured to remonstrate with Louis.

"Sire," he protested, "she is not even legitimate. The birth records attest that."

"Then," laughed the king, "let the right authorities make her so."

Accordingly, messengers were sent posthaste to her babyhood home, and a new birth certificate was drawn up; also a certificate attesting to her mother's legal marriage to a wholly mythical Monsieur de Gomard de Vaubernier and to several other statements that made Marie's legitimacy as solid as Gibraltar.

"Also," pleaded the valet, "she is neither a wife nor a woman of title."

"We can arrange both those trifles," the king assured him.

And, with charming simplicity, the thing was done. Jean sent for his worthless elder brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry, who was at that time an army captain. And on September 1, 1768, Marie and Guillaume were duly married. The lucky bridegroom received enough money to pay all his debts and to make him rich. Then he obligingly deserted his new-made wife at the church door, according to program, and wandered away to spend his fortune as might best please him. Thereby, Marie Becu became Madame la Comtesse du Barry, without having her cur of a husband to bother about.

A list of her possessions and their values--duly set down in the marriage contract, which is still on file--shows the state of Marie's finances at this time. I copy it for the benefit of those who may be interested to learn of a useful life's by-products. At twenty-two--in 1768--so says the contract, Marie was the sole owner of:

One diamond necklace, worth sixteen hundred dollars; an aigret and a pair of earings in clusters, worth sixteen hundred dollars; thirty dresses and petticoats, worth six hundred dollars; lace, dress trimmings, caps, et cetera, worth twelve hundred dollars; six dozen shirts of fine linen, twelve complete morning dresses, and other articles of linen, et cetera, worth four hundred dollars.

One obstacle alone now barred Marie's road to supremacy. According to unbreakable royal etiquette, three things were indispensable to the woman who aspired to become a French king's ~maitresse en titre~--she must be legitimate, she must be of noble rank, and she must have been presented at court.

The first two conditions, Marie had fulfilled. The third was a poser. In order to be presented at court, some reputable woman of the old nobility must act as sponsor. And not one decent woman of high rank would sink to acting as sponsor for Marie. Moreover, the king declared he did not care whether she were presented or not, and he would take no step to help her in the matter.

Without this presentation, she could not appear publicly at court, she could not sway overt political influence, she could not have a suite of rooms at the palace. Between a presentation and no presentation lay all the difference between uncrowned queen and a light o' love. And no one would sponsor Marie.

Jean du Barry, at last, solved the problem, as he had solved all the rest.

He had able assistance. For, a court clique had been formed to back Marie's pretentions. The clique was headed by such men as the old Duc de Richelieu and the much younger Duc d'Aiguillon. The latter was violently in love with Marie, and there is no reason to think that his love was hopeless. But the rest of the clique cared not a straw about her. To them, the whole thing was a master move in politics. With Marie in control of the king, and themselves in control of Marie, they foresaw an era of unlimited power.

The Duc de Choiseul, prime minister of France, was the sworn enemy of this clique, which formed the "opposition." And Choiseul swore to move heaven and earth to prevent Marie's presentation, for he knew it would lead to his own political ruin; as it did.

Jean du Barry hunted around until he discovered somewhere in Navarre a crotchety and impoverished old widow, the dowager Comtesse de Bearn. She was a scion of the ancient nobility, the decayed and dying branch of a once mighty tree. She was not only poor to the verge of starvation, but she had a passion for lawsuits. She had just lost a suit, and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The good-hearted Jean, through the clique's help, arranged to have the case reopened and the decision reversed. This was before our own day of an incorruptible judiciary. He also promised her a gift of twenty thousand dollars in gold. All this in return for the trifling service of journeying up to Paris and thence to Versailles, to act as sponsor for the lovely Madame du Barry, who had wilfully declared that she would be presented under no less auspices than those of the illustrious Comtesse de Bearn.

The old comtesse accepted the offer with all the shrinking reluctance a hungry dog shows at the proffer of a bone. She came up to Paris, at the expense of the clique, and was immured in Jean's house, with the gambler's sister, Chon (Fanchon) du Barry as her jailer and entertainer.

Choiseul, through his spies, learned of the plot, and he tried in every way to kidnap the old lady or to out-bribe the du Barrys.

Meanwhile, coached by Jean, the fair Marie was making King Louis' life miserable by throwing herself at his feet, in season and out of season, and beseeching him to silence her enemies forever by allowing her to be presented. When these tactics failed, she would let loose upon the poor king a flood of gutter language, roundly abusing him, turning the air blue with her profanity, and in other ways showing her inalienable right to a place in court circles.

Louis would promise nothing. The turmoil alternately bored and amused him. At last--April 21, 1769--on his return from the hunt, after an unusually good day's sport, the king casually remarked to all concerned:

"The presentation of Madame la Comtesse du Barry will occur at to-morrow evening's levee."

The traditional and well-thumbed bombshell exploding among them would have created no more stir in court circles than did this yawned announcement. Choiseul and his followers were in despair. Jean ran around in circles, making preparations for the triumph. Marie rehearsed for the hundredth time the complicated forms of etiquette the occasion called for.

The Choiseul faction tried one thing after another to block the ceremony. They kidnapped Marie's hairdresser, stole the coach in which she was to make the trip from her Paris house to Versailles, arranged a holdup on the road, and so forth. Thanks to Jean's wit and clique's power, a new hairdresser and coach were provided in the nick of time. And the Versailles road was so heavily guarded that a regiment of cavalry could scarce have dared intercept the carriage.

According to one story, Choiseul even got a message past all the carefully reared barriers to Madame de Bearn, prevailing on her to plead agonized illness and to keep to her bed on the evening set for the presentation. Whereupon, so runs the yarn, a character actor from the Comedie Francaise was paid to "make up" as Madame de Bearn and to perform her functions of sponsor. This may or may not be true. It forms the central theme of De Vere Stacpoole's novel, "The Presentation."

On the great night, the court was assembled, tensely waiting for Marie to arrive. At the appointed time--no Madame du Barry appeared. The minutes grew into an hour; people began to whisper and fidget; the Choiseul party looked blissful; the clique could not hide its worry. Louis stood, frowning, between the suspense stricken D'Aiguillon and Richelieu. At last he turned from them and stared moodily out of a window. Then, moving back into the room, he opened his lips to declare the levee at an end. As he started to speak, an usher announced:

"Madame la Comtesse de Bearn! Madame la Comtesse du Barry!"

And Marie entered, with her sponsor--or with some one who looked sufficiently like Madame de Bearn to deceive any one.

According to one version, Marie was late because at the last instant another Choiseul obstacle had to be cleared away. According to another, she was purposely late to enhance the dramatic interest of her arrival. Here is an account of the presentation:

Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon. The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter....

She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames, to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.

Marie had won. For the next five years she was the real Queen of France. And, during that time, she cost the French nation, in cold cash, something over seven million dollars.

She was not at all on the style of the Pompadour, who had yearned to meddle in politics. Marie cared nothing for politics, except to help out her army of friends and dependents. She had no ambitions. She had not even craved on her own account to be the king's ~maitresse en titre~. All she wanted was to have a good time. And she had it. The pleasure was all hers. The French people did the paying; until, years later, they exacted bloody settlement of the score.

Pompadour had worn out her life trying to "amuse the unamusable," to find novelties that would entertain the king. Marie did nothing of the sort. Instead, she demanded that the king amuse her. Pompadour had sought to sway the destinies of nations. Marie was quite happy if she could spend the revenues of her own nation.

She treated Louis in a way that caused the court to gasp with horror. She scolded him shrilly; petted him, in public, as if he had been her peasant spouse; and always addressed him as "France." He enjoyed it. It was a novelty.

Once, when she was giving an informal breakfast with a dozen or more nobles as guests, she ordered the king to make the coffee. Amused, he obeyed. She took one sip of the royal-brewed beverage, then tossed the cup into the fireplace, exclaiming:

"France, your coffee is as insipid as your talk!"

All political matters she turned over to d'Aiguillon, who was the clique's spokesman. To please him, and to "get even" for old scores, she caused the ruin of Choiseul.

The mode of Choiseul's downfall is interesting as a side light on court intrigue. The clique taught Marie how to poison the king's ever-suspicious mind against the prime minister, and she did so with great success. Thanks to her, Louis was held to believe that Choiseul, feeling his power over the monarch slipping, was planning a war scare with Spain, so that he could prove his seeming worth to the kingdom of France by dispelling the cloud.

The clique--having access, through a spy, to all of Choiseul's correspondence--resorted to a fairly ingenious trick. At Marie's suggestion, Choiseul's secretary was summoned to the palace. He was in the clique's pay. Before the king, he was questioned as to what he knew about Choiseul's affairs.

The man, with an air of mystery, answered that he knew nothing of them, but that he would give his majesty one hint--let the king request Choiseul to write a letter to Spain, assuring that nation of France's peaceful intent. Should Choiseul do so without comment, it would show he was not plotting a war scare, as charged. But should he hesitate--well, what could that prove, instead?

The plotters already knew that Choiseul had that very day sent a letter to Spain, proposing the mutual signing of a declaration of peace between the nations. The king requested his minister to send a letter that was almost identical with the one he had already written and dispatched. Naturally Choiseul hesitated. And the work was done.

Yet, out of careless good nature--she would not have bothered to harm anybody, politically or otherwise, if she had had her own way--Marie insisted that the king settle a liberal pension on the fallen minister; this despite the fact that Choiseul and his sister, Madame de Grammont, had both worked with all their might and main to block her rise.

She was good, too--as they all were--to her mother. She presented the horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income. She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry. Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman. Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood vied for chances to win her favor.

The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her. The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin--afterward Louis XVI.--and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned supreme.

Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti--who had bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie--renamed him Louis Zamore.

Marie was delighted with the boy--as soon as she heard the price paid for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore, please. He will come back into the story.

Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of France:

To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble, seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes--whose chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom she thrust into the Academy for doing it--she spent sixty-five thousand dollars.

ZThe heirs of one firm of creditors were, as late as 1836, still claiming the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars from her estate. She had "state dresses, hooped dresses, dresses sur ~la consideration, robes de toilette~;" dresses costing two hundred dollars, four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, and one thousand dollars; dresses with a base of silver strewn with clusters of feathers; dresses striped with big bars of gold; mosaic dresses shot with gold and adorned with myrtle; and riding habits of white Indian silk that cost twelve hundred dollars.

She had dresses whose elaborate embroidery alone cost twenty-one hundred dollars. Her dressing gowns had lace on them worth five hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars. She had cuffs of lace costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, point-lace caps valued at three hundred dollars, and ~point Argentan~ costumes at eighteen hundred dollars. She ordered gold ornaments and trinkets of all sorts galore. Roettiers, the goldsmith, received an order from her for a toilet set of solid gold--for which she had a sudden whim. The government advanced twelve thousand ounces of gold for it.

Boehmer, the Paris jeweler, knowing of her love for ultra-costly things, made up for her a huge diamond necklace, of a heterogeneous mass of many-carat diamonds, arranged with regard to show and wholly without a thought of good taste. The necklace was so big and so expensive that Marie declared at once she must have it. Louis willingly consented to buy it for her; but he died before the purchase was made, and Boehmer was left with the ugly treasure loop on his hands. Long afterward he tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette. And from that transaction rose the mystery of "The Queen's Necklace," which did much to hasten the French Revolution.

In the spring of 1774, as King Louis and Marie were driving toward Versailles, they saw a pretty girl in a wayside field, gathering grass for her cow. Louis greeted the girl with a fatherly smile. The girl looked back at him with perfect indifference.

Piqued at such unwonted contempt for his royal self, the king got out of his carriage, waddled across to where the girl stood, and kissed her. The reason she had seemed indifferent was because she was dazed. The reason she was dazed was that she was in the early stages of smallpox.

Louis caught the infection and died a few days later.

The first act of Louis XVI.--the king's grandson and successor--was to order Marie to a convent. Later he softened the decree by allowing her to live at Luciennes, or anywhere else outside a ten-mile radius from Paris.

Then it was that the fallen favorite met Cosse once more. And their old-time love story recommenced, this time on a less platonic footing. She kept her title of "Comtesse," and had enough money--as she paid few of her debts--to live in luxury; still beautiful, still loved, still moderately young.

The Revolution burst forth. Marie enrolled herself as a stanch loyalist. Hearing that the king and queen were pressed for funds, she wrote to Marie Antoinette:

Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory of these treasures--I offer them to you with eagerness. You have so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow. Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's.

When the king and queen were beheaded, she secretly wore black for them. Also, she made a trip to England, where she tried to sell some of her jewels to help the royalist cause. All these things were duly repeated to the revolutionary government by Louis Zamore, her Bengalese servant.

One evening she was expecting a visit from Cosse. But midnight came, and he had not appeared.

"Go down the road," she ordered Zamore, who had just returned from an errand to Paris, "and see if you can catch sight of him."

"I can show him to you--or part of him--without troubling to do that," retorted Zamore, with sudden insolence.

Whipping one hand from behind his back, he tossed on the floor at Marie's feet the head of her lover. Cosse had been guillotined that day. Zamore, in return for certain information to the government, had received the head as a gift.

The information he had given led to Marie's arrest on the following charges:

"Having wasted the treasures of the state, conspiring with the enemies of the Republic, and having, in London, worn mourning for the late King."

Marie was sentenced to death, on December 7, 1793, and was beheaded the same day. Almost alone of all the Frenchwomen thus put to death, she turned coward at the last. The strain of peasant blood came to the fore. And where aristocrats rode smiling to the scaffold, Marie du Barry behaved like a panic-stricken child. She fell on her knees and begged for her life. She told where every article of value she possessed was buried, in her garden. If she thought thus to buy back her life, she did not understand the souls of such men as her captors.

They heard her to the end, jotting down the directions for finding her treasure. Then she was put into the tumbril, and was started on her way to the scaffold. The journey led past the old millinery shop where she had once worked. As she caught sight of its sign, she screamed out, twice.

The crowd had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of death. Now they seemed to awaken to the fact that they were about to kill a woman, a wondrous beautiful woman, at that. A sigh of pity ran through the throng. The driver in charge of the tumbril, fearing a riot and a rescue, whipped up the horses and drove on with his load. There were others besides Madame du Barry in the death wagon.

The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.

Says De Goncourt, her biographer:

"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy, crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."

Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the people of France was paid.