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.