She had no rancor or desire for vengeance; she never humiliated those whom she could destroy; she always punished by silence, yet never won eternal silence by letters patent; generous to a fault, giving and permitting everything about her to be taken, she opened her purse to all who were kind to her and to all who happened in some way to please her. Keeping the heart of Louis XV. was no easy matter, as the case of Mme. de Pompadour clearly showed. The majority of his friends and her enemies endeavored to force a new mistress upon the king; surrounded on all sides by candidates for her coveted position, Mme. du Barry managed to hold her own. When the king was prostrated by smallpox, he sent her away on the last day.
The reign of Mme. du Barry was not one of tyranny, nor was it a domination in the strict sense of that word; for she was a nonentity politically, without ideas or plans. "Study the favor of Mme. du Barry: nothing that emanates from her belongs to her; she possesses neither an idea nor an enemy; she controls all the historical events of her time, without desiring them, without comprehending them.... She serves friendships and individuals, without knowing how to serve a cause or a system or a party, and she is protected by the providential course of things, without having to worry about an effort, intrigues, or gratitude."
Her power and influence cannot be compared with those of her predecessor, Mme. de Pompadour. Modes were followed, but never invented by her. "With her taste for the pleasures of a grisette, her patronage falls from the opera to the couplet, from paintings and statuaries to bronzes and sculptures in wood; her clientèle are no longer artists, philosophers, poets--they are the gods of lower domains, mimics, buffoons, dancers, comedians." She was the lowest and most common type of woman ever influential in France.
After the death of the king, she was ordered to leave Versailles and live with her aunt. Later on, she was permitted to reside within ten leagues of Paris; all her former friends and admirers then returned, and she continued to live the life of old, buying everything for which she had a fancy and living in the most sumptuous style, never worrying about the payment of her debts. After a few years she was entirely forgotten, living at Luciennes with but a few intimate friends and her lover, the Duc de Brissac.
At the outbreak of the Revolution, she was living at Luciennes in great luxury on the fortune left her by the duke. Probably she would have escaped the guillotine had she not been so possessed with the idea of retaining her wealth. Four trips to England were undertaken by her, and on her return she found her estates usurped by a man named Grieve, who, anxious to obtain possession of her riches, finally succeeded in procuring her arrest while her enemies were in power. From Sainte-Pélagie they took her to the Conciergerie, to the room which Marie Antoinette had occupied.
Accused of being the instrument of Pitt, of being an accomplice in the foreign war, of the insurrection in La Vendée, of the disorders in the south, the jury, out one hour, brought in a verdict of guilty, fixing the punishment at death within twenty-four hours, on the Place de la République. Upon hearing her sentence, she broke down completely and confessed everything she had hidden in the garden at Luciennes. On her way to the scaffold, she was a most pitiable sight to behold--the only prominent French woman, victim of the Revolution, to die a coward. The last words of this once famous and popular mistress were: "Life, life, leave me my life! I will give all my wealth to the nation. Another minute, hangman! A moi! A moi!" and the heavy iron cut short her pitiful screams, thus ending the life of the last royal mistress.
CHAPTER XII
MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE REVOLUTION
The condition of France at the end of the reign of Louis XV. was most deplorable--injustice, misery, bankruptcy, and instability everywhere. The action of the law could be overridden by the use of arbitrary warrants of arrest--lettres de cachet. The artisans of the towns were hampered by the system of taxation, but the peasant had the greatest cause for complaint; he was oppressed by the feudal dues and many taxes, which often amounted to sixty per cent of his earnings. The government was absolute, but rotten and tottering; the people, oppressively and unjustly governed, were just beginning to be conscious of their condition and to seek the cause of it, while the educated classes were saturated with revolutionary doctrines which not only destroyed their loyalty to the old institutions, but created constant aspirations toward new ones.