Another of the people declared to be in love with Mme. Le Brun, and about whom there was so much gossip as to cause her serious annoyance, was M. de Calonne, the brilliant, extravagant, fascinating Finance Minister of Louis XVI. [28]
What made this all the more provoking was that M. de Calonne was not even, like M. de Vaudreuil, a great friend of hers. She did not know him at all intimately, and in fact only once went to a party given by him at the Ministère des finances, and that was because the soirée was in honour of Prince Henry of Prussia, who was constantly at her house. The splendid portrait she painted of Calonne was exhibited in the Salon of 1786. Mlle. Arnould remarked on seeing it, “Mme. Le Brun has cut his legs off to keep him in the same place,” alluding to the picture being painted to the knees.
All sorts of preposterous stories were circulated about it and about them. Some said M. de Calonne had given Mme. Le Brun a number of bonbons, called papillottes, wrapped up in bank-notes; others that she had received in a pasty a sum of money large enough to ruin the treasury: the truth being that he had sent her, as the price of his portrait, four thousand francs in notes in a box worth about twenty louis, and this was considered by no means a high price for the picture. M. de Beaujon had given her eight thousand francs for a portrait of the same size a short time before, without anybody finding the least fault. The character of Calonne was such that no woman who cared about her reputation would wish her name to be connected with his.
The first step in his rapid rise he is said to have owed to having left about some compromising papers of his friend Chalotais on a bureau, where they were found, and the disclosure of their contents caused the ruin and imprisonment of Chalotais and others, about the year 1763. After this he continued to prosper financially, politically, and socially, until another intrigue raised him to the height of power.
Madame Vigée Le Brun
CHARLES ALEXANDRE DE CALONNE
He was deeply in love with Mme. d’Harvelay, whose husband was the banker and intimate friend of M. de Vergennes, then Foreign Minister. Mme. d’Harvelay, who returned his passion and carried on a secret liaison with him, used her influence with her husband to induce M. de Vergennes to push him on. The husband, who was fascinated by Calonne and did not know or suspect what was going on, was persuaded by his wife one day to write a confidential letter to Vergennes on the subject of the general alarm then beginning to be felt about the disastrous state of the finances and the peril threatening the Monarchy itself, in which he declared Calonne to be the only man who could save the situation. The Court was then at Fontainebleau, and it was contrived that this letter should be shown to the King in the evening, after he had retired to supper with his family.
Next day the destinies of France were in the hands of Calonne.
Dissipated, unscrupulous, with no money and owing 200,000 écus, the new Contrôleur-général des Finances found an empty treasury, an enormous mass of debt, alarm and perplexity in the Government, and gathering fury and suspicion amongst the populace.