“But where is the Pompadour now?
This was the Pompadour’s fan!”
Next comes the plate of Madame Jeanne-Gomart de Vaubernier, Comtesse Du Barry (born at Vaucouleurs in 1743), the last favourite of Louis XV., who, less fortunate than her rival, la Pompadour, survived her royal protector, nay, even royalty itself, and died on the scaffold in December, 1793. Ignorant as she was, she formed a small but valuable collection, her books being bound in red morocco, all richly gilt, and ornamented on the sides with her arms, and her motto, Boutez en avant. Redan was one of her binders. Louis XV. remarked, “La Pompadour had more books than the countess, but they were neither so well chosen nor so well bound, we therefore create her Bibliothécaire de Versailles.”
Poor Du Barry! She could scarcely read, and could not spell; her books were selected to dispel the ennui and divert the mind of the debauched old king in the last few years of his shameful life. Yet is she worthy of mention here, if for one thing only, she possessed a book-plate engraved by Le Grand, of which, however, she made but little use.
But Louis le Bien-aimé died of small-pox in 1774, and henceforward the Du Barry fades from sight for nearly twenty years, until we see her once again, on the way to the guillotine, where, unlike most of the aristocrats who preceded her, she lost courage, and vainly shrieked for mercy from those who knew not what it was.
“Unclean, yet unmalignant, not unpitiable thing! What a course was thine: from that first truckle-bed where thy mother bore thee, with tears, to an unnamed father: forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over highest sunlit heights, of Harlotdom and Rascaldom—to the guillotine-axe, which shears away thy vainly whimpering head!” Thus does Carlyle epitomize her career.
Louis XV. was known as le Bien-aimé, but years before his death his name had lost all the influence it had ever possessed, and
“Le Bien-aimé de l’Almanac,
N’est pas le Bien-aimé de France,
Il fait tout ab hoc, et ab hac,
Le Bien-aimé de l’Almanac.
Il met tout dans le même sac,
Et la Justice et la Finance:
Le Bien-aimé de l’Almanac,
N’est pas le Bien-aimé de France.”
It was computed that during his reign 150,000 men had been imprisoned in the Bastille, whose crimes, real or imaginary, had never been investigated in any court of justice.