Note 10 — Chapter I

He claimed affinity with the Barrys, Earls of Barrymore, and that family did acknowledge the relationship, and had the meanness, when so many French would not, to grace the mistress’s triumph at Versailles. [This alludes to Lady Barrymore, a foolish woman, whom Walpole ridicules in his Correspondence. An amusing life of the Comte du Barry is given in the Biographie Universelle, partly from an autobiographical MS. He seems to have been a consummate blackguard. He perished by the guillotine in 1794. A more favourable account of the Du Barrys is to be found in Capefigue, the panegyrist of every Bourbon king but Henry the Fourth.—(Louis XV., et la Société du XVIII. Siècle, t. iv. pp. 106–111.)—E.]