VII. 1783. OSCILLATES BETWEEN PARIS AND VERSAILLES.—SENDS OUT BEGGING LETTERS AND PETITIONS.—FAINTS IN MADAME’S SALLE D’ATTENTE.—DESPAIR.

At the time the countess was engaged in setting her snares for the Cardinal de Rohan, she dined one day with our young Bar-sur-Aube advocate, who saw that she was in most excellent spirits, which every now and then exhaled in malicious remarks respecting their common acquaintances. “I tried in vain,” says Beugnot, “to lead her to more serious talk. Irritated at last, I threatened to abandon her entirely to her folly. She answered me gaily that she no longer had need of me. My brow contracted; she saw that she was likely to lose me, and took the trouble to explain to me that I had been exceedingly useful to her in unravelling the particulars of her claim, in composing ‘mémoires’ and petitions for her—in a word, in all the duties of an advocate—but that she had now arrived at a point where she required counsel of a different kind. She wanted some one who could point out to her the way of getting at the queen and the contrôleur-général, and who knew equally well what was necessary to be done as to be left undone—in a word, one who was alike capable of concocting a good intrigue, and of carrying it successfully through. It was necessary that I should now hear from her lips, without making an ugly grimace with my own, that in an affair of this kind she looked upon me as the most foolish of men; she had, indeed, already taken several steps without asking my advice. Her husband’s condition, she went on to say, was one of ridicule to all the world, and consequently an obstacle to her advancement. She had made him enter as supernumerary into the Count d’Artois’ body-guard, which would give him a sort of standing, which the gendarmerie did not. She had found means, moreover, to get him to Versailles to perform his duties there, and where, at least, he would not be so sorry a sight as he was in the country. She observed that she was about to reside at Versailles herself, in order to secure an opportunity of getting at the queen, and of interesting her majesty in her favour. This was the first time,” remarks Beugnot, “that she pronounced the name of her sovereign in my presence.”⁠[39]⁠

At Versailles, which at this period was crowded with intriguers and adventurers, living for the most part by their wits, the countess resided, first of all with the widow Bourgeois, in the Place Dauphine, whence she speedily removed to the Hôtel de Jouy, in the Rue des Récollets, a long narrow street leading on to the immense Place d’Armes, in front of the château. Some of its houses—built in strict accordance with the edict promulgated by the grand monarque at the time a new Versailles was springing up in the neighbourhood of his vast palace, namely, only a single storey high, with attics, and roofed with slate—evidently date back to the days of Louis XIV. The Hôtel de Jouy, where the countess had her quarters, is now an ordinary dwelling-house, lofty and narrow, with a certain air of respectability about it, situated at the far end of the street (No. 23),⁠[40] in an opposite direction to the château.

Having next to nothing to live upon, it is not to be wondered at that the De la Mottes were soon deeply in debt The countess, it is true, converted her apartment into a kind of office, whence she periodically sent forth letters of supplication to the nobility for relief, and petitions to the crown praying for the restoration of the Saint-Remi domains; but although she urged her suit with audacious pertinacity, the result seems to have fallen far short of her expectations. Fortunately for her there was always the Cardinal de Rohan to fall back upon, and the snares which she laid for him appear to have been set to some purpose, for ere six months had gone by, Madame de la Motte had so far improved her acquaintance with the grand almoner, who even assisted her in the composition of her petitions and memorials,⁠[41] as to become convinced—in accordance with the rule she had laid down, that alms could be only effectively asked for at the church-door or from a carriage—that a more respectable lodging was indispensable to enable her to profit by the opportunities which this intercourse seemed to open out to her. There were, moreover, other and most pressing reasons for quitting the Hôtel de Reims. The De la Mottes were fifteen hundred and eighty francs in debt to their landlord, who had latterly not only lodged, but boarded them; in addition to which the countess had quarrelled with the landlady, and had attempted, it was said, to throw her downstairs.⁠[42] The result was a police case, and their ejectment from the premises. A “spacious appartement” the rent of which was twelve hundred francs, was therefore hired by them in Paris, in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles (No. 13), at that time a quiet and very respectable street leading out of the Rue Saint-Louis, now the Rue Turenne, and consisting entirely of private houses, within sight, too, of the Place Royale, where three centuries ago stood the ancient Palais des Tournelles, at the tournament in front of which Madame de la Motte’s royal ancestor, Henri de Valois, lost his life, and almost in a direct line (in an opposite direction to the Rue de la Verrerie) with the cardinal’s hôtel, from which it was distant only a couple of short streets, or some five or six minutes’ walk. Owing to their straitened means the De la Mottes were unable to furnish their new appartement until the month of May, 1783, and in the meantime madame, when not at Versailles, was obliged to live au cinquième with the mother of her femme de chambre,⁠[43] and yet she pretends that at this time she kept five servants, male and female, and a couple of carriages.⁠[44]⁠

This was mere vain boasting. She was not yet in a position to ask alms from a carriage, but was still obliged to send her begging letters through the post, or be herself the bearer of them. One of these missives, written at this particular epoch, and evidently addressed to some person in an official position—possibly to M. d’Ormesson, the then controller-general, or to M. de Breteuil, minister of the king’s household—has been preserved, and furnishes a fair specimen of her style of appeal to persons in power—a little flattery, more or less hypocrisy, allusions to her high descent, and a covert threat or two. We extract its main passages, which we have translated as closely as the bad handwriting and worse spelling of the original document admitted of our doing.

“You have done me the honour, sir, of informing me that you have caused to be remitted to M. Lenoir several notes which I have sent you; but I believed that you, sir, would have had the goodness to oblige me, who am more sensible than any one of the confidence which the king has in you. You are too just to see any harm in there being granted me so small a sum as has, to my knowledge, just been accorded to a person who is not so much to be pitied as I, nor with so much right. I cannot think who it is that has usurped the place due to my misfortunes.... I know that M. de Forge [intendant of the royal fisheries and forests, of which one or more of the Valois estates was part] is very much opposed to my having the estate which I ask by right; still I cannot conceive that it matters to him whether I or another am tenant of the king.... I have the honour of assuring you that I had yesterday only a single livre (franc), consequently I may well hope to improve my fortunes.... It is you, sir, and your good faith that console me. I am very sensible that you are not unmindful of my misfortunes. I believe that you told me you would speak to M. de Vergennes. I have inquired if this matter is under his control, and am assured it is on you alone that it depends. I recommend myself, therefore, to your kindness.... It is not my intention to offer a menace to any one in declaring that I shall end by throwing myself at the feet of the king, and acquainting him with all my misfortunes. If you, sir, cannot lend me your assistance, I beg you to have the goodness to cause to be returned to me the documents which I have had the honour to send you. I shall see, on the day of the audience, whether it will not be possible for me to change my lot, and for my efforts to get me accorded the trifling sum I have asked. M. Lenoir sent me yesterday a safe conduct, which M. Amelon requested of him on my behalf, for a large sum which I have owed these two years past, but which has not yet reduced me to sell my furniture, and thereby cause scandals which would assuredly have been aimed at me. Nevertheless, there is no help for it; I shall be forced to make away with it so that I may live. God has not yet determined my fate, and, if Providence does not show pity on me, people will have to reproach themselves at seeing me come to a most miserable end. I am not ashamed to tell you, sir, that I am going out into the world to beg. I have borrowed from the Baron de Clugny, of the Ministry of Marine, three hundred livres to enable me to live, which, counting on your goodness, I have promised to return him in a week’s time. No one, sir, has so much reason to complain as I have—my husband without a post, my sister for a long time on my hands, has, of course, contributed to my debts. People may do as they please with me; still, I say it is frightful to abandon a relation of a king, whom he has himself recognised, and who is in the most frightful position. You will, doubtless, sir, consider me very unreasonable, but I cannot keep myself from complaining, since not even the smallest grace is accorded me. I am no longer surprised that so many people are driven into crime, and I can say, moreover, that it is religion alone that keeps me from doing wrong....

“I have the honour to be, with all the attachment of which you are deserving, Sir,

“Your very humble, very obedient Servant,

“Countess de Valois de la Motte.

“Paris, May 16th, 1783.”⁠[45]⁠

Unless she desired to have a couple of strings to her bow, we can hardly imagine the “safe conduct” referred to in the foregoing letter being required by Madame de la Motte, since in her Memoirs she tells us that the Countess de Provence interested herself to procure for her an arrêt de surséance, or writ under the king’s sign manual, which not only protected the person named in it from arrest, but saved him or her from being harassed by suits at law as well. Madame de la Motte at the same time obtained a “safe conduct” for her husband, the count. Convenient documents, both of these, for individuals of their stamp. The count’s “safe conduct” was not procured before there was pressing need of it, for at this time the ex-gendarme was hiding from his creditors in a little auberge at Brie-Comte-Robert,⁠[46] famous now-a-days for its beautiful roses, a score or so of miles from Paris on the Lyons road, and close to the Abbey of Jarcy, where his sister-in-law, Mademoiselle de Saint-Remi, afterwards went to reside. The chances are that he had already lost his post in the Count d’Artois’ body-guard, although Madame de la Motte pretended that the countess was her protectress, and that the count used to notice her “in a particular manner” whenever she went to church at Versailles—a notice which, by the way, it has been insinuated, subsequently ripened into a too familiar intimacy.⁠[47]⁠

The furniture which, on the guarantee of a Jew, the De la Mottes eventually succeeded in obtaining for their new appartement in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, was far from splendid, and it was, moreover, every now and then being sent to some neighbour, notably to Burlandeux, the count’s barber, to save it from being taken in execution,⁠[48] and not unfrequently to the pawnbrokers to provide the family with meat and bread.⁠[49] The countess of course kept up her intimacy with the cardinal, on whose liberality, or call it charity if you will, she could to a certain extent depend. If we believe the cardinal’s statement, the donations he bestowed upon her at this period were far from being of that prodigal character which the countess afterwards asserted them to have been, and were more consistent with his character of priest and grand almoner than that of lover and man of gallantry, which latter Madame de la Motte openly insinuated was the nature of the cardinal’s then relations towards her. The cardinal asserted that four or five louis at a time, and at irregular and somewhat distant intervals, was the extent of the benefactions she received from him; but he was forced to admit that he had given her twenty-five louis on one occasion, and it eventually oozed out that he had also made himself personally liable to a Jew money-lender of Nancy for five thousand five hundred livres (francs), a debt contracted by the count when he was stationed at Lunéville, and which amount the cardinal of course eventually had to pay.⁠[50] These facts would seem to prove that at this period the countess had succeeded in ensnaring her victim, preparatory to making him, as she afterwards did, her dupe and then her instrument.

Madame de la Motte was very much in the habit of exaggerating the amount of the charitable gifts bestowed upon her by members of the royal family and some few of the French nobility, and even claimed to have received certain apocryphal sums from persons of distinction who never once assisted her. The reason for this will be apparent enough in the course of our narrative. In the memorials and reports published in 1786 are various disclaimers on the part of people of rank, among others the Duke de Chartres (afterwards Orléans Égalité), the Duke de Penthièvre, the Duke de Choiseul, the contrôleur-général, &c., showing that these exceedingly liberal benefactors, as the countess had made them out to be, had either given nothing at all, or else that a huge disparity existed between the sum really given and the amount pretended to have been received. Her friend, Beugnot, moreover, speaks at this period of sundry treats of an evening on the Boulevards, consisting of cakes and beer, a beverage for which she had a particular liking, while, as regards cakes, she would devour two or three dozen of these at a sitting, making it evident that she had dined but lightly on these occasions, if, indeed, she had dined at all.⁠[51] She, however, most astonished Beugnot by the voracity of her appetite when she dined with him, as she every now and then did, at the “Cadran bleu” a noted tavern in the Champs Élysées, whence on a memorable occasion, some eight years later, five hundred and odd Marseillais, who had marched up to Paris in defence of their fellow “patriots,” and whose march inspired the composition of the world-renowned Marseillaise hymn, rushed forth on the grenadiers of the Filles Saint-Thomas section, and drove them pell-mell over the drawbridge of the Tuileries. Other friends of the countess’s tell, too, of frequent loans of ten, fifteen, or twenty livres at a time, all of which is tolerable evidence of semi-starvation and penury rather than of an abundance or even a sufficiency of means.

Spite, nevertheless, of the limited nature of their resources, there is no doubt but that when the De la Mottes had regularly settled down in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, they made pretensions to something like display. They borrowed, for instance, a service of silver plate of a friend—a M. de Vieilleville; and according to the countess’s own statement, M. de Calonne, at one of the interviews she succeeded in obtaining with him just after his appointment to the office of contrôleur-général, plainly told her that she was only “shamming poverty,” and commenced twitting her respecting her hôtel at Paris, her cabriolet, her coach, her travelling-carriage, and her servants in livery. To convince Calonne that whatever might be her style of living, she was nevertheless in great pecuniary difficulties, she took him one day the tickets for numerous articles of furniture pledged by her at the Mont de Piété, and by this ruse succeeded in securing some small amount of official sympathy, which developed itself in a gift of six hundred livres from the royal treasury, on the express condition, however, that she was to make no further appeals.

Soon after the countess had become regularly resident in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, she was a frequent attendant at mass at a convent of Minimes, on the opposite side of the way, which has long since been demolished, and barracks for gendarmerie erected on its site, but the remembrance of which is still preserved in the nomenclature of several of the adjacent streets. A certain Father Loth having his eye upon so interesting an addition to the common fold, made her an offer of a key by means of which she might let herself into the chapel to the ten o’clock mass, attended, as he explained to her, only by persons of her own condition. The countess accepted the offer, and a kind of acquaintanceship sprang up between Father Loth and her, which resulted in the former becoming a constant visitor at the De la Mottes, and insinuating himself into the confidence of the family; and subsequently, when brighter days dawned upon them, officiating as a sort of steward of their household.

Although the countess went constantly to Versailles, in the hope of obtaining by some lucky chance access to the queen, she seems to have been baffled in all her efforts. She had scraped acquaintance with Desclos, one of the queen’s pages, at a man-midwife’s at Versailles,⁠[52] and was on gossiping terms with the gatekeeper of the Little Trianon, but could make no further advance at court, until by a lucky chance she one day succeeded in penetrating into the apartments of one of the princesses. Here, whilst waiting among other visitors for her turn to be introduced, she suddenly fell down like a person fainting from weakness, and otherwise exhibited symptoms of great suffering. Her poverty being known, there was instantly a rumour afoot that sheer hunger was the cause of this debility. The incident produced considerable excitement in the court circle, and news reaching the ears of the Countess de Provence that a lady of rank had fainted in the salle d’attente, from lack of sustenance, she flew to her assistance, and after treating her with all the tenderness that humanity dictated, gave her some twelve or fifteen louis to relieve her necessities. The countess, much affected by the occurrence, is said to have mentioned it on the following day to Marie-Antoinette, who was about to yield to the impression it made upon her sensibility; but Louis XVI., who had received so many of Madame de la Motte’s petitions, and had been sufficiently bored thereby, had conceived a strong prejudice against both her and her pretensions, and pronounced her swoon to be a mere ruse to extort money. The result was that the queen closed her purse-strings, and Madame de la Motte took little or nothing by her move. Most persons in her situation, after this signal failure, would have considered their struggle for court favour as fairly concluded, but it was far from being so with her. She was one of those indomitable spirits gifted with a pertinacity which no mere rebuff could check, no disappointment discourage.

For some time past the countess had made a point of laying siege to one controller-general after another—first to M. Joly de Fleury, then to M. d’Ormesson, and finally to M. de Calonne, in whose antechamber she was a constant attendant, and whom she so pestered with her petitions and memorials and personal appeals for relief, spite of the understanding come to when the six hundred livres were given to her, that she became at length a kind of terror to the minister, who showered gold around him with easy facility from a bankrupt exchequer, while, as a courtier said, “All the world held out its hand, but I held out my hat.” To rid himself of the countess’s importunities, and urged by Madame Elisabeth and the Countess de Provence (who since the fainting scene had taken some kind of interest in her) to do something towards her relief, M. de Calonne obtained an augmentation of seven hundred livres (twenty-eight pounds) to the De la Motte pension. Instead, however, of feeling in any degree grateful for this act of favour, the countess tells us that when the minister communicated the intelligence to her she indignantly refused this “pitiful addition,” as she called it, “to her income.” Visions of the restoration of the Essoyes, Fontette and Verpilière estates had been floating before her eyes, and in the heat of her passion she exclaimed, “I will oblige you, sir, to speak of my demands to the king. Tell him, sir, that I will fix myself in this house”—the palace of Versailles—“until he thinks proper to provide me with another home.” And the irate countess in accordance with her threat did actually remain for several hours, but at last took her departure, because, as she naïvely remarks, her further stay there “would have answered no purpose.”⁠[53]⁠

It must have been about this period that the countess, harassed by pecuniary difficulties, and determined to exhaust every chance of relief that suggested itself, ventured upon an appeal to Madame Dubarry, the late king’s banished mistress, who clung as close upon the skirts of the Court as she dared do, residing in her charming pavilion at Louveciennes, within eye-shot of Versailles. Thither Madame de la Motte drove over one day ostensibly to offer herself as dame de compagnie to the dowager queen, as she used ironically to style the once all-powerful favourite of Louis the Well-Beloved; but Madame Dubarry, judging from the absurd pretensions she put forward with regard to her name and birth, thought her little fitted for the post she sought to fill, and told her that she was not at that moment in want of a companion, adding sarcastically that if she were, she was not great lady enough to engage one of so high a quality as a descendant of the house of Valois. Nothing disconcerted, the countess called a second time a few days afterwards, and made a pitiable appeal to the Dubarry to support her claims at court, shedding floods of tears as she spoke. But as soon as her back was turned, “La Faiblesse,” as Marie-Antoinette was accustomed to style the Dubarry, whose heart was none of the most susceptible, bored by the countess’s melting display, and caring not a straw for the house of Valois or any of its bastard descendants, flung both petition and memoir, which the countess had presented to her, into the fire.⁠[54]⁠

The countess now addressed herself to the well-known favourite of Marie-Antoinette, the Duchess de Polignac, whose influence over her royal mistress, whenever she chose to exercise it, was believed to be supreme. The duchess, however, got rid of her once for all with this freezing reply: “Madame the duchess is too much engaged for other persons to oblige Madame de la Motte in any claim which she may have to make of the king or the queen, who are already fatigued with numberless applications.” The descendant of the house of Valois was cut to the quick at the treatment she received at the hands of “this imperious woman, whose haughty demeanour sufficiently characterises her grovelling extraction. Was this the woman,” she exclaims, “whom in my humble station of mantua-maker’s apprentice I had so frequently waited upon from Madame Boussel’s to obtain payment, and who then instead of money could only pay me with courtesy and fair promises? Is this she who before the smile of royal favour no tradesman chose to trust, and even her mantua-maker refused to work for any longer, and who had not even a dress in which she could be presented at Court?”⁠[55]⁠

Sick at heart, weary almost unto death, the wretched woman saw no escape from the pecuniary embarrassments that threatened to overwhelm her, except in suicide. Providing herself, she tells us, with a couple of loaded pistols she bent her steps towards a wood about a league distant from Versailles, and passing through the park, came to a large and deep pit, which had formerly been a stone quarry. Here she prepared to carry her resolution into effect, and had placed one of the pistols to her right ear when thoughts of her husband stayed her hand. Flinging herself on the ground she wept long and bitterly, and then offered up a fervent prayer. On becoming more calm she returned home, still however mourning her unhappy fate.⁠[56]⁠