The perils of being a royal mistress 4
Like Nell Gwynn, Marie-Jeanne Bécu, aka Madame du Barry, rose from the depths of the sex trade to the heights of royal favour.
She was born in 1743, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a monk. After a convent education, she worked as a street pedlar, a lady’s companion, a shop assistant, and a prostitute. She caught the eye of Jean du Barry, a Gascon nobleman who had made a fortune as a war contractor and who operated as a high-class pimp. He took her as his mistress and with his help she became one of Paris’s most successful courtesans. Her blonde hair, blue eyes, and pretty face (which seems rather insipid in contemporary portraits) eventually attracted Louis XV’s attention in 1768. Since the death of the king’s previous favourite Madame de Pompadour four years earlier, Louis had acknowledged no one as his maîtresse en titre. (Only the French could have invented an official role for a royal doxy, complete with state-funded apartments and privileges.) Du Barry needed a noble title to aspire to that role so a convenient marriage was arranged and she could openly appear at court.
Du Barry kept her royal lover happy until his death in 1774 by which time she had made powerful enemies for her dabbling in politics and her unbridled extravagance. The new queen, Marie Antoinette, had her banished to a convent for a time and du Barry was never able to return to the court of Louis XVI. She lived quietly on her rural estates until the French Revolution. She managed to survive the first few years of turmoil but her support of counter-revolutionary émigrés led to a sentence of death in December 1793. Her last words on the scaffold were “You are going to hurt me, please don’t hurt me, just one more moment, I beg you!”