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Mistress of Versailles: Madame Du Barry
8vo A reasonable copy with minor foxing to text block edges, front inner hinges beginning to crack. Corners bumped. White dw yellowed with nicks and small tears and creases to edges.
175 pages, Hardcover
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August 29, 2021
This is a real relic of a bygone age.
Agnes de Stoeckl was an Irish woman who married a senior Russian aristocrat and became a lady-in-waiting to Tzarina Alexandra. Escaping the Russian revolution, she became a shop assistant in Knightsbridge before bouncing back post-WWII with a series of autobiographies and popular histories published by John Murray. This biography of Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, is one of these, published 1966 and now well out of print. My copy is a used book shop find.
In her preface, she writes “As this is surely my last book - I am well over ninety-one years old - I intend to dedicate it to myself and forget that other people may criticise!” She intends to give “free rein” to her “knowledge”; whilst keeping it “historically true” she will give the “human side”. I cynically wonder how much of the book was actually written in John Murray’s editorial department.
It’s charmingly readable, and bubbles along breathlessly in fluent Hello magazine style prose. The trouble is disentangling the author’s imaginative riffs from actual fact. Certainly, du Barry’s career defied fiction: rising from the lowest of the low to being a king’s mistress and then after his death being implicated in mysterious activities in the French Revolution.
To her credit de Stoeckl doesn’t theorise on the revolutionary activity and confines herself to heavy hints. Du Barry seems to have been closely associated with a known English spy and made a series of lengthy visits to London throughout the revolution on a provenly false pretext (she was involved in a court case to recover her stolen jewels; the revolutionaries discovered the jewels hidden in her chateau). Whilst in London she mixed with English high society, French émigrés and British government figures. She assisted several French aristocrats to escape to England. And a French banking house advanced her huge sums in this period - completely bizarrely given her situation. After arrest her trial was together with her banker and his two sons. All were condemned to the guillotine - my feeling is, on the admittedly ropey evidence of this book, probably correctly in the lights of the revolution.
De Stoeckl’s aristocratic biases are a hoot. She’s conscious of the moral lapses of her subjects, but considers men will be men and beautiful women must make the most of their assets. Christianity is great, and its best feature - she is absolutely blatant here - is that it keeps the lower classes under control.
Agnes de Stoeckl was an Irish woman who married a senior Russian aristocrat and became a lady-in-waiting to Tzarina Alexandra. Escaping the Russian revolution, she became a shop assistant in Knightsbridge before bouncing back post-WWII with a series of autobiographies and popular histories published by John Murray. This biography of Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, is one of these, published 1966 and now well out of print. My copy is a used book shop find.
In her preface, she writes “As this is surely my last book - I am well over ninety-one years old - I intend to dedicate it to myself and forget that other people may criticise!” She intends to give “free rein” to her “knowledge”; whilst keeping it “historically true” she will give the “human side”. I cynically wonder how much of the book was actually written in John Murray’s editorial department.
It’s charmingly readable, and bubbles along breathlessly in fluent Hello magazine style prose. The trouble is disentangling the author’s imaginative riffs from actual fact. Certainly, du Barry’s career defied fiction: rising from the lowest of the low to being a king’s mistress and then after his death being implicated in mysterious activities in the French Revolution.
To her credit de Stoeckl doesn’t theorise on the revolutionary activity and confines herself to heavy hints. Du Barry seems to have been closely associated with a known English spy and made a series of lengthy visits to London throughout the revolution on a provenly false pretext (she was involved in a court case to recover her stolen jewels; the revolutionaries discovered the jewels hidden in her chateau). Whilst in London she mixed with English high society, French émigrés and British government figures. She assisted several French aristocrats to escape to England. And a French banking house advanced her huge sums in this period - completely bizarrely given her situation. After arrest her trial was together with her banker and his two sons. All were condemned to the guillotine - my feeling is, on the admittedly ropey evidence of this book, probably correctly in the lights of the revolution.
De Stoeckl’s aristocratic biases are a hoot. She’s conscious of the moral lapses of her subjects, but considers men will be men and beautiful women must make the most of their assets. Christianity is great, and its best feature - she is absolutely blatant here - is that it keeps the lower classes under control.
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