Jeanne Becu, the Comtesse du Barry
I fell in love with Jeanne Becu, who became the Comtesse du Barry. By all accounts she was strikingly lovely, with large hooded blue eyes, great skin, fantastic curly blond hair and a beautiful smile. She was also genuinely a kind person, very much a favored angel, and pretty much everyone who met her fell in love with her. She was also quite a shallow woman – she liked comfort, a good time and probably wasn’t that bright.
One of the interesting and common themes from reviewers who didn’t particularly enjoy the books is that they are full of shallow characters who only care about clothes and baubles. To that I say: Yes! They are definitely shallow characters, and writing their story from their perspective as I do in the books, you have to be true to who they are. Jeanne really wasn’t much interested in politics or anything beyond her next meal and her next dress fitting. I try to sneak in as much politics as I can, but I have to remain true to my central characters and their worldviews.
I hate the way Jeanne is often portrayed, for example in Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, or in Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette: Harsh, graspy, greedy, lower class and unmannered. Natch, she had lovely manners – from years of serving the Parisian elite – and a pretty lisping way of talking and was very natural and friendly in her manner. Sure she liked luxuries, and why shouldn’t she? Fortune had smiled on her and given her a lovely life, and she was determined to enjoy it.
One of the interesting and common themes from reviewers who didn’t particularly enjoy the books is that they are full of shallow characters who only care about clothes and baubles. To that I say: Yes! They are definitely shallow characters, and writing their story from their perspective as I do in the books, you have to be true to who they are. Jeanne really wasn’t much interested in politics or anything beyond her next meal and her next dress fitting. I try to sneak in as much politics as I can, but I have to remain true to my central characters and their worldviews.
I hate the way Jeanne is often portrayed, for example in Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, or in Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette: Harsh, graspy, greedy, lower class and unmannered. Natch, she had lovely manners – from years of serving the Parisian elite – and a pretty lisping way of talking and was very natural and friendly in her manner. Sure she liked luxuries, and why shouldn’t she? Fortune had smiled on her and given her a lovely life, and she was determined to enjoy it.
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Unlike, for example, Pompadour, we can get a sense of some of du Barry's beauty from her portraits. Luckily, many of them survive. This is a sketch of her as a young woman, by Francois-Herbert Drouais. |
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I was really happy that this one was chosen to be the face of Jeanne on the cover of the book. Soooo luminous. Painted by François Hubert Drouais in 1769, so it was perhaps one of the first portraits commissioned by or for the King (Jeanne came to his attention in Spring, 1768). |
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This portrait shows her hooded blue eyes, as well as her fashionable grey hair. Painted by the amazing Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun. I was lucky enough to see this portrait in the flesh during an exhibition of Vigee Le Brun's work, and the photograph certainly does not do the painting justice. |
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I saw this bust of Jeanne (Louis XV had a matching one done at the same time) in her Pavilion in the grounds of her chateau at Louveciennes. I love this sculpture - it captures the magnificence of her beauty and the force of her vitality in a way that the flatter paintings don't. |
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Writing Jeanne was really fun. I really liked everything about her, and she was the ultimate outsider, experiencing Versailles and all its contraductions and idiocies in the same way that a modern reader might. I especially liked the contrast with Pompadour, who was determined from day one to fit in and be accepted, and while Jeanne certainly wanted to be presented at Court, so she could be publicly with the king, that was about as far as her desire to fit in went: the courtiers could adapt to her, and not the other way around!
