MADAME DU BARRY.* THE process of digging amongst the remains
of past histories for all that preceded and characterised the French Revolution appears to grow in favour. But the possibility of white- washing poor Madame Du Barry is beyond anything that the boldest has yet undertaken. For really there is nothing to whitewash. Even Carlyle's famous and characteristic sum- mary, which is set down upon the title-page of the book before us, gives rather too much of dignity to the subject than other- wise. "Thou unclean, yet unmalignant, not nnpitiable thing I What a course was thine from that first truckle bed (in Joan of Arc's country) where thy mother bore thee, with tears, to an unnamed father; forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over highest sunlit heights, of Harlotdom and Rascaldom, — to the guillotine - axe, which sheers away thy vainly-whimpering head ! Rest there uncnrsed ; only buried and abolished ; what else befitted thee?" A "vainly-whimpering head" would be but a vile phrase in any hand bat Carlyle's ; and the guillotine seldom did work more cruel or more unnecessary than in disposing of this unfortunate woman for sins so entirely of her time and fashion. If, according to tradition, the poor soul died with shrieks and struggles instead of with the resignation, sometimes dazed and sometimes courageous, which was characteristic of the large majority of the victims of that day, somehow one can only feel sorry for the still young and exuberant vitality which felt itself apart from all the ferocious political passion of the time, and could not realise its own responsibility, or share in the responsibility. Madame Da Barry had given in her time so many proofs of her own kindly nature and absolute absence of vindictiveness, that she might well disbelieve to the last in the bloodthirstiness which sacrificed her life where so many better lives had gone before. She would have done a great deal at any time to save any suppliant from the guillotine; and the pages of her story are as full of good-nature and forgivingness as of reckless license and absence of all description of self- control. She was the merest scapegoat of her day, the kind of heroine whom Victor Hugo might have chosen for one of his romances, with that strange note of sympathy with Carlyle's seemingly contrary moral indignation which is the note of the democratic instinct in his writings, as much as it is Carlyle's in his. One feels inclined to plead for her as for a child, that she knew no better. But let bio- graphers and special pleaders do what they will, she, probably the last and the frailest of all the left-band Queens of history, remains a very sad and awful picture of the desolation of the days of the Louises, which by some strange and unaccount- able Nemesis were to discharge their gathered wrath upon the most domestic, and upright, and innocuous of the race— Louis XVI.—who, as it seems to us, might have been allowed to inaugurate on his own account a reign of new and better things in France, if he had been only suffered to reign instead of being called upon to pay the reckoning of the Du Barrys and the Pompadours.
A sort of strange parallel will sometimes suggest itself even between two women so entirely different as Marie Antoinette and Madame Da Barry, with nothing in common but their beauty and their fate, when we think of the abso- lute ignorance of both, in the various ways in which they had been brought up, of the awful harm they were instru- mental in working. The story brings them together, so utterly opposed in heart and strain, yet with a kind of -common irresponsibility for all that was going on, after a manner which throws into strong relief the fashions and the anomalies of the time. We certainly cannot sympathise with • TI'. Life and Times of Madams Du Barry. By Robert B. Donfeas. London : Boalthers. 1896. the notion of a biographer who wonders at a world which can bestow so much sympathy upon the Queen, while it flouts the paramour, and who apparently wishes to suggest that their similar fate was deserving of a similar kind of canonisation. The dignity of Marie Antoinette's figure stands apart and aloof from themes like these. Nor is there much to be gathered from another parallel which he draws between Da Barry and Nell Gwynne, wondering why the "virtuous English" should be so willing to condone the offences of the last, while the French overload the other with obloquy. Nell Gwynne's connection with the stage made her a different character altogether from the French woman; and her career was free entirely from the special characteristics which make such a dreary record of the adventures of Mdlle. Jeanne Gomard de Vanbarnier. To say that in birth, in circumstances of early life, and in character, the two women closely re- semble one another, seems to UB no more true than the same assertion would be of hundreds who might have been chosen for a similar parallel. Very likely Carlyle would have in.- volved them both in the same general condemnation, but the similarity ends there.
It is more the times than the life of Madame du Barry which will always give a kind of vital interest to her career,— far more, as it seems to us, than the episode of Nell Gwynne can ever lend to her's. Nothing in the history of that fas- cinating and terrible period is more remarkable than the prevailing Gretk sense of destiny which pervades and dominates it all. It seems as if nobody—not a Robespierre or a Danton or a Louis, not even a Mirabeau, a Rousseau, or a Voltaire—if perhaps we except Napoleon, none—had any real initiative in the perplexing business. They were moulded by the times ; they did not mould them. And Madame Du Barry, in spite of herself, was the mere personification of a world - old spirit, — an ordinary repetition of an ordinary type to which the circumstances lent an especial significance and an especial influence. In any other country, or at any other time, she would have gone quietly to her grave unnoticed and unmarked— for, beautiful as she was, her beauty was not of that pre-eminent type which alone stamps its possessor for ever—but as it was, it seems clear that her only preoccupation was that of her class, to keep the affections of her Royal lover for the sake of the emoluments, and to show neither rancour nor ill-feeling to anybody who did not interfere with that simple object. Out of such a negative quality no whitewasher can make a heroine. But undoubtedly it was hard on her that her position should have been put upon her just at the time when it became the personification of a deep political wrong, and set her unfortunate life upon a pedestal which it in no wise fitted. Whether a Montespan or even a La Valliere would have fared any better at such a crisis, or done either less or more to forward the great catastrophe, one can only divine as one pleases without definite conclusion. Let us willingly record in her favour that Louis XV. himself is reported to have said to her at the very beginning of their intimacy, "Madame, I am delighted that the first favour yon obtain from me should be an act of mercy." And we are glad to be told that she was very fond of Shakespeare, though obliged to read him in translations. " Vous ne meme pia" was her way of spelling "You love me no longer," a weakness which she shared with such trained scholars as Madame de Pompadour. The anecdotes which enliven this record of a melancholy time turn chiefly upon the heroine's feather- brained spirits and delight in making fun of the bigwigs of the Court,—making her negro-boy put cockchafers in the Chancellor's wig, or a Cardinal stoop down and put on her slippers, while the King looked on and laughed himself into fits. What a dreary prelude to the coming fall! and how cruel to a King so different as Louis XVI. "Napoli pecea e Torre paga,"—the strange old story never had so wild and so sad a solution and so weary an nnknotting as here. As for the wretched travestie of a trial and the horrors of the execu- tion which ended poor Madame Du Barry's own share in the grim tale of misdoing, it is the fitting end to crown the work. The author hopes that some tardy measure of justice may be done to an ill-used memory. But one hardly sees what justice there is to do.
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