But Madame du Barry had far more to offer Louis than her radiant beauty. Her sexual talents bound him to her, and her gaiety plucked him out of his frequent depressions. She was all women to him—a delightful child, a talented whore, a comforting mother. And, like Madame de Pompadour, she was always willing to forgive the malicious courtiers who made trouble for her.
Taking the example of her predecessor, Madame du Barry made herself the king’s entertainment committee. She decorated her apartments to please Louis and stuffed them with his favorite flowers. Her mother had been a cook in many noble kitchens, and while haughty courtiers ridiculed this, Madame du Barry tempted the jaded royal palate with countless tasty dishes recommended by her mother. In addition, she brought in jugglers and clowns and had operettas and farces performed for the king’s amusement.
While it was challenging enough to amuse the king in a palace, in the 1590s beautiful Gabrielle d’Estrées had the task of making Henri IV’s surroundings comfortable on the field of battle. For several years at the outset of their relationship, Henri was campaigning with his army against rebel forces throughout France. Golden Gabrielle, even when heavily pregnant, insisted on staying by his side, living in cold, drafty tents. She saw to it that he had a good dinner after a day’s battle, and she herself kept his clothes as clean as possible—often pounding them with rocks when she ran out of soap. While Henri was fighting on the field, Gabrielle remained in their tent writing his political and diplomatic dispatches. In the evening, they would discuss the events of the day.
Gabrielle was tall with a delicious figure and graceful walk. Blessed with exquisite coloring—pale blonde hair and large blue eyes—she had a broad forehead, high cheekbones, and a nose just a bit too long for perfection. Her contemporaries—even enemies who hated Gabrielle for her Catholicism, her involvement in politics, and her warming the king’s bed—waxed poetic when describing her beauty.
In addition to providing her royal lover with shining beauty and comfortable surroundings, Gabrielle offered him fierce political loyalty. During a ball in Paris, a messenger arrived informing the king that the Spanish had launched a surprise attack and captured the town of Amiens. Henri decided to march immediately. Gabrielle calmly went to her strong boxes in the Louvre, emptied them of fifty thousand pieces of gold, and gave Henri every penny to pay the initial costs of troops and provisions. While Henri mustered his troops, Gabrielle got in her carriage and visited the homes of the nobility to ask for donations, collecting an additional 250,000 ecus.
Still not satisfied, Gabrielle took her extraordinary jewels to the richest banker in Paris and pawned them. Still in her ball gown and dancing slippers, Gabrielle set out for the front, where she insisted on taking care of her royal lover despite real danger. Henri wrote, “Last evening I found three bullet holes burned into the fabric of my mistress’ tent, and begged her to go to her house in Paris, where her life would not be endangered, but she laughed and was deaf to my pleas…. She replied that only in my presence is she pleased. I entertain no fears for myself, but daily tremble for her.”11
One day, during a particularly fierce battle, a column of Austrian soldiers appeared, causing the French troops to flee in disorder. Oblivious of the cannonballs crashing around her, Gabrielle cried at the top of her voice for the French troops to stay and fight. The Austrians came within five hundred paces of the king’s mistress as she continued exhorting her countrymen to bravery. Alarmed, Henri rode to her side and ordered her to be slung over a horse and taken to the rear of the camp. Out of fifty-six known mistresses in his lifetime, Henri was faithful only to Gabrielle. So smitten was the king with his brave and beautiful mistress that he vowed to marry Gabrielle and make her queen of France.
In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the king raised his mistress to his lofty level and ensconced her in apartments at the palace. Most likely she did not complain about the bitter cold that froze the ink in her inkwell and coated the wash water in her basin with a crust of ice. She understood that the distance of outhouses from the palace required bowls overflowing with human waste in almost every room, concealed behind elegant cabinets of inlaid rosewood until they could be removed. She did not expect her food to be warm; the distance of the palace kitchens from the royal suites precluded that. She knew that behind its thin wash of gilding, the court was a “tissue of malice,” as Madame de Pompadour said, a place of vicious backbiting and petulant self-aggrandizement.12
By the nineteenth century, the monarch, instead of raising his mistress to his exalted if uncomfortable level, gratefully descended to hers. He escaped his golden prison by fleeing to her tidy bourgeois home, which offered the warmth, comfort, and privacy his court could not.
Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef (1830–1916), a sad, weary little man bowed down by the weight of a crumbling empire, found joy over coffee and croissants with his mistress Katharina Schratt. A thirty-three-year-old comic actress at the Imperial Theater when their love affair began in 1886, Katharina was the only woman ever reported to make the emperor laugh out loud. Over a period of thirty years, Franz Josef found in her quaint home an oasis of entertainment and relaxation, far from the cold etiquette of the palace. Katharina did not weary him with politics but told him jokes and pleasant chatty gossip.
Katharina was one of those women whose aura of beauty quickly disintegrates when one analyzes her features. She had a face like a potato dumpling, a stubborn chin, thick, quizzical black eyebrows framing laughing eyes, a pointed little nose, and thin lips struggling to suppress a smile. Her curvaceous figure ran to plumpness in middle age. It was the joy she embodied, her warmth and kindness, that made her seem truly beautiful.
In 1895, the German ambassador Count Eulenberg described the forty-two-year-old actress as “ravishingly pretty with extraordinary youthful looks, marvelous coloring, shining golden hair and great blue eyes with the sweetest expression, a really good soul who never says an unkind word and is always pleasant and gay and ready to help whom she can. Apart from which she is delightful company and has a very original way of relating little anecdotes.”13
The emperor loved his beautiful wife, Empress Elizabeth, who was always balancing precariously on the brink of insanity. But the anguished empress was in no position to amuse and comfort her husband, and she spent most of her time trekking across Europe in a fruitless effort to cast out her inner demons. In fact it was she who had chosen Katharina to be her husband’s mistress to relieve her own guilt at deserting him. The empress kept throwing the two together—they were a bit slow to understand—until an affair began. It was a wise choice. Franz Josef wrote Katharina that his visits to her cheerful home were “the only rays of light in my otherwise dreary life.”14
With his children married and his wife away, the lonely emperor often roamed the endless corridors of the royal palace alone, with no one to see to his personal comfort. He had dozens of servants to snap to his commands, but not one would have dared to see what he was lacking and make suggestions. Katharina filled this role, giving him a painted screen to protect him from the draft, a thick wool smoking jacket, a cozy little rug. His favorite gift was a hand mirror with the words in French “portrait of him whom I love.”15
Untamed Shrews
While the vast majority of royal mistresses presented an unfailingly cheerful face to the king, there were some notable exceptions. Two of the worst harpies reigned in the 1660s and 1670s. Louis XIV’s Athénaïs de Montespan and his cousin Charles II’s Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, were both cunning, hotheaded, vengeful, and rapacious.