Lady Conyngham was always aglitter with gems at parties. One witness described her as being very dull and very brilliant at the same time. George’s bills at jewelers at this time included £3,150 for a necklace of remarkably large oriental pearls, £400 for a pair of diamond earrings, £437 for a pair of pearl bracelets, £530 for an emerald necklace, and £740 for another pearl necklace. Some estimated that the king had given his mistress £100,000 worth of jewelry, or $10 million in today’s money.
Louis XV’s Madame de Pompadour preferred collecting estates to jewelry. She had little taste for jewels, though her position required her to wear them daily. Her gems were of the finest quality. A portion of her collection consisted of a diamond necklace with 547 stones, a set of emerald jewelry, and forty-two priceless rings. But they meant little to her; she twice turned in her jewels to the treasury to help out in time of war.
Her successor, Madame du Barry, would never have been so generous. She positively adored her gems and launched new fashions in jewelry. Throughout the first seven decades of the eighteenth century, court women usually wore diamonds or pearls alone, or sometimes emeralds or rubies outlined by small rows of diamonds, but never two conflicting colors. When she became royal mistress in 1769, Madame du Barry encouraged jewelers to experiment with setting different-colored stones together—amethysts and sapphires, rubies and emeralds, aquamarines and garnets.
The infamous diamond necklace which would cause Queen Marie Antoinette such trouble a decade later was originally made for Madame du Barry. A veritable yoke of the largest and finest gems collected throughout Europe, the necklace consisted of a collar of huge stones from which hung intertwined ropes of diamonds. In a time of national financial disaster, this necklace outraged even the frivolous courtiers of Versailles. Despite the quality of its stones, many found the necklace to be incredibly ugly and compared it to an animal halter. Madame du Barry would have worn it with pride, however, if Louis had not died before purchasing it for her.
In 1847 Lola Montez had wrapped King Ludwig I of Bavaria so tightly around her little finger that the miserly monarch—who made his queen wear old dresses to the theater—showered her with jewels. One night at the opera haughty Lola appeared shining in thirteen thousand florins’ worth of glittering diamonds—including a tiara—far outstripping the queen, who sat glumly in her old-fashioned heirlooms and rusty dress.
Of all royal mistresses, Lola Montez was so hated that she truly needed plenty of jewels to make a quick escape. Ironically, Lola’s expulsion happened so quickly that she had no time to grab her jewel box. Threatened by an angry mob in front of her house, Lola was pushed by her friends against her will into a carriage, which raced out of town. Wearing a plain dress and no cloak on the cold February night, Lola went into exile.
Ludwig stopped the mob from ransacking her house and arranged for the sale of the building and her furniture, dresses, and jewels to pay her debts. The king sent Lola the little that remained, for her debts in Munich were significant. She should have grabbed the jewels and run.
Royal Apartments, Real Estate, and Furnishings
One of the greatest benefits given a royal mistress—though only during her tenure—was luxurious apartments in all the royal palaces, usually attached to those of the king by a secret door or staircase. One’s rooms at court proclaimed one’s status. Hundreds of noble families vied for the limited space, eager for a single cramped, cheerless room under the eaves. While most courtiers had comfortable homes near the royal palaces, they coveted the honor of lodging under the king’s roof.
We can imagine the inexpressible joy of an obscure woman—who under ordinary circumstances would never have been given the coldest garret in the royal household—when she found herself the mistress of not only the king, but a huge suite of palace rooms. Often the mistress had more—and lovelier—rooms at court than the queen. For instance, in the 1670s Queen Marie-Thérèse was given only eleven rooms at Versailles, whereas Madame de Montespan occupied a suite of twenty.
Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle had a lavish suite with furnishings so ostentatious that the queen’s apartments looked poverty-stricken in comparison. The diarist John Evelyn visited the royal mistress as she sat in a rich dressing gown, having her hair combed. Looking around her apartment in amazement at “the riches and splendor of this world, purchased with vice and dishonor,” he saw “the new fabric of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I had ever beheld…. Japon cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braziers, etc…. all of massive silver, and without number, besides of His Majesty’s best paintings.”6
As highly coveted as court apartments were, they were the first perquisite a disgraced royal mistress would lose. As she left her suite of finely furnished rooms with head hung low, her replacement would be tripping in eagerly with her luggage. So it made sense for the mistress to acquire property away from court.
Country estates were highly desirable, providing considerable income from tenants and the sale of crops and wine produced on them. In the 1440s Charles VII of France bestowed several castles and manor houses on Agnes Sorel, the first of which was the Château de Beauté—the Castle of Beauty—from which she acquired her nickname, the Lady of Beauty. Other properties were given to her on the births of her children.
Not content with vast suites of rooms in each of the three royal palaces, Athénaïs de Montespan wanted Louis XIV to build her a château of her own. He had already purchased her a fine house near the Louvre in Paris, but she wanted one in the country as well. When Louis had floor plans drawn up for a country house near his Palace of Saint-Germain, she rejected them out of hand as “good only for a chorus girl.”7 So Louis gave her the château of Clagny, which took ten years to build, with up to twelve hundred men working on it at a time, and which cost $11 million in today’s money.
In 1668 Charles II gave Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, the lovely Berkshire House. The gift had a dual purpose—to silence her clamoring for money for a while and to remove her termagant presence from Whitehall Palace. Soon the French ambassador reported, “She is busying herself getting her gift valued and having the house furnished.”8 Realizing the value of the land, Lady Castlemaine demolished the venerable mansion, then sold the timber and all the land except a small corner of the property, where she built a new brick house. She pocketed a great deal of cash in the transaction.
In the early 1700s Augustus, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, built a palace for his mistress Madame Cosel. Her two summer apartments were lined with cool marble; her two winter apartments were inlaid with fine wood and adorned with porcelain and brocade hangings. In addition, he filled the palace with silver plates, crystal tables, and beds of exquisitely embroidered brocade.
Over her nineteen-year tenure as Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour owned seventeen estates, in addition to numerous houses that she bought as investments. She devoted the equivalent of millions of dollars to improving and decorating these estates—mainly for the king’s convenience. Linens alone cost her a fortune—one item in the inventory of her estate listed 112 pairs of sheets, 160 tablecloths, 1,600 napkins, and 388 kitchen aprons. Firewood, candles, and food would have cost her additional large sums. But her estate expenses were not as frivolous as they might seem; the properties yielded rents from tenants and income from the sale of wine and crops. Many estates she sold at a profit.