But we should not think that Jeanne was idle in her penury, or that, like Rohan, she was simply waiting for a miracle to turn her fortunes round. A miracle, yes, but one she intended to bring about herself. Her plan was to recover her ancestral estates (or supposed estates) through royal favour. In this novelettish fantasy she had worked out in great detail how unjustly her illustrious forebears had been stripped of their land. Now was the moment for the King to put everything right. The estates should revert to the royal fisc, then the King, in a kindly gesture, would return them overnight to his distant relatives, the Valois.
The King had after all done far greater things for his followers in this period. All it needed was for someone who had influence in the Court to sponsor her. Patronage has always existed in the world, but in eighteenth-century France there was only one officially recognised and sanctioned way of getting anything done. It was called the royal favour. The royal favour had of course to be earned. But Jeanne had yet to learn that winning it would not be simple.
In addition to her house in Paris she took a place at Versailles, and she moved constantly between the two venues. Residence at Versailles served partly to make her Parisian creditors, and anyone else to whom she owed money, believe that she was a regular visitor at the Palace, but it also served as a place from which she could watch for any gaps through which she might scuttle into the realm of her heart’s desire, the all-powerful world of the Court.
One day Jeanne ‘fainted’ in the antechamber of Madame Royale, the King’s sister the Princess Elisabeth, and when she came to she informed those around her that the reason was that she, the offspring of the Valois, had been destroyed by poverty. The kind-hearted Madame intervened on her behalf and raised another pension for her. But the tiny amount it brought in was of little use to Jeanne.
However, since the fainting idea had worked so well, she tried it again, this time in the antechamber of the Comtesse d’Artois, the King’s sister-in-law. It failed completely. There was a third such attempt, even more daring than the first two — in the famous Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, where Marie-Antoinette herself was finally to encounter her — but there was such a throng of people around the Queen that she entirely failed to notice.
Jeanne and her husband tried everything; but there was one step that did not occur to them — to work. In their defence, this was a possibility that would not have occurred to any member of the nobility at the time, not even those very much wiser than themselves. If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence in the same way as, at a later date, the so-called historical classes sought employment with the state or county authority when their lands and fortunes vanished beneath their feet. But when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. The concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in the old order was so fine and wonderful — with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at wilclass="underline" it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn’t just swap it for another — you simply plummeted into the void. The aristocrat who settled for the life of confidence trickery rather than work for his living (and besides what work could he do, since by virtue of his rank he had neither craft nor skills?) was effectively keeping a kind of inverted faith with the aristocratic order of things, just as the hypocrite keeps faith with the moral order — if he didn’t fundamentally respect morality, he would not pretend to possess it but openly admit his wickedness.
Thus in the eighteenth century, the twilight of the aristocracy, there were a great many fraudsters in France.
All the same, during these years of genteel poverty Jeanne did study for a profession that consorted with her high rank, and even called for a degree of talent. She became a faiseuse d’affaires, or, as we would say in Budapest, a lobbyist. It is in the nature of things that business of this type will thrive in the heyday of favour. Like large numbers of her kind, Jeanne was able to persuade middle-class people and tradesmen that she could be useful to them in all sorts of ways through her connections at the Court.
Mercier writes: “For some years now, women have openly played the role of entremetteuse d’affaires. They write twenty letters a day, are relentless in their demands, lay siege to ministers, weary the draughtsmen of legislation to death; they have proper offices and keep records, and to get the wheels of fortune turning they find positions for their lovers, their favourites, their husbands and indeed anyone who will pay them.”
There certainly were some genuine lobbyists, who produced real results and raised the standing of their trade. But Jeanne was a pseudo-lobbyist. Apart from one royal footman she did not know a single soul at the Court. When she did visit Versailles she shut herself away in an inn to make people believe she was at Court. (It was said that she was not alone on these occasions, but with the hostess’s son — the only service that would secure the accommodation.)
For all that, it does appear to have been a profitable line of business. Before very long we find the Rue St Gilles household apparently thriving. It saw a steady procession of guests, and not all of the lowest class. They included: a genuine Comte, who was later forced to resign his officer’s rank as a result of the necklace trial; the young lawyer Beugnot, who subsequently left some very interesting observations; Father Loth, a Franciscan, who conducted daily mass for the Countess; and above all, one Réteaux de Villette. Villette was a good-looking nobleman of around thirty, from La Motte’s old regiment. His chief qualification was his exquisite, rather effeminate, handwriting. We shall discover soon enough just how important a factor that was.
The household was by now considerable. There were footmen, a cook, a coachman, a jockey, two concierges (a married couple), a chambermaid, a reader (a poor female relation); then Father Loth doubling as major-domo, confessor and drawing-room vicar, in his fine black-lace cassock; a military officer, with whom the Count played a form of draughts called tric-trac; a secretary (Réteaux), a family friend (again Réteaux) … what more could one want?
But the freedom from want was an illusion. In fact the only difference now was the greatly increased scale of their debt, and the even greater peril hanging over their heads. Small-scale measures would no longer serve: they needed a master plan, a stroke of genius.
By now we might be thinking that Jeanne had become every bit as obsessed with the Queen as the Cardinal was. Obsession is part of genius. News would naturally have reached her about Her Majesty’s intense friendships with the radiantly beautiful Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac. Perhaps the wonderful woman might take up with her too? For her perverse and twisted nature this was a much more appropriate erotic fantasy than the usual banal notion of the ‘wealthy admirer’. To become the King’s favourite mistress would be a wonderful thing — one that every Frenchwoman dreamt about then, and continued to do so for over a century, and that Hollywood dreams about still. But to become the Queen’s minion would be a hundred times more interesting. Meanwhile her Valois fantasies must have taken on ever more colourful hues. One day the Queen would suddenly discover her. “Ma chère cousine,” she would say, “I need someone to whom I can open my heart, someone with whom I can be as one human being with another,” and, taking her hand, would lead her into the secret, velvet interiors of Le Petit Trianon. In Jeanne’s mind the boundary between dreams and reality had long been blurred. Alongside the reality of everyday life, another, more brilliant and surreal reality — the Valois reality — existed for her, as it had ever since her childhood as a beggar. And who could possibly say where the truth began and ended? Thus, by degrees, she persuaded herself that she really was the Queen’s confidante. She must have believed it. Had she not, she would not have been able to lie so convincingly. She felt this ‘Valois-reality’ as an actual something, and it was her duty to find a way to bring it to Paris, and into the Rue St Gilles.