The next question is, what did they do with such vast sums of money? It is difficult for us now to believe they could spend so much. A modern American millionaire would struggle to do so. But American millionaires and other people with huge amounts of money are not grands seigneurs. The owner of a vast fortune achieved through economic activity will even in his wildest moments retain some degree of business sense, and preserve some sort of method even in his madness. But the old French grandees were never, in their most sober moments, thinking economists, and had no idea of system or method. Just where money went in the age of Louis XVI we shall seek to explain by means of a few extracts from the work by Taine mentioned earlier.
“The lady-in-waiting to Louis XV’s daughters, the three little old ladies known as the Mesdames, burned candles to the value of 215,068 francs, and the Queen 157,109 francs. In Versailles they still point out the street, once filled with little shops, where the royal footmen would come and feed the entire town on desserts left over from the King’s table. According to the official estimate, the King himself consumed 2,190 francs worth of almond tea and lemonade. The ‘round-the-clock’ consommé kept for Madame Royale, the two-year-old daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, cost 5,201 livres a year.” While Marie-Antoinette was still the Dauphine, the femmes de chambre ran up a bill against her account for “four pairs of shoes per week, three spindles of thread per day to stitch their hairdressing gowns, and two reels of ribbon to adorn the baskets in which her gloves and fans were kept.” (The rules forbade that one should simply hand them to her: they had to be presented in a basket.)
Naturally, tradespeople were never paid on time. When Turgot was Finance Minister the King ran a debt of some 800,000 livres with his wine-merchants, and 3,500,000 with his caterers. (Multiply these figures by ten, advises Funck-Brentano.)
Next come figures which confirm that the nobility did not lag far behind the Court in the scale of their debts and general spending. “On one occasion the Maréchal de Soubise (Rohan’s relation) entertained the King at his country mansion for dinner and the night. The bill came to 200,000 livres. Mme de Matignon allowed herself 24,000 livres a year for a new coiffure every day. Cardinal Rohan owned a needle-lace silk chasuble valued at over 100,000 livres; his saucepans were made of solid silver. And nothing could have been more natural, when you consider the way they thought about money at the time. To economise, to set money aside, was like turning a flowing stream into a useless, foul-smelling swamp. Better to throw the stuff out of the window. Which is precisely what the Maréchal de Richelieu did, when his grandson sent back the bulging purse he had been given because he ‘couldn’t think what to do with it’. So out it went — to the great good fortune the street-sweeper who picked it up. Had the man not happened to be passing by the money would have ended up in the river.
“Mme de B,” Taine continues, “once intimated to the Prince de Conti that she would like a portrait of her canary as a miniature set on a ring. The Prince volunteered his services. The lady accepted, but stipulated that the miniature should be kept quite simple, with no accompanying diamonds. She was indeed given a simple gold ring, but the picture was set not under glass but under a finely-cut sheet of diamond. She sent the diamond back, whereupon the Prince ground it to dust which he scattered over the letter she had written. The cost of this little heap of powder was between four and five thousand livres (raising questions about the tone and content of the letter). The highest gallantry often combined with the most extravagant generosity, and the more fashionable the gentleman, the weaker his understanding of money.”
However, the sheer size of these sums does give cause for wonder.
First and foremost: it could well be that Funck-Brentano’s principle of multiplying by ten is wrong. The money can hardly have been worth that much. To establish its value in today’s terms is not easy. Funck-Brentano seems not to have taken into account its actual purchasing power, or he would have found that the livre would have bought a great deal less than ten pre-war francs. Here are one or two facts which struck us in our reading around the subject.
During the exceptionally cold winter of 1784 the Comédie Française offered a special evening performance for the poor (it was the premier of La Harpe’s Coriolan) where the takings amounted to 10,330 livres. In today’s Budapest Playhouse, with approximately the same seating capacity, a full house would bring in around 7,000 pengős.
Or again, we know what Marie-Antoinette paid for some of the hats she bought from the celebrated Mlle Bertin. They cost her forty-eight, seventy-two, ninety and (possibly) 280 livres. In pre-war Paris the price of a woman’s hat ranged from thirty to 1200 francs. Even the most expensive of those royal purchases hardly justifies the ten-times rule. Further examples: Louis XVI, as I shall mention later, kept a precise record of his petty cash expenditure. From his notes we learn that he paid twelve livres for one hundred apricots for preserving; three livres for six pounds of cherries and two baskets of strawberries; one livre and ten sols for collecting wood and, for one pound of pepper (much more expensive then than here in peacetime), four livres. On the basis of these figures it seems reasonable to conclude that the purchasing power of the livre was very roughly that of today’s Hungarian pengő.
The figures may diminish our sense of the scale of the sums involved, but they are still monstrous. One wonders how it was possible to pay out such amounts in the coinage of the day. Ever since the collapse of the system introduced by John Law at the start of the century the French had been extremely wary of paper money. In 1776 they set up the Caisse d’Escompte to issue banknotes, and those notes were generally preferred to the not always reliable coinage. But in our particular period only very small numbers of banknotes were issued, and by 1783 there were no more than forty million livres’ worth in circulation.
And that gives rise to another little puzzle: whether the aristocracy really did always get their hands on their supposed income. We have seen that Louis XVI owed huge sums to his caterers and wine merchants, so it is possible that the Treasury itself was in debt, and the reason why Rohan and his peers found themselves in permanent financial difficulty was that their stipends were purely nominal, or were received only in part.
Despite all this, they must still have had access to vast sums, which brings us to the third question: where did it all come from? We have seen the size of the bills presented to the King and his nobles, both by their suppliers and by those who billed them in the name of those suppliers, for almond-tea, lemonade or whatever. They suggest a very cosy relationship between two social groups: on the one hand, the tradespeople and merchants supplying the Court and the aristocracy, and on the other, the intendants (financial administrators for the Court and nobility) with their army of clerks and assistants, together with the many different orders of flunkey.
As regards this last group, we find some interesting notes in our treasured guide to the old city, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris: “The principal footman of a high-ranking man at this time would enjoy an annual income of 40,000 livres, and he too would have a footman, who in turn had one of his own. This lowest functionary’s task was to brush Monseigneur’s coat and straighten his wig. The head footman would take the wig from the last of four hands in line, and had merely to arrange it on the head in which reposed the great questions of state. This momentous task being duly accomplished, it became his turn to be dressed by his men. He would order them about in a loud voice, scolding them fiercely: he was expecting visitors, he would explain loftily, as he ordered them to make his carriage ready. The footman’s footman did not have a carriage, but that too suited him perfectly well … The principal footman’s possessions included an engraved gold watch, lace apparel, diamond buckles and a little vendor of fashionable goods as his mistress.