Madame du Barry gave hospitality to the wounded at the arrest of the queen. "These wounded youths have no other regret than that they have not died for a princess so worthy as your Majesty," she said. "What I have done for these brave men is only what they have merited. I consoled them, and I respect their wounds when I think, Madame, that without their devotion, your Majesty would no longer be alive. Lucienne is yours, Madame, for was it not your beneficence which gave it to me? All I possess has come to me through the royal family. I have too much loyalty to forget it."But negro Zamor became a citizen like Mirabeau. It was Zamor who took to Du Barry her lover's head. It was Zamor who denounced her at the club of the Jacobins. "The fealty (faith) of the black man is white," said the negro. But he learned how to make it red. Jeanne was imprisoned and tried before Dumas.
"Your age?"
"Forty-two years." She was really forty-seven. Coquetry even at the guillotine.
The public accuser, Fouquier Tinville, was not disarmed by the sweet voluptuousness still possessed by this pale and already fading beauty. He accused her of treason against the nation.
Could the defender of Du Barry, who had also defended Marie Antoinette, find an eloquent word? No; Fouquier Tinville was more eloquent than Chauveau-Lagarde. So the mistress of Louis was condemned. It was eleven o'clock in the evening--the hour for supper at Versailles when she was queen!
She passed the night in prayer and weeping, or rather in a frenzy of fright. In the morning she said it was "too early to die"; she wished to have a little time in order to make some disclosures.
The Comite sent someone to listen to her. What did she say?
She revealed all that was hidden away at Lucienne; she gave word by word an inventory of the treasures she had concealed, forgetting nothing, for did not each word give her a second of time?
"Have you finished?" said the inquisitor. "No," said Jeanne. "Ihave not mentioned a silver syringe concealed under the staircase!"Meanwhile the horses of destiny stamped with impatience, and spectators were knocking at the prison gate. When they put her, already half dead, on the little cart, she bent her head and grew pale. The Du Barry alone--a sinner without redemption.
She saw the people in the square of Louis XV; she struck her breast three times and murmured: "It is my fault!" But this Christian resignation abandoned her when she mounted the scaffold--there where the statue of Louis XV had been--and she implored of the executioner:
"One moment, Mr. Executioner! One moment more!"But the executioner was pitiless Sanson. It was block and the knife--without the "one moment!"Such was the last bed of the Du Barry. Had the almanac of Liege only predicted to her that the one who would lead her to her bed for the last time would not be a King but a citizen executioner, it might have been--but why moralize?
Robert ArnotTo the ReaderAs the early part of Madame du Barry's career had little to differentiate it from the life of an ordinary courtezan, the editor has deemed it best to confine the memoirs to the years in her life which helped to make history.
Editor
"Editor here means the author, who is assuming the persona of the editor of the Comtesse's memoirs.