Affair of State

Du BARRY (320 pp.)--Stanley Loomis --Lippincott ($6).

"He rises at 11," wrote a diarist of Louis XV, "and leads a useless life." But Louis' notion of ruling France by divine right was to titillate his courtiers with a succession of diabolic wrongs, and his affairs of state were not the kind that required early rising. His first three official mistresses were sisters named De Nesle, who fought each other like wolverines, and for a while it looked as if another De Nesle sister would claw her way to favor. The fourth of Louis' "left-hand queens" was the spectacular Madame de Pompadour--beautiful, witty, accomplished, meddlesome and frigid--who diverted the King, and a considerable portion of his cash, for 20 years. The prettiest and most appealing of the lot came last. Said the aging royal rake after he met 25-year-old Madame du Barry in 1768: "She makes me forget that soon I will be 60."

In 18th century France, writes Historian Loomis in this biography of the King's last courtesan, it was as natural for a girl to dream of being mistress to the King as it is today for a Vassar freshman to aspire to the profession of sales manager or efficiency expert. Low-born Jeanne Becu, who became Madame du Barry, was training for the job by the time she was 20. Jeanne Becu's mother was a seamstress and part-time prostitute who was "either unable or unwilling to offer any suggestions as to who exactly the baby's father might have been." Probably, according to Biographer Loomis, he was a monk named Gomard.

Eminently Salable. At any rate, Jeanne showed an early fondness for religion, and from seven to 16 she was a model student at the convent of Saint-Aure, in Paris. This period was almost her last placid one; within months after she left the convent she was accused by an outraged mother of seducing her son, a hairdresser. She clerked for a time in a millinery shop, then began following her lifework in earnest. Jeanne kept her name off the police records of professional doxies, but. Loomis notes, "it was no frightened virgin who finally fluttered into the embraces of the King of France."

The man who helped Jeanne overcome any fright that remained was Count Jean du Barry, a ragtag aristocrat who was, in the author's description, "brazenly unscrupulous, a cardsharp, a wencher, a fop --so perfectly the 18th century rake that he seems almost a caricature." He was, in fact, a Pygmalion among pimps who regularly took in likely young girls and taught them the social and the sinful graces. "When he begins to weary of a woman he invariably sells her off," a police report observes. "But it must be admitted that he is a connoisseur and his merchandise is eminently salable."

The count outfitted Jeanne lavishly with clothes, carriage and diamonds, sent her off to Versailles. Admission to the court was no problem. "Any person who was decently dressed could wander about and enjoy such spectacles as the King eating or. when it happened, the Queen giving birth to a child." In a remarkably short time Versailles had a new spectacle. Married hurriedly to the count's bumpkin brother (it would have been improper for a lady of the court to be unmarried), Madame du Barry was installed as the Favorite.

Image of Woman. Her six-year reign--cut short when the rickety old royal satyr died of smallpox in 1774--was a tangle of intrigue and a grievous drain on the treasury, but on both counts it was less of a disaster than Pompadour's rule. Du Barry bought jewels almost daily, unconcerned as a housewife shopping for turnips, but Pompadour, "with all the fervor of a suburban clubwoman supporting a Worthy Cause," had prodded her weak-willed King into the ruinous Seven Years' War. The new mistress was kindly and held few grudges, and her involvements in petticoat politics were minor.

"Never," writes Author Loomis of Louis' court, "have so few talked so well. What was said was not important. How it was said was all. The mind was exercised, trained and respected by these people as is the body by the athlete." The author's own use of words is hardly up to Versailles' athletic standards. But, eulogizing the woman who was to die on the guillotine two decades after her great days with Louis, Biographer Loomis is grandly and royally purple: "An accomplished courtesan is but she who can conform as closely as possible to man's image of the perfect woman. Her function is to alleviate boredom, to amuse, beguile and sympathize, as much as it is to arouse and assuage passion. She is what wives are supposed to be but after a few years of marriage are not. She is a pearl beyond price."

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