In vain did an Irish priest who visited her offer to secure her escape if she would give him money to bribe her jailers.  “No,” she answered with a smile, “I have no wish to escape.  I am glad to die; but I will give you money willingly on condition that you save the Duchesse de Mortemart.”  And while Madame de Mortemart, daughter of the man she loved, was making her way to safety under the priest’s escort, Jeanne du Barry was being led to the scaffold, breathing the name of the man she had loved so well; and, however feeble the flesh, glad to follow where he had led the way.

CHAPTER VI

THE REGENT’S DAUGHTER

Many unwomanly women have played their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d’Orleans, known to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled in a palace.

It is said that this libertine Duchesse was mad; and certainly he would be a bold champion who would try to prove her sanity.  But, apart from any question of a disordered brain, there was a taint in her blood sufficient to account for almost any lapse from conventional standards of pure living.  Her father was that Duc d’Orleans who shocked the none too strait-laced Europe of two centuries ago by his orgies; her grandfather was that other Orleans Duke, brother of Louis XIV., whose passion for his minions broke the heart of his English wife, the Stuart Princess Henriettta; and she had for mother one of the daughters of Madame de Montespan, light-o’-love to le Roi Soleil.

The offspring of such parents could scarcely have been normal; and how far from normal Marie Louise was, this story of her singular life will show.  When her father, the Duc de Chartres, took to wife Mademoiselle de Blois, Montespan’s daughter, there were many who significantly shrugged their shoulders and curled their lips at such a union; and one at least, the Duc’s mother, Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, was undisguisedly furious.  She refused point-blank to be present at the nuptials, and when her son, fresh from the altar, approached her to ask her blessing, she retorted by giving the bridegroom a resounding slap on the face.

Such was the ill-omened opening to a wedded life which brought nothing but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) who have ever been cradled.

The first of these degenerates was Marie Elizabeth, who was born one August day in the year 1695, and who from her earliest infancy was her father’s pet and favourite.  His idolatry of his first-born child, indeed, is one of the most inscrutable things in a life full of the abnormal, and in later years afforded much material for the tongue of scandal.  He was inseparable from her; her lightest wish was law to him; he nursed her through her childish illnesses with more than the devotion of a mother; and, as she grew to girlhood, he worshipped at the shrine of her young beauty with the adoration of a lover and put her charms on canvas in the guise of a pagan goddess.