On this date in 1793, Madame du Barry — shrieking pitiably in terror — was guillotined in Paris.
Versaille costume dramas have made great hay with the courtesan who became the mistress of Louis XV, and her catty court rivalry with Marie Antoinette. (Madame Tussaud’s still-on-display Sleeping Beauty figure was also created way back in 1763 in her likeness.)
The sovereign’s bed implied a station of wealth and extravagance, but the low birth that caused Marie to turn up her nose didn’t much help this day’s victim standing with the Jacobins.
Poor Madame du Barry, at 50 years of age, had not lost an ounce of her considerable zest for life … and her apparently ingenuous joie de vivre while the Revolution raged looks somewhere between innocent and daft.
While nobles were scrambling to get out of France, the Comtesse born Jeanne Bécu shuttled back and forth over the English Channel in 1792 to settle her jewelry accounts … and decided to stay in France, returning after the September Massacres no less. Later, she would detail to her gaolers where she had stashed her baubles around her estate, in the delusion that they could buy her life — or at least, “did not each word give her a second of time?”*
She’s remembered for the uncommon scene she made being hauled to the guillotine this date — in a time when the scaffold’s pageantry demanded a stoic public dignity from the guillotine’s victims, the Comtesse came apart, and begged the crowd for her life so frantically and heart-wrenchingly that the executioners felt hurried to dispatch her lest the scene turn against them.
Even to the last, hopeless second she implored Sanson,
Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, un petit moment.**
One could make the case that if more clients of the national razor had displayed such naked humanity to onlookers, the guillotine‘s technical and social capacity for mass butchery might have been lessened.
Whether true or not, she gives us a glimpse, oddly unusual in these pages, of unadulterated fright — of that visceral instinct to cling to life, even under the blade, even for one little moment more.
Dostoyevsky, who knew whereof he spoke would write in The Idiot,
After all this honour and glory, after having been almost a Queen, she was guillotined by that butcher, Samson. She was quite innocent, but it had to be done, for the satisfaction of the fishwives of Paris. She was so terrified, that she did not understand what was happening. But when Samson seized her head, and pushed her under the knife with his foot, she cried out: ‘Wait a moment! wait a moment, monsieur!’ Well, because of that moment of bitter suffering, perhaps the Saviour will pardon her other faults, for one cannot imagine a greater agony.
Spare a thought for that moment of bitter suffering, next time you … uh, dine on cauliflower?
* This line, obviously in the vein of her famous last request to the headsman, is from Memoirs of the Comtesse Du Barry, actually a 19th century work of historical fiction by Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon.
** “One moment more, executioner, one little moment!”
On this day..
- 1452: Antonio Rizzo, cannonaded
- 1718: Avram Lopukhin, Peter the Great's brother-in-law
- 1905: Mary Rogers, chloroformer
- 1915: Cordella Stevenson lynched
- 1746: Charles Radclyffe, twice Jacobite rebel
- 1975: Isobel Lobato, wife of East Timor's Prime Minister
- 1934: John and Betty Stam, China missionaries
- 1922: Four anti-Treaty Irish Republicans
- Hand of Glory: 1,500 days and counting
- 2009: Yang Yanming, hedge fund manager
- 1828: Joseph Hunton, forger
- Themed Set: Reputation
- 1982: Suriname's "December murders"
- 1596: Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, her children, and four other crypto-Jews of her family
