[4] Madame d’Esparbès, a woman of quality, was one of the mistresses that succeeded Madame de Pompadour, and hated the Duc de Choiseul. As he was one day coming down the great staircase at Versailles he met her going to the King. He took her by the hand, told her he knew her designs, led her down, returned to the King, and obtained an order for her appearing no more at Court. When Madame du Barry became the favourite mistress, by the intrigues of Maréchal de Richelieu, the Duc de Choiseul, seeing her pass through the gallery at Versailles, said to the Maréchal, “N’est ce pas Madame de Maintenon qui passe?”--a satire on Richelieu, who was so old as to remember the latter, for paying court in the dregs of life to the former, and marking his contempt for both the mistress and her flatterer. [5] See the character of Choiseul, supra, vol. ii. p. 243. [6] I one evening heard the Maréchal relate the histories of his five imprisonments in the Bastille. The first was for having, at fifteen, hid himself under the bed of the Duchess of Burgundy, the King’s mother. The second, I think, was for following the Regent’s daughter in the dress of a footman when she went to marry the Duke of Modena. I forget the others, or he had not time to finish them, for though he related well, he was not concise. [7] Four or five years after the period I am speaking of, the Maréchal was greatly disgraced by seducing a married woman of quality, Madame de St. Vincent, descendant of the famous Madame de Sevigné. The suit between them made considerable noise. At his hotel in Paris he built a pavilion in his garden, luxuriously furnished, for his amours; as it was supposed to be built with his plunder of the Electorate of Hanover, it was nicknamed _Le Pavillon d’Hanovre_. [8] In his eighty-third year he married his third wife, who, it is said, had too much reason to complain of his infidelities. This heartless voluptuary died in 1788, at the great age of ninety-two.--E. [9] See supra, vol ii. p. 245.--E. [10] He claimed affinity with the Barrys, Earls of Barrymore, and that family did acknowledge the relationship, and had the meanness, when so many French would not, to grace the mistress’s triumph at Versailles. [This alludes to Lady Barrymore, a foolish woman, whom Walpole ridicules in his Correspondence. An amusing life of the Comte du Barry is given in the Biographie Universelle, partly from an autobiographical MS. He seems to have been a consummate blackguard. He perished by the guillotine in 1794. A more favourable account of the Du Barrys is to be found in Capefigue, the panegyrist of every Bourbon king but Henry the Fourth.--(Louis XV., et la Société du XVIII. Siècle, t. iv. pp. 106–111.)--E.] [11] It was a most absurd etiquette at the Court of France that the King’s mistress should be a married woman,--perhaps for fear of the precedent of Madame de Maintenon.