She was good, too--as they all were--to her mother. She presented the horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income. She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry. Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman. Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood vied for chances to win her favor.
The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her. The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin--afterward Louis XVI.--and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned supreme.
Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti--who had bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie--renamed him Louis Zamore.
Marie was delighted with the boy--as soon as she heard the price paid for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore, please. He will come back into the story.
Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of France:
To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble, seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes--whose chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom she thrust into the Academy for doing it--she spent sixty-five thousand dollars.