Writerly Wednesday–I Hear Dead People

I was thinking about how exactly to explain what goes on in a writer’s head without sounding like a crazy person. And what popped into my head was the title of this thread: “I hear dead people!”

Of course, the creative process is a little different for everyone, between writers and non-writers and even among writers. I’m not going to think of things in the same way that a visual artist would. They don’t need to attach actual words to the story they’re trying to tell, and likewise I don’t need to attach actual images to my words. Even among writers, though, the amount to which the writer visualizes his/her characters, setting, or events varies.

For me, it’s a distinctly non-visual affair. I try to create a rich environment, but it doesn’t necessarily come naturally. I do best with creating landscapes, because landscapes capture my attention and imagination, and I enjoy rendering them in words. Getting down to a smaller scale, though, I don‘t see the immediate environment of my characters photographically. I see snippets of it, like a candle being wielded by our POV character and illuminating just what’s in front of them.

And as for the characters themselves? Well, I rarely get an actual image of them. What I have is a list of traits in my mind that add up to them as a character. I do not necessarily see a face, though I have a hazy idea of how that face is animated by the person within. I do not necessarily see a body, but I see how the character uses his/her body to express things in the moment, or how that body reflects who they are (scars? a limp? an athletic build?). I’ve only rarely had “glimpses” of my characters. Otherwise, they’re a bit like figures from a well-plotted dream: you know they are what they are, but you don’t know why and you never really see the details.

Mostly, I hear voices. Conversations go on in my head, not necessarily at the moment I’m writing, but often as I’m daydreaming. Snatches of dialogue come to me, and sometime entire conversations play out in my mind. They are actual words–complete sentences. And the voices in my head answer one another. It can be a bit startling, because I’m not always necessarily thinking of the story at the particular moment, but then boom! there’s a pithy line, or an exchange between two characters. That’s part of the reason there are sticky notes all over my wall with two or three lines on them: one of these lines of dialogue or exchanges between characters has come to me, and I have to get it down before it disappears.

[As a side-note, plot points sometimes come to me this way, in the form of dialogue, but more often they come to me in much the same way–in flashes of understanding–except not in the form of words. It’s more like a connection. A “duh” moment.]

Sometimes, I wonder where these voices come from, but I know it’s just the working of my unconscious. My unconscious probably believes these stories are real and is working out for me how to respond, just as it works behind the scenes to help me respond to the real world. The voices in my head are my brain’s best guess at how a person with Character X’s traits would respond. It’s trying to figure out these characters as if they were real. I guess that’s another way of saying it’s my imagination.

And of course, I write historical fiction, so all these “people” are long-dead.

Ergo, I hear dead people . . . and it’s not even creepy, I swear.

Writerly Wednesday–Multiple Main Characters and Word Count

Although I took all of last week off (I already had off Christmas Day and the day after), I felt pretty harried most of that time. There were presents to wrap, goodies to bake, research projects to work on, paintings to, uh, paint, and so on. I’d been storing up all these plans, and they just didn’t fit into one week.

I did, however, find time to complete another editing pass of The Cotton Wars (that’s the working title). As a bit of background, this novel is the story of the parents of three characters in my (as yet unpublished) Antebellum novel, Channing. It takes place between 1829 and 1837 in Philadelphia and Georgia. And because of the backstory told in Channing, it was always clear to me that there would be four main characters: Charles Daniels, his twin brother Archie Daniels, a young actress named Emily Everly who works at their theater in Philly, and a slave woman named Betty. All four are equally important, and I consider them co-main characters.

As I got going, I decided to see how much face-time, so to speak, each character got. In my Excel spreadsheet, I marked from whose point of view each chapter was told and in another cell the word-count.

[Aside: I left chapter 1 blank because it was ambiguous whether the POV was Charles’s or Archie’s. This worried me at first, but as I went along and marked down the POV characters and word count and main events for each chapter, I realized something: it made perfect sense for the first chapter to be more ambiguous. After all, at the beginning of the novel, the brothers are basically indistinguishable to outside observers and are very much in sync with one another. Needless to say, that changes.]

When I reached the end of this round of edits, I had an interesting dataset on hands. Oh, Excel, you sexy beast, you, spitting out data on the fictional characters I created. Ahem. Uh, yeah. With the data, I could show how much of the story was told from each character’s perspective: how many words, how many chapters, what percentage.

Out of 104,100 words (I rounded each chapter to the nearest fifty; Word tells me the total word count is actually 103,950):

38,800 words or 37.3% were from Archie’s POV; he has 19 chapters

29,600 words or 28.4% were from Emily’s POV; she has 13 chapters

20,050 words or 19.3% were from Betty’s POV; she had 13 chapters

14,750 words or 14.2% were from Charles’s POV; he has 10 chapters

900 words or .8% were ambiguous; this is 1 chapter

Which I have to admit reflects, to some degree, my opinion of the characters–not necessarily as “people” but as characters. Archie is extremely fun to write, and I think is the most honest character in the manuscript. But he screws up multiple times and really wouldn’t be the kind of person I’d want to spend time with. Emily is slightly out of her mind and given to saying and thinking and doing startling things. She gets boring after a certain point, and more or less drops off the map–poor girl–until she’s needed again to die. Betty is a fascinating, complicated character, but because of who she is, she doesn’t have a great deal of agency (she’s a slave). That limits me with her, plot-wise, and a lot of the time we spend with her is in her head–which is fine, but spending too much time in anyone’s head without any actual action can be tedious. When she finally takes charge, she gets interesting and the story turns more fully to her. That is where the bulk of her word count comes from. As for Charles, well, he’s a deluded bastard who barely ever realizes his faults. I don’t like him very much, though I think he wants to be a good man and just doesn’t really know how. It’s ironic that he’s the one with the lowest word count even though he’s the only one of the four still alive at the end.

Oh, damn, did I spoil it? Well, that’s okay. If you’ve glanced at Channing (The Cotton Wars is a prequel), you’d pretty much know everyone’s fate. And anyway, they were all born around 1800. Clearly, they all died at some point.

Using a spreadsheet proved to be a nice way not so much to rearrange the plot (I already had it where I wanted it) but to lay out what I already had for analysis. It helps to have one list of chapters, POVs, and events, on one page. It also gives me a place to make any notes of little things I need to fix or check on (to eliminate continuity errors, for instance). It was a really useful exercise, and I might just do the same thing with Channing . . .

If you’re a writer with a manuscript, this kind of analysis might be helpful or at least interesting.

Writerly Wednesdays–Letting Go Is Hard to Do.

At the end of the movie Titanic, Rose says, “I’ll never let go, Jack.” Of course, she then promptly lets go, and his frozen body sinks into the icy depths.

Which just goes to show that letting go it hard to do (unless you’re Rose).

Writers, myself included, sometimes find it difficult to say goodbye to our characters when the story is over. It’s hard–almost impossible–to write 102,000 words–and twice that amount in discarded material–without getting attached to the (fictional) people you’ve been sharing head space with. I’ve been writing about my current characters for about two years now. I dreamed them up from nowhere, molded them, listened to their voices in my head, reshaped them, fit the story to them and them to the story . . . and along the way I really fell in love with them.

So what’s a girl to do? The story was written, the arc was complete. Some characters were dead, others were off to something like a happily-ever-after. We started here; we ended there. It took us over a hundred thousand words to get there. The story proper was done. Finito.

And yet . . .

There they still were, popping into my head when I was brushing my teeth or taking a shower or sitting on the bus. All of a sudden, a new situation would appear in my head–what if this happened? How would Caroline, Everett, or Harry handle it? What would Augustine say? Although I loved all my characters, it was almost always Everett and Harry who appeared there with something to say.

So I decided to keep writing, even though the story was over. I had an idea–a silly idea, really. It’s filled with various cliches. But I thought it was fitting. It’s a death scene, a quiet death scene. A character (I don’t want to spoil anything, even though there’s not much chance anyone reading this will ever read Channing, or even that it’ll ever be in print) is old and sick. It’s forty years after the end of Channing, and he’s sitting alone in the dark. Suddenly, a ghost from his past appears. They talk for a bit, then the old man is escorted away to his death by the ghost.

See? That would seem exceptionally silly tacked on to the end of a novel. It might be silly all by itself–though I like to think I wrote it well. The point is, I had this image in my head of exactly what those two would say to each other, forty years later, one of them dead and one of them shriveled with age. I had to keep writing. Sometimes, the bug bites really hard, and it doesn’t matter if it’s useful for anything. It just needs to be written down.

And just the other day, another vivid image came to my mind as I was thinking about the years directly after the end of Channing, the years of the Civil War. Perhaps ironically, the image was a funny one (a wife daring her husband to go down to breakfast naked in the morning, and him doing it). And I thought to myself, it’s a moment of laughter in the face of great tragedy. So I wrote another scene, another little epilogue that will never be part of a published book but just is.

If I ever am lucky enough to get Channing published, and if I ever am lucky enough to have people who care to read them, I’ll make these scenes available. But until then, I guess I just have to content myself with creating these little epilogues for my own enjoyment. Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll get this story and these characters out of my system. Until then, I guess they’ll just continue carrying on their conversations in the corners of my mind. Maybe I don’t want them to stop. Maybe letting them go really is hard to do.

Marie Jossel: Jeanne de La Motte’s mother

I am currently working through one of Jeanne de la Motte-Valois’s memoirs. It is available online through Google Books (click this link to go there). This version is the original English translation, published in London’s Paternoster row in 1791. At this time, Jeanne was living in London. Shortly after the publication of this memoir, she died after a fall from a London window onto the London streets (some say she was pushed).

Jeanne de la Motte-Valois

Presumably, Jeanne told her story in French. Unless her English was very good, someone translated this work. Whoever did it was not a great prose stylist. The wording is clunky at best. Most of the sentences stretch on for a week or two without any reason for doing so. Combined with the fact that the English of 220 years ago was slightly different from the English of today, the language of the memoir itself can be a bit tedious. But once you get used to it, it’s worth the trouble. The story is extraordinary.

Google Books offers a text version of the book. You can highlight, copy, and paste the words. But because the software isn’t perfect, and because the page images have some flaws, the text version is messy. As I go, I am copying the text and cleaning it up. I’m doing it roughly; there’s simply too much work for me to go through it with a fine-toothed comb. However, I will bring to the readers of this blog some of the results of this clean-up.

The first of these posts will be about Marie Jossel, Jeanne’s mother. Jeanne was not, to say the least, her mother’s biggest fan. According to Jeanne, her father–the son of a minor nobleman, descended from the illegitimate child of Henri II, unprepared to support his family in any way–had been intended to marry a young noblewoman practically since his birth. As a young man, he fell for a maid in his household, the lovely but barbed Marie. Jeanne’s father, named Jacques like Jeanne’s brother, wanted to marry Marie, but his father disapproved. In spite of his father’s disapproval, Jacques married Marie (the English translation refers to her as Maria for no discernible reason).

As Jeanne herself puts it:

Maria [or Marie] Jossel, a girl who had the charge of the house at Fontette [meaning she was a maid], was the person who had attracted his [Jeanne’s father Jacques’s] eye. She was solicitous to please him and in a short time became pregnant. My father, wishing at once to make her an honorable reparation and to legitimate his child, was induced to ask my grandfather’s consent to marry her; [Jacques’s father], thinking such a union degrading to an illustrious line of ancestry, gave a pointed and formal refusal. This opposition did but increase my father’s ardor; who, after many unsuccessful efforts to win my grandfather to compliance, and remaining unmarried till he was thirty-six years of age (four years longer than the law required) [until the age of thirty, men were required to seek their father’s approval to marry in France], at length solemnized the marriage at Langres in Champaign, under the names of James de Luz and Maria Jossel, where my father had purchased an estate upon which he resided some time previous to the nuptials. About a year after, my grandfather, upon his deathbed, forgave the indiscretion of his son; after whose decease my father and mother left Langres to take possession of the estate at Fontette [the family estate, where Jeanne herself was born].

click below to continue reading…..

Madame du Barry and the Diamond Necklace

The Characters #7: Madame du Barry

Every good story starts somewhere, and the origins of the Diamond Necklace Affair–in fact, the origins of the necklace itself–lie with Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, grandfather of Louis XVI and grandfather-in-law to Marie Antoinette.

Women like Madame du Barry weren’t uncommon in royal courts. Generally, they were expected to exist, a la Louis XV’s earlier maîtresse-en-titre Madame de Pompadour or Louis XIV’s mistresses (Madame de Montespan, La Vallière, and many others). There was a delineation of duties between the queen/wife and the mistress. The queen bore children, acted royal, and cemented an alliance with the kingdom from whence she came. The mistress pleased the king, was often the leader of fashion, and was generally there because the kings never got to choose their wives.

Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV and intended purchaser of the Diamond Necklace. (Painted by Vigee Le Brun)

The du Barry was one of the more flamboyant personalities of her time. She entered the king’s life after Madame de Pompadour’s death. She was a courtesan, a beautiful blonde girl who caught the eye of the king. She was married off to a comte du Barry to make her eligible for the vaunted position of royal mistress–yes, apparently even the mistress had to be noble. The king was very fond of du Barry and lavished gifts on her. This is where her personal tastes made an impact on history.

Knowing that she loved diamonds and that her tastes verged on the vulgar, the royal jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge began to assemble diamonds for an enormous necklace named the Slave Collar, meant to grace the neck of Madame du Barry. It was, relatively speaking, reasonable to expect the King to purchase this necklace for his favorite, or for him to give her the means to purchase it for herself. The jewelers, however, didn’t receive a commission for this necklace. They had taken upon themselves the risk of purchasing the diamonds and assembling it in a gaudy setting.

Before the diamonds had been placed in their setting, the King died of smallpox in May 1774. This put his grandson Louis XVI on the throne alongside his wife, Marie Antoinette. The nation rejoiced, but this king was a very different king from his grandfather. Not for him the procession of mistresses. He was, alas, not able in the first years of the marriage to consummate it. This was bad news for the jewelers, who needed someone with flashy tastes who the king was willing to lavish their necklace on. They’d gone deeply into debt to purchase the necklace, and only royalty on the caliber of the French monarchs could afford their necklace.

Luckily, the queen was Marie Antoinette, who as a young woman had expensive tastes and flashy ways. The jewelers obviously weren’t going to be able to sell the necklace to du Barry anymore, since she’d been exiled to a convent. But if the new, pretty, extravagant queen would buy the necklace, they would be saved from ruin. Unfortunately for them, Marie Antoinette didn’t want to buy their necklace. She and du Barry hadn’t gotten along while Marie Antoinette was the dauphine, so aside from the necklace being gaudy and too expensive for even Marie Antoinette to buy on a whim, it also had negative connotations because it had first been offered to the du Barry.

Without Madame du Barry for whom to create this diamond necklace extraordinaire, the entire Affair of the Diamond Necklace probably would have never unfolded. The implications for what might have happened to the monarchy and French history are potentially huge.

Madame du Barry must have been shocked when she learned about the plots surrounding the necklace that had been intended for her. In fact, in the parade of witnesses brought into the Palais de Justice when the conspirators in the theft of the necklace that was initially meant for Madame du Barry, the dead king’s mistress was questioned. As Frances Mossiker, her sudden reappearance on the scene started the rumors flying. What did Madame du Barry know? What part had she played in the theft of the necklace by the Comtesse de la Motte, or Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan?

Madame du Barry arrived at the Palais de Justice on December 7, 1785 to answer the questions of the Parlement (the court). Du Barry told the court that Madame de La Motte had introduced herself with the proposition of being taken on as the royal mistress’s dame de compagnie. She painted herself as graciously turning down the idea because she didn’t need a companion and besides Madame de La Motte made a lot out of having royal blood, which made her overqualified for the position. Madame de La Motte came back again to get Du Barry’s help in putting forward a petition to the king for more money.

The story according to Madame de La Motte is almost unrecognizable. She objected to accusations made by du Barry–that Madame de La Motte had long ago signed her name with “de France”, an incriminating detail. The accusations, she said, came from a twisted memory of genealogical tables Madame had shown du Barry. According to Madame de La Motte’s version, du Barry was unpleasant to the interrogators, refusing to give her name and age.

In either case, Madame du Barry’s evidence didn’t provide the “smoking gun”. In fact, the du Barry knew very little about the necklace. The piece of evidence she gave was intriguing, but didn’t necessarily prove anything. Her recollection of a document on which Madame de La Motte signed herself “de France” was significant because there was a contract to purchase the diamond necklace signed “Marie Anoinette de France.” A real queen of France would never add “de France”; she would let her name stand alone, since she was powerful and regal enough to do without a last name. This suggests that the contract was forged, but then again this was a pretty fair assumption to make anyway.

So in the end, Madame du Barry’s evidence didn’t really add much, but her presence at the trial created a stir and she was, all things considered, the catalyst for the Affair of the Necklace.

Unfortunately, Madame du Barry was a victim of the French Revolution. She was executed in 1793, during the Reign of Terror.

Nicolas de La Motte

The Characters #6: Nicolas de La Motte

Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Motte was “homely but a man of splendid physique” according to Jacques Claude (late Comte) Beugnot. Monsieur de La Motte married a young lady by the name of Jeanne de Valois de St Remy. She was a member of an impoverished (and illegitimate) arm of the Valois royal line of France; her family was descended from Henri II the entire inheritance had been squandered. He was a gentleman and a cavalry officer in the Gendarmerie. According, again, to Beugnot (who may have not been well-disposed towards La Motte), La Motte was adroit at “Wrangling credit” and had poor behavior so that he never advanced within the cavalry.

He lived in Bar-sur-Aube where his uncle was one of the most prominent citizens. He met Mademoiselle de Valois (later Madame or Comtesse de La Motte) at his uncle’s house. He was a lively, powerful character, and she was an impetuous, wild character. They hit it off immediately. Mademoiselle de Valois is rather tight-lipped about the lead-up to her marriage to La Motte on June 6, 1780, and no wonder. Beugnot, who was something an admirer of Mademoiselle in his own right, says that he received letters from Bar-sur-Aube telling him that a romance had begun between Mademoiselle de Valois and Monsieur de La Motte. “All in the same month,” he says,” they wrote me, first, that there seemed possibility of an engagement; in the next letter, that the engagement had been announced . . . and then, in almost no time at all, that the marriage had been celebrated.” The marriage was sanctioned by Mademoiselle de Valois’s foster mother (the Marquise de Boullainvilliers) and the Bishop de Langres, an old friend (and perhaps lover) of Mademoiselle. Beugnot’s “astonishment” at the rapidity of the romance was relieved when Madame de La Motte gave birth to twins a month later.

Retaux de Villette

Characters #4: Retaux de Villette (1759-1797?)

Like almost everyone else involved in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, Retaux de Villette left a first-hand account for posterity. Memoirs were something of a vogue, and nearly everyone had one–Madame de La Motte, Monsieur de La Motte, and Comte Beugnot to name a few involved directly in the affair. Villette’s memoirs were published in Venice in 1790 under the name “Mémoires Historiques des Intrigues de la Cour”.

The “intrigue” is, of course, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which Retaux de Villette had a very intimate involvement in.

Plan of the grounds of the Chateau de Versailles, where Retaux de Villette took part in the “Grove of Venus” incident.

Villette, a tall blonde-haired blue-eyed young man, had known Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Motte since childhood. They were both born in Bar-sur-Aube and both went into the cavalry at the garrison of Lunéville. Villette was relatively well educated and accomplished, with a good voice, the ability to play the mandolin almost professionally, and some real flair for penmanship and writing. He was published in a few European newspapers such as the Gazette of Leyden.

His relationship with his friend Nicolas’s wife (Jeanne de La Motte-Valois) is a little sketchy. But it seems fairly likely that there was a ménage à trois between them. He certainly was named Madame de La Motte’s “personal secretary”. Certainly he was good with a pen, but one suspects that “personal secretary” was as much a euphemism as a job title. Villette himself admits in his memoir that he “loved Madame de La Motte to distraction”.

In any case, Villette was always in financial trouble. According to a friend of Madame de La Motte’s, a young lawyer named Jacques Claude Beugnot, he lived an itinerant lifestyle, leaving a trail of debts and running from them. He therefore had something in common with Jeanne de La Motte-Valois: financial desperation. It wasn’t much of a leap, therefore, for the two to go from (probable) lovers to co-conspirators . . . with Nicolas de La Motte, the husband, in on it, too.

Count Cagliostro

The Characters #3: Count Cagliostro (1743-1795)

It has been ascertained that Count Alessandro di Cagliostro was almost certainly Giuseppe Balsamo, an Italian adventurer and occultist who made his living by tricking wealthy people into believing in all kinds of fantastic tales and in his own spiritual powers. In other words, he was a con man and a cheat.

This begs the question, What in the name of all that is [un]holy does a man like this have to do with a jewel heist perpetrated by a desperate and very obscure scion of a defunct royal house?

Castel Sant’Angelo, where Cagliostro was incarcerated and died. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

First, to begin at beginning; if Count Cagliostro was the Giuseppe Balsamo that he is believed to be, he was born in 1743 in Sicily. His lineage was very humble and his family not particularly wealthy. He did, however, receive a good education and began early to trick and swindle the wealthy people around him [some interesting stories are included in this Wikipedia article]. The story is that the coarse and crude Italian “metamorphosed” (as Frances Mossiker puts it) into the sophisticated, unctuous, sought-after, and influential Count Cagliostro. Frances Mossiker, for one, has her doubts that Giuseppe Balsamo was Count Cagliostro.

However, it is established fact that Count Cagliostro toured Europe extensively, selling his act. His act was that of a mystic and occultist, a knower of things and doer of incredible deeds.

Cardinal Rohan

The Characters #2: Prince Louis de Rohan (1734-1803)

Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan was a prince of the blood. This was a rank in ancien régime France just below the royal family. Those lucky enough to be born princes or princesses of the blood had certain privileges, such as the right of entrée during official ceremonies at Court involving the person of the monarch (like the lever and coucher, the official rising and going-to-bed ceremonies).

The Rohan family was one of the most influential in France. They were based largely in the eastern lands bordering Germany, specifically Saverne and Strasbourg. The family was descended from the kings of Brittany.

Prince Louis was destined for the Church from an early age. His uncle was a Cardinal and bishop, and Louis was the designated successor of these offices. As a talented scion of one of the most important families in France, he had a bright future to look forward to. As a child, he was probably conditioned to think of himself as a possible prime minister of France. In 1760, he took orders, becoming part of the Catholic Church. The Church still held strong influence on France, so Prince Louis was now supported by powerful relatives and the powerful Catholic church.

Jeanne de La Motte-Valois

Starting with this post, I am going to be writing about the endlessly fascinating Affair of the Diamond Necklace. In this issue: the Comtesse de La Motte, the orchestrator of a diamond theft that rocked the world.

This is all prompted by the historical novel I’m working on. I’m 40k into the story (give or take 401 words; or, rather, take 401 words because it’s at exactly 39,599). Obviously, I’ve gotten a hell of a lot done already, and I’m pretty pleased with what I have. I will have to go back and do a little bit of cleaning up, I think, just to make sure I haven’t inadvertently given the wrong impression about this, that, or the other thing. The story is being set up rather like a thriller or a mystery, though the revelation (which I just wrote) comes around halfway through the story, not at the end. The denouement (or at least the aftermath of poor Nicole’s realization) is going to be much longer. Because, after all, it’s about her, not about the story.

The Characters #1: Jeanne de La Motte-Valois de St Remy (July 1756 – August 1791)

Jeanne de Valois de St Remy was born in the provinces, near the town of Bar-Sur-Aube, France. Her family were impoverished nobility, living in the ramshackle Chateau de Fontette. One of her ancestors, Henri de Saint-Remy, was born in 1557, the illegitimate son of Henri II of France. His descendants were given the surname “Saint-Remy” and this Henri was made Baron of Fontette. Several generations later, the family was in dire financial straits. They had kept themselves alive through a tradition of military service, but Jeanne’s father did not carry on this tradition. He married one of the maids as the family fortunes sank even lower. Jeanne had an older brother, a younger sister who died as a young child, and a sister who was near her age. Her family ended up walking to Paris to try to make their way with only a paper outlining their pedigree. The father died, the mother abandoned her children, and Jeanne and her brother were forced to beg.

According to Jeanne, she carried her little sister on her back and went to the road to Passy, where she met the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, who took her in. She was sent to school (and didn’t like it), worked for increasingly lowly couturiers (and didn’t like it), and was briefly in a convent (and didn’t like it). She returned to Bar-sur-Aube, running away from the convent. There she was supported by the Beugnot family. After what appears to have been what is called a “shotgun wedding” in common parlance, she went to Paris with her husband (Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Motte), looking to make her fortune by importuning the queen with her sad story. She expected that, as the last (though illegitimate) living Valois, she would be given some support. She was actually given a fairly generous annuity, considering how distant her relation was to the king. She was also to be known as Mademoiselle de Valois, her brother was given the title Baron de Valois, and her sister was to be called Mademoiselle de St Remy.

Her publicity stunts at Versailles grew increasingly desperate. She fainted in front of Madame Elisabeth, King Louis XVI’s sister, and even managed to get into the good graces of Madame Elisabeth and the Comtesse d’Artois, the King’s sister-in-law. Then there was some little scandal involving Jeanne and the Comte d’Artois, her patroness’s husband. She fell out of favor. She went to one minister and refused to leave until she was listened to. This produced a slight increase in her pension. Still, she was in troubled waters.

This is where her story gets interesting. Jeanne, now calling herself a countess, had begun to convince people in about 1783 to 1784 that she was a close friend to the queen. She put around the story that she and the queen were on intimate terms. The pandering of influence was big business in a time and place where all good things flowed from the king and, especially there and then, from queen Marie-Antoinette. Jeanne roped in a Cardinal and Prince of the blood, a man named Prince Louis de Rohan. He had alienated the queen when she was still Dauphine (queen in waiting), and wanted to get back into her favor. Jeanne took advantage of him, bilking him for one hundred twenty thousand francs, a vast sum. She did it by having her “personal secretary” Retaux de Villette forge letters from the queen. The “queen” requested loans because she was more than usually hard up–because, of course, the queen of France typically had such troubles (or not). In any case, Jeanne apparently pocketed the money and showed sudden signs of affluence. She returned briefly to Bar-sur-Aube, lording it over the locals.

Then this all got very interesting.