Talleyrand and Fouché invited us to their power brokers’ «Le souper » in the aftermath of the Waterloo battle. Blandly true to its title, « La révolution française » taught us the basics of its topic and preciously little else. We extensively toured Versailles on the heels on Sofia Coppola and her « Marie-Antoinette ».
Is it time to know more about the Empire, pick up where « La révolution française » left us and follow the Imperial eagles to Waterloo and Talleyrand’s dining room ? « The judgment of Paris » already made us familiar to a few of Ernest Meissonier’s painstakingly accurate, if not moving, pictures of the Napoleon era.
Instead, let us keep moving backward to the years before « Marie-Antoinette » or rather Louis XVI, when the reign of his grand father, Louis XV, was drawing to a close and Madame du Barry was the latest, and the last, of the royal mistresses : the king’s « favorite ».
Christian-Jaque’s « Madame du Barry » tells a piece of History, but History is only a raw material which reaches the screen after a long transformation process, under many layers of narration.
« Madame du Barry » sees History through « le petit bout de la lorgnette », i.e. the smaller end of a spy-glass, in truth the smaller end of several successive spy-glasses..
« Madame du Barry » first sees History, obviously, through the lens of cinema : the film is even in « couleurs », as the opening titles feel necessary to inform us, probably less by fear that we would otherwise not notice than because, in 1954 French cinema, a colour film still seemed a promise of prodigality, frivolity and gaiety, if not of slight on screen debauchery.
« Madame du Barry » is a film, but opens like a book, the pages of which the opening credits slowly turn.
This film and this book immediately take us to a Parisian open-air fair during the French Revolution : on a stage, a « sans-culottes » entertainer is teasing his audience with the promised scandalous tale of « la du Barry ».
The film and the book close in on the cardboard characters on stage and bring them to life and us to Paris in the 1760s.
In a fancy shop of fashion, a young and attractive Jeanne Bécu works as a saleswoman and receives pointed attention from several rich and often aristocratic customers.
But Jeanne soon takes her back to the very fair we come from, « foire Saint-Germain », only three decades earlier : she and her work colleagues come there on their free time, looking for entertainment and chance encounters. Another Monsieur Loyal is on stage, already teasing his audience, today with the tale of life at Louis XV’s Court in Versailles.
The film again falls for the entertainer’s smooth talk and we are promptly transported from the populous fair to the Versailles palace and the bedroom of a gloomy but witty king, who, at sixty, is left, figuratively, nearly on his own, after the death of his son, the Queen and, last but not least, his long time « favorite », Madame de Pompadour.
These many detours, successive narrators and time travels eventually introduce us to the heart of the matter, and one more stage : the king’s court, where Jeanne Bécu, still only a star-struck young woman dreaming of it as she watches the show at the fair, shall soon become the leading actress.