Diderot, Bouret and his dog

Detail from Greuze's L'Enfant gâté (Louvre)

The story of Bouret and his dog has been made famous by Diderot in Rameau' s Nephew:

Rameau's nephew ("Lui") defends his reprehensible life as a social parasite on the grounds of moral determinism and cites Bouret 's innate natural ability in the art of flattery, a skill which has served him well:  "Only God and a few rare geniuses can have careers that keep stretching out before them as they advance".  His incident concerning the dog is one of three, ostensibly well-known,  examples of Bouret's  ingenuity, the others being the "Book of Felicity" and "torches lighting the way to Versailles". The first of these references is clearly to Bouret's famous book in the pavillon du roi,  described in the Correspondance littéraire for March 1764.  Bouret is recorded in 1759 as having stationed torchbearers at intervals along the King's progress from Versailles to La Croix-Fontaine.

According to Rameau's nephew, the  Keeper of the Seals took a fancy to Bouret's little pet dog and Bouret decided to make him a present of it.  He was obliged to go extraordinary lengths  since he had to persuade the animal to accept the minister as his new master. The creature was extremely attached to him and frightened of the minister's bizarre clothing. Moreover Bouret was under time pressure, for he has only a week to achieve the feat. He had a mask made to disguise himself as the Keeper of the Seals, borrowed the man's wig and voluminous robe, then petted the dog and gaves it titbits to eat;  reverting to his own identity, he then gave  the animal a beating.  By repeating the exercise from morning to night, the dog was soon persuaded to prefer the minister. Rameau's nephew professes  admiration for this remorseless attention to detail - "Having a mask made to look like him! It's the mask I find so staggering". Genius of this sort is born, not made:  "Who ever gave Bouret any lessons?  No-one. It's nature that forms these rare men.  Do you think the dog and the mask is written down anywhere?" (2014 English edition, p.52-55) 

A Pavilion fit for a King

This portrait, by Louis-Michel Van Loo, is from the collection of the late couturier Hubert de Givency which is to be auctioned by Christie's in Paris at the end of the month. If you have €60,000-€ 80,000 to spare, this glossy, this splendid, rather self-satisfied eighteenth-century gentleman could soon adorn your walls....

Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707-1771) and workshop, Portrait of Étienne-Michel Bouret (1710-1777) in front of the  Pavillon Bouret

Oil on canvas 141 cm x 109 cm. 

https://www.christies.com/lot/louis-michel-van-loo-1707-1771-et-atelier-portrait-6376123

[The painting was previously auctioned in December 1994. See the reproductions on Artnet and Wikimedia.]

As it happens, the subject fits in neatly with my current theme of financiers and tax farmers.  He is Étienne-Michel Bouret - perhaps the most absurdly rich and profligate of them all. 

According to Lenotre, Bouret was "le prototype des parvenus".  The most famous of three brothers, he rose from modest origins -  legend he had it he arrived in Paris with only 20 écus - and amassed fortune through transport of salt for the gabelle and later through speculation in the grain trade.   He amassed even greater income through a series of lucrative Royal offices -  General Treasurer to the Royal Household in 1738 and Postmaster General in 1752 - and in 1741 joined the exalted ranks of the Farmer-Generals. 

In an age of ostentatious luxury, Bouret stood out for his extravagance. Biographers estimate that his fortune at its peak could have been reached as much 42 million livres.   Voltaire later maintained that he spent up to 200 livres a day to have fresh seafood relayed by road from Dieppe.(Requête à tous les magistrats du royaume, 1769).  It was above all the scale of his building projects which drew scandalised attention.   He maintained a splendid hôtel in the rue de la Grange-Batelière (later sold to Laborde), and constructed an magnificent "pavilion" at Gonesse  ("What folly!", wrote d'Argenson, who disliked him: "What an insult all this is to the people.").  

The buildings of the General Farm in Paris

Throughout France the General-Farm advertised its presence with imposing offices, factories and warehouses.  In the provinces, it was common to assign to the Farm grand hôtels left vacant by their noble owners; when these were not available for sale, they would be leased.  In Paris the Farmers owned the properties they occupied.  On the eve of Revolution  it is estimated that there were as many as 700 officials and clerks employed in the Farm's central bureaux alone (Dict. des Fermes).   The most important building was the Hôtel des Fermes, rue de Grenelle, which had been acquired  in 1687.  It was here that the assemblies of senior Farmers met, and here also that much of the administration was accommodated.  In course of the century half-a-dozen others premises were added, notably the magnificent Hôtel de Bretonvilliers on the Île Saint-Louis.  The Hôtel de Longueville adjacent to the Louvre was occupied from 1746, by the administration and Paris manufacture of the tobacco monopoly. There was also a splendid salt warehouse, the grenier à sel in the rue Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. 

Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste_Raguenet, The Hôtel de Bretonvilliers, 1757

The General-Farm of Taxes

The General-Farm (or, strictly speaking, General-Farms) of Taxes was one of the most hated institutions of 18th century France.  It wa  responsible for the collection of the majority of indirect taxes, that is to say it controlled between 40% and 50% of the Crown's total tax revenue. Its operations extended throughout the provinces and  impinged to great or lesser extent on the lives of most ordinary Frenchmen.

A portrait of Helvétius?

 

It is always exciting to find a new image of a prominent Enlightenment figure!  This portrait of Helvétius has been on the website of Lapham's Quarterly from at least 2015 and is beginning to feature  more and more on the internet.....  

The Prince and the Magician

Portrait  of Orléans by Jean-Pierre Franque, musée de Dreux
https://webmuseo.com/ws/musee-dreux/app/collection/record/188

Here is a curious episode from the late-eighteenth century world of Freemasonry,the occult and ritual magic.  It involves no less a figure than the duc d'Orléans, later Philippe d'Égalité.   According to the fullest account, events took place near Orléan's  residence at the Château du Raincy, about ten kilometres north-east of Paris.   An unnamed Jewish sorcerer led the duke into a forest thicket where an demonic being materialised from a supernatural fire. The apparition conferred on him a talismanic ring and imparted an unknown secret: 

"He conversed for more than an hour with this real or phantasmic figure whose hand sealed an iron ring around his neck.  He showed us this ring, but did not confide in us what had been predicted.  He only told us "The matter is of the highest importance, but it is a mystery".  These are the exact words he used.  [D'Allonville, Mémoires secrets (1838), vol. 1, p.145] 

In later commentaries, notably the history by Auguste Viatte published in 1928,  the  mysterious Jew is identified as Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk, the so-called "Baal Shem of London",  a famous Kabbalistic magician of the later eighteenth century.  It was generally assumed that the duke had been promised a magical guarantee for his accession to the French throne. [see Viatte, p.184]

William Beckford in Paris

 

 Beckford by John Hoppner, Salford Art Gallery        

 https://artuk.org/william-beckford-165217     

Few Englishmen obtained greater celebrity in the late 18th and early 19th century than William Beckford, eccentric, hedonist and creator of the marvellous gothick folly of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. 

In 1784 Beckford, then a young man of twenty-four, journeyed with his long suffering wife to Paris. In the course of his sejourn he wrote a series of letters addressed to his mistress Louisa, the wife of his cousin Peter.  The letters survive only in copies which Beckford transcribed in his own hand years later, in 1834.  In all probability they were never intended to be sent, but were written for publication; it is reported that the elderly Beckford was in the habit of reading extracts to favoured guests in his retreat at Lansdown Tower in Bath.  How far the letters are genuine reportage and how far fanciful reminiscences, is anyone's guess.  Either way, they are a fascinating read, though possibly more for the light they shed on Beckford's psyche than for their insights into pre-Revolutionary France.

A discussion of the letters, with substantial extracts, is included  in John Walter Oliver's biography, The Life of William Beckford, published in 1932.  [Available for loan on Internet Archive]

Laborde - Life and death of a financier

Monsieur de Laborde, you will perhaps be astonished that, without the honour of knowing you, I have come to ask you to lend me 100 louis? - Monsieur, replied Laborde laughing, you will be even more astonished  to learn that, knowing you, I am prepared to lend them to you.

Quoted Janzé, Les financiers d'autrefois (1886), p.268.

I am remaining in France.  I have never done any harm to anyone. 

Letter from Laborde, received by Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun during her exile in Rome in 1789-90; quoted in her memoirs. 

Laborde by Alexander Roslin,
Cover image from the biography by Jean-Pierre Thomas & François d'Ormesson

Here are a few more notes on the owner of La Ferté and Méréville.  A  new scholarly biography of Laborde by François d'Ormesson and Jean-Pierre appeared in 2001, reissued this year.  I have  not managed to find a copy of this; what follows is just based on sources I found for free on the Web.

A promenade at Betz

For a scholarly description of the garden at Betz and its creation, the English-speaking reader is referred to Gabriel Wick's article, which is available on H-Net. 

The following account is from an old guidebook by  André Hallys, translated into English in 1920 as

The Spell of the Heart of France.  I am reproducing it (from Gutenberg) mainly because I enjoyed the prose.  Hallys provides some record of the fabriques which still stood in the early twentieth century.  The rest of his text is is derived mainly from the poem by Joseph-Antoine-Joachim Cérutti  Les Jardins de Betz, written in 1785 (though published only in 1792). This is a verbose piece, so it is  nice to have a few snippets of English translation! 

Cérutti is an interesting character.  An inveterate writer and versifier, he started out his career as a Jesuit schoolmaster, but later became a prominent Revolutionary journalist.  (It was he who delivered the eulogy at Mirabeau's funeral in 1791) . In the 1780s he had various aristocratic patrons, and had clearly been charged with composing inscriptions and mottoes for the garden at Betz.  His poem, which was no doubt originally intended for the entertainment of the princesse de Monaco's guests, was modelled on the abbé Delille's highly popular Les Jardins, our l'art d'embellir les paysages (1782).  André Hallys has no difficulty in finding plenty of anti-clerical and anti-despotic sentiments in the text.  [Most prescient was the final comment in Cérutti's  notes to the poem: For two hundred year, France has been pregnant with revolution; she will give birth before the end of the century.]

Betz - The King of Morocco's garden

The park at Betz. Plate from Alexandre Laborde's Description des nouveaux jardins (1808)

The princesse de Monaco by an unknown artist         
( Wikimedia)

In 1780 Marie Catherine de Brignole-Sale, princesse de Monaco bought the ancient feudal domain of Betz  in order to be close to her exiled lover, the prince de Condé, in nearby Chantilly.  Between 1782 and 1789 she constructed a Renaissance style château, with a park inspired by the latest taste in landscape design. The result is acknolwedged to have been one of the finest examples of French  picturesque garden. 

The park at Betz has had a quite  different fate from the parks at Ermenonville or Méréville, both of which are now in public ownership. The 70 hectare estate, in the commune of Betz, some 60 kilometres north-east of Paris, now belongs to no less a personage than Mohammed VI,  King of Morocco.  Although the park is classed as "national patrimony" it is not just  completely private -  it is hidden behind high stone walls and patrolled by armed guards....