Madame du Barry

Jeanne Bécu was born in 1743 to circumstances humble enough that when the king wanted her in 1768, his fixers had to forge a birth certificate and rush her into marriage with Comte Guillaume du Barry just to make her presentable at Versailles. Her past as a courtesan made her arrival a scandal; Marie Antoinette refused to acknowledge her existence until New Year's Day 1772, when the young queen's single bland remark - "There are many people at Versailles today" - was considered enough to ease the freeze. She reigned as maîtresse-en-titre until Louis XV's death, then lived quietly through the gathering storm. In the Terror, a servant named Zamor accused her of helping émigrés escape, and on 8 December 1793 she went to the guillotine. The jewels she'd smuggled to London were auctioned two years later.