Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse, a Tiger among the Bluestockings

By Julia Gasper

Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse fled from France to England in 1756 to avoid being sent to the Bastille for writing a book denouncing the tyranny of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. When the book was printed the French government tried to get it suppressed and the author arrested, but failed. Author of twenty books in both French and English, she was an eccentric, brilliant, and wayward woman who escaped from a convent in her youth and had numerous love-affairs, some disastrous. Novelist, political satirist, poet, feminist and animal rights advocate, she was determined to play a role in the Enlightenment intellectual scene and succeeded despite all the odds. Fauques was at one time the mistress of the Young Pretender and was a friend of some of the most scandal-prone figures of the time, including John Cleland, Elizabeth Craven and William Beckford. This biography unravels the confusion surrounding the identity of a woman who was an unconventional intellectual, criminal, lunatic and genius.

The cover picture shows the Fountain of Vaucluse, painting by Thomas Cole 1841.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781312976955

Book preview

Table of Contents

Introduction ……….

Chapter One ………

Chapter Two……….

Chapter Three………

Chapter Four………

Chapter Five……...

Chapter Six………

Chronological List of Works……

Index of Persons……..

Bibliography………...

Introduction

Who was Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse?

"Even her private history has something uncommonly curious in it."

In January 1759, in the middle of the Seven Years War, a diplomatic furore arose about a book being published in the Netherlands. It was an account of the life of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, who was at that time the effective ruler of France. The book gave a damning account of the regime in power, portraying it as corrupt and decadent, wholly under the tyranny of this one woman who appointed or dismissed ministers and generals at her whim. It was full of intimate details of a most scurrilous kind about the behaviour of high-up people, including the King himself. Moreover it alleged that France was racked with discontent, all classes being so incensed with the degree of misgovernment and repression that it was on the verge of rebellion. The French foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, alerted the French ambassador to the United Provinces, the Comte d’Affry, and told him to demand that the book, L’Histoire de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, be suppressed. It had already appeared in English in 1758, entitled The History of the Marchioness de Pompadour. D’Affrey complained that it was full of shocking scandal, which he insisted was calumny.¹

The Netherlands was officially neutral during the war, but tied closely to Britain for many reasons, not least the fact that the Statholder William V was a grandson of King George II. If the United Provinces permitted the printing and circulation of books that amounted to grossly damaging anti-French propaganda, Dutch neutrality might be in question. It might mean war.

When efforts to stop the book from being printed failed, the French tried to prevent shops from selling it, and a Swiss bookseller named Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam demanded payment from d’Affrey in order to recoup his losses. Effectively, the French government was being blackmailed to buy up all copies to prevent circulation. The French at first refused, fearing that the manuscript would simply be sent to another printer elsewhere, and instead they took legal action. In March the judges of Amsterdam seized all copies of the book from Rey, and a French agent named Astier purchased the original manuscript. But it was not the only one in existence. Almost immediately, more copies went on sale printed in Frankfurt, and very shortly afterwards, another English edition of the book appeared, published in Dublin. Several German editions appeared too. The fact that it was rather funny in places, as well as damning, ensured that it went on selling well for some time.²

The French ambassador in London, the Duc de Nivernais, made enquiries and was told that the author was a Mademoiselle Fauques, living in London. She had published a satirical fable, La Dernière Guerre des Bêtes (The Last War of the Beasts) in April 1758. This political satire had attracted so much interest that it had been translated into German as well as English. She had committed no crime under English law and therefore, even had France and Great Britain not been at war, there were no grounds for arresting her. Moreover there was some doubt about whether the French government had any authority over her, as she originated from Avignon.³

D’Affrey contacted the British ambassador in the Netherlands, General Joseph Yorke, and accused the British government of giving asylum to a criminal who was inciting the overthrow of the French government and spreading intolerable slanders. Yorke shrugged it off. France and Britain were on opposite sides in the war, and even had they been allies, his government had no power to interfere with the freedom of the Dutch press. He merely confirmed that the author was living in London. More information came via d’Affrey’s correspondents in Paris, and none of it was favourable. Mme Géoffrin, the hostess of a salon in Paris, got a letter from her friend Lady Hervey in London telling her that this woman, whose name was Fauques, was a mere adventuress. She claimed to be of good family but that was doubtful. She was poor, and lived by means of her wits and her body though the latter, Hervey added scathingly, was not earning her very much at present.⁴

Yorke knew very well who this woman was. He was just very cautious about what he told the French. The previous year she had caused embarrassment to his own government when she published a book denouncing a foreign diplomat. She even tried to bring a prosecution against him, so that he was forced to leave Britain altogether to avoid it. In his defence, the diplomat had accused her of being a subversive who had been mixed up with the Jacobites. That was two governments she wanted to overthrow, apparently. He had urged William Pitt to expel her from the country. It was hardly possible to be more embroiled in scandal than she was.⁵

For almost a hundred years nobody contested the attribution of The History of the Marchioness of Pompadour to Fauques. Louis Petit de Bachaumont, who probably knew Fauques, wrote in her lifetime, The book is the translation of a work by mademoiselle Fauque, an ex-nun. This young lady after becoming known in Paris for her novels and her love affairs, went to England where she got married. ⁶

Then in 1850 it was listed in Joseph-Marie Quérard’s Les Supercheries Littéraires Dévoilées, a book about literary frauds and forgeries, which included some conflicting statements about the authorship. He refers to Fauques disapprovingly:

Histoire (l’) de Mme la marquise de Pompadour, traduite de l’anglais (ou plutôt composée en français par Mlle FAUQUE, ex-religieuse), Londres, aux dépens de S. Hooper, à la Tête de César (Hollande), 1759, deux parties petit in-8 de 160 pages. - Autre édition, sous le même titre et avec la même date, petit in-8 de 189 pages.

[5962] On trouve la note suivante, en tête d’un exemplaire de la traduction anglaise de cet ouvrage:

« Cette vie est d’une demoiselle FAUQUE, ci-devant religieuse, qui, après s’être fait connaitre à Paris par de mauvais vers, de mauvais romans, et surtout par ses galanteries, passa en Angleterre où elle épousa (dit-on) un officier prussien (1). Ce livre ayant été traduit du français en anglais, et d’abord imprimée en Hollande, M. le comte d’Affri, ministre du roi, acheta l’édition par ordre du roi, ce qui n’a pas empêcher cet exemplaire d’échapper...

(1) Nous possédons une note très curieuse de Mercier, abbé de Saint-Léger, sur cette femme galante dont le nom de famille était Pillement, soeur de Pillement, peintre et dessinateur célèbre; elle se maria deux fois: la première avec Falques (et non Fauque), agent de change à Lyon où il sut pendu, et la seconde fois avec un ex-mousquetaire noir, nommé Clermont-Blêtre, lequel la quitta et alla servir à Cayenne sous les ordres du chevalier Turgot qui y commandait. Nous donnerons cette note dans nos Additions, au nom de guerre (Fauque) sous lequel cette femme était connue en littérature.⁷

In the main text he gives Fauques as the author, saying that she was known in Paris for her bad verses, bad novels and above all for her love-affairs, then went to England where she married, it was said, a Prussian officer. In the footnote he gives a different theory, from a priest named Mercier, identifying Fauques with a certain Mlle Pillement, of Lyon. He says Pillement married a man called Falques who was later hanged, and secondly a black musketeer named Clermont-Blêtre.

Four years later Quérard positively identified Fauques as Pillement in his work La France littéraire, where he lists her as:

FALQUES (Mlle), d’Avignon, née Pillement, sœur de Pillement, peintre et dessinateur célèbre. ⁸

This theory was adopted by Maurice Tourneux, editor of Baron’s Grimm’s Literary Correspondence, an influential book, which appeared in 1877. This was not, however, Grimm’s own opinion. It is added in the footnote. ⁹

When in 1879 a new edition of L’Histoire de la Marquise de Pompadour was published at Paris, the editor, who is anonymous, mentioned the Pillement theory, saying it is derived from the Bibliographie des principaux ouvrages relatifs à l’amour, aux femmes, et au mariage, by d’Imecourt, which is incorrect. The book in question does list the History of Mme la Marquise de Pompadour, but rightly attributes it to Fauques, pure and simple.¹⁰

It is not possible to create a composite entity out of these two women. Archives confirm that Marianne-Agnès Pillement was born in Lyon in 1732, to a family of artists. In 1750 she married a man named Charles Falque (not Falques), who was hanged for forgery in February 1756, and in 1773 she re-married to an officer in the army. Shortly afterwards she died in Paris. On 30th October 1773, Marie-Anne Pillement, wife of Fr.-René Brethe (not Blêtre) de Clermont, infantry captain of rue Mazarine, was buried at Saint-Sulpice. It has been surmised that she might have taken refuge in England after the scandal of her first husband’s crime but there is simply no evidence of that, whereas there are contemporary statements about Fauques crossing the Channel for quite different reasons. There is nothing to support the idea that Marianne Pillement ever left France. Most women whose husbands were hanged did not emigrate. Nor did they fake their own death seventeen years later.¹¹ A descendant of the Pillement family has written a book asserting that they are the same person, but all the evidence is against it. ¹²

Having been attached to one book, the false attribution spread and was added to lists of all Fauques’ books, whether published previously or long afterwards. The result is that books and library catalogues now present an amalgam, stringing together both women’s names. The names Pillement, Falque and Falques have been attached to the works of the author in question along with Vaucluse and La Cépèdes not only on websites such as Wikipedia which one would expect to be wrong, but also in the catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, WorldCat and on Google books. Sometimes Marianne-Agnès is turned into Marianne-Anges. But Mlle Fauques was not Madame Falque. They were two different people. Mlle Fauques always signed her name Fauques in surviving letters and documents, never Falque. She is never referred to as Pillement or Falque by any of the French critics who reviewed her books in the eighteenth century. She did not marry a Frenchman or die in 1773. She lived on in England until 1804, wrote many more books, some in English, and was married in 1780 to Henry Savile de Starck, a Prussian officer.

Anne-Marie Fauques already had an established reputation as a writer in the 1750s. As early as 1755, Formey writes, "Mademoiselle Fauque, of Avignon, is the author of this novel (Abbassaï, An Oriental Tale).¹³ In 1757 he lists four novels by her in La France Littéraire:

FAUQUE [Mademoiselle] d'Avignon. Le Triomphe de l'Amitié, 1750. Abassaï, histoire orientale, 1753, 2 vol. in-12. Contes du Serail, 1753, in-12. Les Préjugés trop bravés & trop suivis, ou les Mémoires de Mlle d’Oran, 1755, in-12.¹⁴

Furthermore, when we examine the works in question, we find that they reveal intimate links with the life story and experiences of Anne-Marie Fauques, not with that of Marianne-Agnès Pillement.

The History of the Marchioness of Pompadour was not the only one of Fauques’ books that the French government tried to suppress. In 1763 the Duc de Nivernais referred in a letter to another one, written by a certain Mme. de Vaucluse, the name she was by then using. ¹⁵ She was living a precarious and obscure existence in England as a writer and could not return to France for fear of prosecution. She was sometimes able to raise money from subscription to her books. It was said at one point she was so indigent she was begging in the streets. And yet with only a few small twists of fate, one of her children might have had a plausible claim to the British throne. 

By the 1770s, Fauques was being well-received among intellectual society in London, particularly by Elizabeth Montagu, the respected hostess and advocate of education for women, who was known as the Queen of the Bluestockings. The Bluestockings were on the whole a strait-laced bunch. How did Fauques manage to re-invent herself, and persuade Mrs Montagu that she was acceptable? Fauques did not assume a completely false identity but she must have given Mrs Montagu a very carefully selected version of her life story. Obviously, she did not mention that she had given birth to two children outside wedlock, by two different fathers, or that she had been sent to prison several times– mostly for debt and once for threatening somebody with a gun. All that was edited out. Yet if Mrs Montagu’s circle read her books they would have found a complete disregard for propriety, delicacy or the conventional boundaries of what a woman was supposed to write about. The novels are full of extra-marital affairs, illegitimate children, cross-dressing, incest and heroines who, when attacked, seize a poniard and defend themselves vigorously.¹⁶ Luckily, it seems that Mrs Montagu and her friends did not read most of Fauques’ books, only the political satires, and so she was able to pass among the Bluestockings as just a well-bred, agreeable lady.

Anne-Marie Fauques struggled to educate herself to a very high level under circumstances that were immensely difficult. She overcame severe handicaps and misfortunes through sheer determination. She was always a strong believer that women deserved as good an education as men, and could achieve as much if given the opportunity. This conviction in itself makes her a feminist in the context of the time, when the Bluestockings were fighting a cultural battle to be taken seriously instead of being dismissed as female scribblers. In her novel Les Mémoires de Mademoiselle d’Oran, Fauques wrote, It remains to be seen whether an education similar to that of men would not correct many of the faults of women, and enable them to carry off all the prizes for every talent. In order to be able to judge this, it would be necessary to liberate us at the same time from the yoke of a thousand prejudices against our Sex that are held to be natural. These barriers that we have never dared to destroy have brought ridicule on those women who have undertaken to cross them, and it is believed in this century that ridicule dispenses with all justice. The heroine recounts how her father gave her the same tuition as her brothers, with the result that she understood the ideas of Pythagorus as well as the adornment of a gown. She knew how to fence and hunt, but still felt delight at the scent of a jasmine flower. Her intellectual acquirements and martial skill did not make her any less of a woman, but she became a many-sided and complex person. ¹⁷

After she died, her husband Henry Savile de Starck wrote a Memoir of her life that is a work of devout hagiography. It presents her as an immaculate, almost saintly woman of outstanding intellect, who deserved to be ranked as a great genius.  The Memoir has to be treated with great caution. It is right about her intellect though not about her virtue or her social position. The Memoir claims that in Paris in the 1750s she was hostess of a salon attended by all the most celebrated authors and nobility, a picture that is just wishful thinking. Nevertheless Starck can be relied on to tell us the facts about his wife’s date and place of birth. ¹⁸ His assertion that she spent many years of her life as an unwilling nun is confirmed by surviving documents some of which have been researched by historian Anne Jacobson Schutte. ¹⁹

In order to keep up the hagiographical image, Starck’s Memoir omits all mention of the scandal-prone friends who played such an important part in Fauques’ life, Elizabeth Craven and William Beckford. He mentions that she knew John Cleland (the author of Fanny Hill) perhaps being unaware of why Cleland was famous. If Fauques had been more conventional, she would not have always gravitated towards such unconventional, risk-taking people as her closest associates. In their company she could have safely mentioned her highly unorthodox religious views, without fear of encountering shock or disapproval.

Fauques was a very gifted poet, and some her prose works, such as Frederick the Great in the Temple of Immortality, The Last War of the Beasts, and The Transmigrations of Hermes, ought to be regarded as classics of the eighteenth century. The collection of poems she published in 1772 is highly accomplished and full of merit, as were her later poems.²⁰ Most of her fiction uses classical or Oriental settings, following the established fashion of the day. The most serious writers, including Voltaire and Johnson, wrote Oriental stories as vehicles for exploring a wide range of ideas. It was the manner of the eighteenth century to veil things in alien-seeming guise, and we need to decipher it. Without doubt there were ideas that needed to be expressed discreetly or obliquely, because of censorship. Fauques is a literary smuggler. Sometimes we need to search her to find the contraband.

Altogether, Fauques wrote an amazing miscellany of works. It is worth asking how, and why, the author of extravagant romances in the early 1750s became the author of such strident political polemic by 1758, and then went on to write poetry and allegory. Political topics were conventionally regarded as being out of the sphere of a woman, yet when Fauques turned her hand to them, she was highly successful. The Last War of the Beasts was taken for the work of a man.  A reviewer wrote, Before we conclude, we must ask pardon for having spoken of our Author in the masculine gender; for we have the pleasure to be informed, that a Lady claims the honour of this production. It is the forerunner of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in its use of naive fable for sophisticated political satire. ²¹

Nowadays few copies of her books survive, and many are misattributed or not attributed at all. The History of the Marchioness de Pompadour sells for high prices as a rare book and is attributed to Marianne-Agnès Falques.  A copy found in Germany recently sold for £265. ²² Gale Editions has re-issued the book and is selling it more affordably, attributing it to "Marianne-Agnès Pillement".²³ It is one of the few of Fauques’ books listed in the Women’s Print History Project, whose website attributes them to Falques, Marianne-Agnès with the ID number 973 and the dates 1720-1777. The editors have relied on Wikipedia as their source of information, which is never advisable.²⁴ The Oxford DNB entry on John Cleland gives the impression that he was the author of The History of Madame de Pompadour, although he was only the translator.²⁵ A recent article has classified it as a novel and refers to the author as Mlle de Falques, incorrectly described as de-frocked. ²⁶ The book is regularly confused with a later work Memoirs of the Marchioness of Pompadour, Written by Herself, which is often attributed to Marianne-Agnès Pillement Fauques (dame de) even on Worldcat.²⁷

When Fauques’ first novel, Le Triomphe de l’Amitié, was translated into English it was given the title Agenor and Ismena, and was anonymous, which has led to it being listed everywhere as a separate, anonymous, work. ²⁸ The original French text has been re-issued as a modern paperback, attributed to Marianne-Agnes Pillement Fauques. ²⁹

Three modern publishers have re-issued Dialogues in the Shades as an anonymous work, although we know from Starck's Memoirs that it is by Fauques. Nobody has ever guessed that it was written by a woman.³⁰ Her book of poetry, Nouvelles Fables, and one of her most outstanding later poems, L'Apparition, are both wrongly attributed to Pillement on ECCO and in the Bodleian catalogue. Her admirable translation of Voltaire’s Henriade has been attributed to two other people, on very flimsy evidence, never to herself. But when you come to look at it, her authorship is obvious.

In his Memoirs, Starck promises to include a list of her works and transcriptions of them, but the manuscript is incomplete. It breaks off in the middle without list or transcriptions. Some of the pages in Beckford’s papers got lost and some of Fauques’ letters there are incomplete.

The truth about Fauques lies somewhere between the hagiographical version and the dismissive judgement found in a recent book by Simon Burrows. He accepts the Pillement identification and gives a fairly inaccurate account of Fauques’ admittedly complicated and obscure life. He also takes the letter of Lady Hervey at face value, and concludes that Fauques was a hack writer who "became a libelliste to earn a dishonest crust, not from ideological motives or from frustrated ambition". I disagree with this and think Lady Hervey’s letter needs to be read in the light of the attitudes of the time. It confuses disapproval of her sexual behaviour with evaluation of her writing. Mlle Fauques may have been disreputable but there was nothing dishonest about her book. It resounds with a genuine indignation that France is so corrupt, so badly governed, so repressed, that its people are suffering and that battles are being lost because of petty grudges. ³¹

What Fauques always wanted above all was to be regarded as a serious scholar and writer, a woman of letters. Starck’s Memoirs labour the fact that those who met and corresponded with her had many proofs of her understanding of the Latin classics, and her familiarity with the works of the leading Enlightenment authors, in order to present her as what she aspired to be: an example of the intellectual equality of the sexes. She was well read in Latin, French, Italian and English literature, probably knew some Greek, understood Arabic and was knowledgeable about history and philosophy. She collaborated on the first translation of the Arabian Nights into English. She got some recognition in her own time, but not from posterity, which consigned her to ignominious obscurity and oblivion. Although she lived in England for the last forty-eight years of her life, and published many books here, written in English as well as French, she is not in the Dictionary of National Biography. A fairly recent book Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785, ignores her.³²

The familiar problem facing anyone who writes the biography of a woman, of nomenclature, is more vexatious than usual in the case of this elusive, shape-shifting author. Women change their names on marriage, sometimes multiple times. If they write books it may be desirable to call them by the name they used as authors but even that changes. Most of Anne-Marie Fauques’ books were published anonymously, or with such hints as by the author of Abbassaï. Early documents spell the family name Fauque or Fauques or even Fauk and are inconsistent about whether it is preceded by a de. Autograph letters show that she spelled it Fauques. She married very late in life, at the age of sixty, so to call her by her married name would be inappropriate for all but the very last section of a biography. Fauques used half a dozen other, different names from time to time.  The one she used most was Madame de Vaucluse and the fact that she chose it gives it some authenticity. After all, even Voltaire used an assumed name. But Vaucluse is also a place, so I think it best on the whole to stick to Fauques, defining her at last as a single, consistent entity and allowing her to emerge from the cloud of confusion and invisibility that has heretofore surrounded her.

Chapter One

Avignon.

Avignon in 1720 was a small enclave of the Papal states, governed by its Archbishop under the authority of the Vatican. The woman who would later call herself Madame Fauques de Vaucluse described it as a city renowned from the time of Julius Cæsar for the honesty and sprightliness of its inhabitants... breathing a pure and wholesome air, living under a mild government, and with a people hospitable, polite, and learned. ³³ It was not particularly wholesome around the time of her birth on 26th August 1720, as an epidemic of Bubonic plague was ravaging Provence and the surrounding area. Marseille was where it started and was the worst hit, while Avignon was to some extent sheltered because of its position some miles inland up the Rhône. The plague took a little longer to get there and wipe out half of the inhabitants. By June 1722 it was starting to subside and people were still speculating about its causes.³⁴

As a native of Avignon, Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse was French but not a subject of the French monarch. To the end of her life, she described France as my nation and cared passionately about its destiny. ³⁵ The language of the town was French – Provençale and Occitan having died out centuries earlier – and she grew up immersed in French culture and history. Yet she was also a countrywoman of the poet Petrarch, who had lived there in the fourteenth century and