The Royalist (Spy vs. Spy)

In the late eighteenth century, Grace Elliott became a royal courtesan, famously sharing a bed with the Prince of Wales, later to reign as King George IV. She later got together with the Duke of Orléans in Paris. When the French Revolution broke out, Elliott sided with the royalists and risked her life to sneak aristocrats out of the country.

Above: 1778 portrait of Grace Elliott by Thomas Gainsborough.

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TRANSCRIPT

It was July 12, 1789, and Grace Dalrymple Elliott was enjoying a low-key Sunday morning. A few years earlier, she had gained entrance to the highest echelons of Parisian society as a royal courtesan. Elliott was spending this day in the company of a former lover, the Duke of Orléans, a nobleman who seldom shared a bed with her nowadays but who nevertheless reserved a special place in his heart for her. Accompanied by Prince Louis d’Aremberg and a few other members of the extended royal family, Elliott and Orléans had taken a daytrip to the duke’s handsome chateau outside Paris. That afternoon, Elliott sunned herself while the men went fishing before the whole party sat down to a banquet in the duke’s dining room, the exquisite dishes, silverware, and wineglasses set and removed without a word by the waitstaff.

The day had been delightful, and the evening promised to be even more pleasures. As the sun set, Elliott and her friends boarded their carriages and rode back to Paris, looking forward to an evening performance at the Comédie-Itallienne, one of their favorite theaters. But when they pulled up to the Porte St. Martin, a towering triumphal arch built under the reign of King Louis XIV, they learned that all playhouses and clubs in the city had been closed by police order. “We had left Paris at eleven o’clock in perfect tranquillity,” Elliott recalled years later, “but on our return at eight o’clock . . . Paris was all in confusion and tumult.” Fo reasons that Elliott did not yet understand, protestors had spread across the city, and violence had erupted, leaving the streets strewn with dying men and horses. With their plans aborted, Elliott and company made their way to Monceau, the site of one of Orléans’s residences. Along the way, they passed Place Louis XV, where demonstrators and soldiers had fought to the death, and found the square teeming with troops, on foot and horseback. “I never in my life shall forget the awful but beautiful appearance the Place Louis Quinze presented at that moment,” Elliott wrote. “The troops were under arms, and the silence was so great that if a pin had fallen it might have been heard.” Two days later, the Bastille fell, and the life of carefree luxury that Elliott had lived previously would come to an abrupt end.

A lot of what we know about Grace Dalrymple Elliott stems from her memoir, Journal of My Life During the French Revolution, posthumously published in 1859. Since then, the Journal has been recognized as one of the most vivid eye-witness accounts of this turbulent historical period, particularly the Reign of Terror. Yet Elliott was far from a passive observer of the violence and hypervigilance that consumed France at this time. A full-throated royalist who disdained the revolutionary cause from the beginning, Elliott risked her life to help imperiled aristocrats flee the country. These clandestine activities fueled speculation that Elliott had acted as a spy, collecting sensitive information and transmitting it to enemies of the revolution. Today, we’ll hear how a portrait of Elliott launched her to notoriety as a royal courtesan, how she drifted from the embrace of an English heir to the throne to the arms of the Duke of Orléans, and how she put her life on the line to save an aristocrat she barely knew. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to another episode of Spy vs. Spy . . .

The Royalist

Born for Scandal

Probably born in Edinburgh, circa 1754, Grace Dalrymple was touched by scandal from an early age. Her parents separated around the time of her birth, after her father wound up on the wrong side of the law and got himself embroiled in a highly publicized criminal trial. After living in a French convent for several years, Elliott returned to Scotland and made her debut in polite society. Her fey beauty won the attentions of a moneyed physician by the name of John Elliott, eighteen years Grace’s senior. He proposed marriage, and the two took their vows on October 19, 1771. By 1774, they had fallen out of love. By then, Grace had found a more palatable bedfellow in the young and handsome Lord Valentia. John suspected his wife of infidelity and had her tailed by private eyes. One night, she led them straight to a bordello, where she and Valentia met for a tryst. John sued Valentia for adultery, referred to at the time as criminal conversation or “Crim. Con.” for shot. The physician won.

The sensational trial made it impossible for Grace to fit in with fashionable women, sure, but that didn’t make her any less desirable to upper-class men. Elliott and her husband separated, and within a year, she made the acquaintance of British peer and politician Lord Cholmondeley. The two are said to have first bumped into each other at a masquerade ball at the Pantheon in Paris. Cholmondeley whisked her back to his home in London, where they began a three-year sexual liaison. Elliott probably hoped to marry Cholmondeley, but a proposal never came, doubtless because his high-born family would have disapproved of his marrying a fallen woman like Elliott.

Sometime around 1776, Cholmondeley commissioned acclaimed portraitist Thomas Gainsborough to immortalize his paramour’s likeness on canvas. Held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and viewable on the Art of Crime website, Gainsborough’s painting, a full-length portrait, represents Elliott in all her beauty. The courtesan stands in three-quarters profile, radiating self-confidence. Dressed to impress, Elliott wears a gown of golden silk, with pearl bracelets on either wrist, a pair of elegant earrings, and a ribbon around her neck. Very much in keeping with contemporary fashion, Elliott has powdered her hair, usually honey-colored but chalky-white in the painting. In addition, she has artificially darkened her eyebrows, probably with burnt cork or cloves, makeup that accentuate the whiteness of her skin. Gainsborough exhibited the portrait at the Royal Academy after completing it, to favorable reviews. The General Evening Post praised his handiwork as a “striking and beautiful likeness” of Elliott, following up this praise with a couplet from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: “If to her share some female errors fall / Look on her face, and you’ll forget them all.”

It was thanks to this portrait that Elliott became not just an aristocratic but a royal courtesan. By late 1777 or so, Elliott and Cholmondeley were no longer sexually intimate but still remained close. At around this time, the Prince of Wales, later to reign as King George IV, paid a visit to Cholmondeley’s sumptuous Picadilly home, where the heir apparent spied Elliott’s portrait on the wall. Moonstruck, the prince asked Cholmondeley to introduce him to her. Cholmondeley obliged (what else was he supposed to do?), and before long, Elliott and the prince were frolicking in his bedchamber. In becoming the recognized mistress of the heir to the throne, Elliott had usurped the place of Mary Robinson, a beloved stage actress nicknamed Perdita for her signature role in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.

Gossip columnists went wild over not only the illicit love affair between Elliott and the prince but also the attendant rivalry between the courtesan and Perdita. Public interest only increased when Elliott fell pregnant, whereupon she named the prince as the father. He initially identified himself as the father only to take it back once Elliott had given birth. Inspecting the child, a baby girl, the Prince of Wales balked at its swarthy skin tones: “To convince me that this is my girl they must first prove that black is white.” Many who shared the prince’s doubts suspected that Cholmondeley had fathered the baby. Cholmondeley added credibility to that theory by raising Elliott’s daughter until her premature death in 1813, after which the nobleman cared for her daughter, his potential granddaughter. The question of parentage was never resolved, but this eighteenth-century Jerry Springer saga turned Grace Elliott into a household name.

On The Eve of Revolution

By the mid-1780s, Elliott had left England for France. The, the Prince of Wales introduced her to his cousin, the Duke of Orléans, himself a cousin of Louis XVI. Orléans owned the gargantuan Palais Royal, which doubled as the duke’s private residence as well as a shopping and entertainment complex. Shortly after meeting the duke, Elliott became one of his recognized mistresses, continuing her streak as a royal courtesan. She savored her life with the duke, dining on the finest cuisine, watching plays from royal boxes, and buying from Paris’s most celebrated jewelers, milliners, and clothiers. Like many women of the day, Elliott favored masculine attire, particularly riding habits, an outfit she might have worn while out hunting with Orléans or even while entertaining company at home. The Duke set his latest squeeze up with her own house in the Rue de Valois, adjacent to the Palais Royal.

Elliott luxuriated like this until the spirit of revolution took hold of France in 1789. (Today, I’m not going to say much about the underlying causes of the French Revolution, largely because we covered quite a bit of that in season 3 of this podcast, Queen of Crime: Madame Tussaud and the Chamber of Horrors. If you want to know more, go have a listen.) Elliott eyed the revolution with a mixture of horror and disgust. In her Journal, she extols the glory and benevolence of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and other members of the royal family. Don’t expect her to argue for the merits of popular sovereignty or to shed a tear for the countless commoners who froze or starved to death in the late 1780s. Elliott saw the Revolution as wanton bloodshed wreaked by a mob of faceless monsters.

When you stop and think about it, though, Elliott’s royalist leanings come as no surprise. Let’s not forget that she personally knew and liked royals and aristocrats. What’s more, as Joanne Major and Sarah Murden note in their biography of Elliott, An Infamous Mistress, “Grace had an inherent interest in the survival of the monarchy and aristocracy, both in France and in Britain.” Her livelihood depended on the financial support of her blue-blooded lovers. The frenzied brutality of the revolution, which Elliott witnessed at close proximity, only reinforced her convictions.

Her politics stood in striking contrast to those of Orléans. This down-to-earth duke styled himself as a man of the people, a claim he could back up partly by inviting the public to shop and enjoy themselves at the Palais Royal. After the Bastille fell, he threw his support behind the revolution, in direct opposition to many of his fellow noblemen. He even voted in favor of executing his cousin, Louis XVI, to the horror of Elliott and her friends. Like so many revolutionaries, however, the duke would lose his head to the guillotine in 1793, right at the height of the Reign of Terror. In her Journal, Elliott claims to have warned her lover that he would suffer precisely that fate if he stuck around in the revolutionary camp.

One scene in the Journal reveals Elliott’s obliviousness to the plight of the common man. It also exemplifies her too-close-for-comfort experience of mob violence. On July 13, 1789, the day before the storming of the Bastille, rioters were running amok across Paris, furious at the monarchy for its wild excesses and apparent indifference to their misery. Despite all this, Elliott decides that it was the right day for a trip to her jeweler. Why shouldn’t she buy herself some new bling? Grabbing a parasol to shield herself from the summer sun, she hopped in a carriage and rode down the Rue St. Honoré, where she came face to face with a platoon of soldiers brandishing the severed head of a hated official. All of a sudden, the memoirist writes, “They thrust the head into my carriage: at the horrid sight I screamed and fainted away, and had I not had an English lady with me, who had courage enough to harangue the mob, and to say that I was an English patriot, they certainly would have murdered me; for they began to accuse me of being one of [the dead man’s] friends, and of wishing the people to live on hay, of which they had accused him.” Elliott went home, sadly unable to add a new diamond or sapphire to her collection.

The Tenth of August

Despite the volatile atmosphere in Paris, Elliott stayed there for three full years. But that all changed on August 10, 1792. For reasons that are too complex to get into, the threat of an imminent foreign invasion sent a wave of hysteria crashing over Paris, touching off an armed insurrection. On the morning of the tenth, a ragtag militia of volunteer soldiers and activists marched along the banks of the Seine toward the Tuileries, then the residence of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children. The rebels intended to take the royal family by force.

The Tuileries’s defenses consisted of 800 Swiss Guards, 200 royalist volunteers, and 1,250 National Guardsmen. When the king and queen caught wind of the incoming rabble, they evacuated, seeking sanctuary at a government facility nearby. Back at the Tuileries, the attackers streamed into the courtyard and came to a halt before a contingent of Swiss Guardsmen. The rioters ordered the Swiss fighters to take up arms against the monarchy, but the soldiers refused. “Then you all want to die?” an invader demanded. “Yes,” came the reply. “We shall all die rather than abandon our posts without an order from the king.” The Swiss opened fire, and the royal palace transformed into a slaughterhouse.

The rioters vastly outnumbered the Swiss Guardsmen and easily overwhelmed them. By three o’clock in the afternoon, they had taken control of the Tuileries, the bodies of more than 800 Swiss Guardsmen and royalist volunteers littering its halls and stairways. Lusting for blood, the insurrectionists castrated their corpses and exalted outdoors, waving their gory trophies overhead.

Elliott lived just a few minutes away and feared the worst when she heard the blast of cannons. Her first instinct was to leave Paris at once, and she knew where to go. About six months earlier, she had purchased a property in Meudon, a hilly village to the south of the capital. But how was she to get there? The city gates were closed and the walls impenetrable—or at least almost impenetrable. One of Elliott’s maids reminded her that Elliott’s porter owned a house behind the Invalides, a military hospital. This porter had more than once remarked that smugglers had made a breech in the wall near his residence, making it possible to climb up and over the perimeter.

At nine o’clock that night, several hours after the slaughter of the Swiss Guardsmen, Elliot went with her maid to her porter’s house, electing not to notify the rest of her staff. When the courtesan arrived and revealed her intentions to the porter, he hesitated to help, afraid of getting caught. Elliott convinced him to lend her a hand under the condition that she alone would make the journey—her maid would return home. It would be easier to sneak just one of them over the wall.

In the dead of night, Elliott scaled the wall and touched down safely on the other side. She had a long journey ahead of her, and it would be painful. In her harried state, she had not thought to bring suitable footwear for the trek—she had on a pair of white silk shoes without any soles. Gritting her teeth, she followed a stony road through the plains of Vaugirard, fearing with every step that she would encounter a patrolmen or, worse still, robbers.

It was with immense relief that she finally reached the foot of the hill leading up to the Chateau de Meudon, the property she had purchased. Then, without warning, she spotted a man—little more than a shadow gliding in her direction. Foot-sore, fatigued, and overwrought with fear, she collapsed, unconscious, in a tangle of vines. When she came to a few moments later, she poked her head out of the underbrush and scanned her surroundings—nobody was there. With hindsight, she could almost laugh at the scare: “Perhaps it was some poor wretch making his escape, who was as much alarmed as I was.” She rose to her feet, brushed herself off, and trudged the rest of the way up the hill. A short time later, she staggered over the threshold of Chateau de Meudon, her feet wet with blood, and into her bed. We’ll hear about her secret mission to help an aristocrat escape from Paris after a quick break.

A Secret Mission

Elliott stayed at the Chateau de Meudon until September 2, 1792. That day, a messenger boy who looked like a beggar arrived on her doorstep. He had come from Paris with an urgent communication from Elliott’s dear friend, Mrs. Meyler. In the note, Meyeler explained that Elliott was in a position to save a man’s life, but to do so she would have to come back to Paris and meet Meyler at her home. To that end, Elliott would need to procure a passport for herself and a servant. Elliott cared deeply about Meyler and resolved to do what she could to help the unnamed man in distress. The courtesan flew to the mayor of Meudon, who issued two passports—one for her and another for a servant—both of which were valid until midnight. Elliott jumped in a cabriolet and hastened to Paris, stopping in the shadow of the Barrier Vaugirard, where a team of watchmen inspected her passport.

Her papers checked out, the guards concluded, but they could not fathom why she—or anyone, for that matter—would want to enter Paris right now. Hadn’t she heard? Once again, mass hysteria had surged through the capital, with renewed fears of an imminent invasion. A belief had taken root that prison inmates across the city were going to join forces with the invading armies, bent on bringing Paris to its knees. To forestall such an uprising, hired assassins were butchering prisoners indiscriminately all throughout the city. The bloodletting would rage for the next five days, in what became known as the September Massacres. Some 1,500 prisoners would lose their lives, most of whom had no connection to the military and none of whom were conspiring to overthrow Paris.

Elliott was aghast, but she would follow through on her decision to help a friend in need. To avoid suspicion, the courtesan thought up a lie to explain why she wasn’t turning around and running the other direction. Her mother was ill—terminally so—and had begged to see her one last time.

The watchmen gave her their condolences, instructing her to have her passport signed at the stationhouse before going further. With the paperwork signed, Elliott drove to Meyler’s home, situated behind the Ancienne Opéra.

When Meyler opened up, she wasted little time in revealing the identity of the man who needed Elliott’s help. Inside, Elliott was greeted by a soldier in the uniform of a major-general. She immediately recognized him as the Marquis de Chansenets, an English-born aristocrat who had acted as governor of the Tuileries palace. She had seen him a few times at the Duke of Oléans’s residence before the Revolution, but the two had never exchanged more than a few words. Still, she had spent enough time in his presence to know that he was unwell. He looked haunted and visibly frail, barely able to carry his own weight. Elliott listened with mounting horror as Chansenets recounted the chain of events that had brought him to Meyler’s home.

Surviving the Slaughter

It all started on the tenth of August, the day of the insurrection and the invasion of the Tuileries. As governor of the palace, Chansenets had passed the night of August 9 with the king and his family. When the siege broke out the following afternoon, the marquis stayed by the monarch’s side until it seemed certain that Louis would be murdered unless he ran away. As the royal family bid farewell to the marquis, Marie Antoinette took him by the hand and expressed regret at leaving him behind: “I fear we are doing wrong, but you know I cannot persuade [the king to stay]. God only knows if we shall ever meet again!” Soon, the halls were running red with the blood and gore of the Tuileries’s guardsmen. Chansenets could either fight and die or flee and maybe—just maybe—survive. He chose to flee. Propelled by adrenaline, he took a running start and leapt from one of the upper-story windows into the garden. He landed, hard, in a heap of dead bodies, the mangled corpses of his comrades, discarded like scraps of spoiled meat. It would be suicide to make a run for it now, Chanesnets realized. The insurrectionists would see him, catch him, and probably kill him. And so he lay there, unmoving, his uniform stained with the blood and sweat of the dead. As the hours passed, the August sun beat down upon the dead bodies. The reek of putrefaction enveloped him.

After sundown, a National Guardsmen was combing through the bodies when one of them flinched at his touch. The soldier recognized the living man amid the cadavers as the Marquis de Chansenets. Never raising his voice above a whisper, the guardsman offered help, glancing over his shoulder to make sure they were alone. He stripped off his overcoat and handed it to Chansenets, who pulled it on. A minute later, the marquis was walking down the street, making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

Chansenets was thirsty, famished, and stricken with what Elliott calls a “nervous fever.” The marquis knocked at the door of a stranger, and a shop-woman opened. The Englishman begged for a crust of bread or a glass of brandy in broken French. Taking pity on him, the woman ushered him inside and into a backroom. She agreed to fetch him a piece of bread, but he must take it and leave at once. Her husband, she explained, was a card-carrying Jacobin, a radical revolutionary, who had helped cut down the Swiss Guardsmen at the Tuileries. He was due home any minute, and he would not scruple killing the aristocrat where he stood. She was just turning to grab a loaf of bread when the front door opened—her husband was home. Thinking fast, the shop-woman pushed the marquis behind a wine press in a corner of the room. Then, planting herself in the doorway, blocking her husband’s path. A friend of his had stopped by and asked to speak with him right away, the shop-woman told him. The Jacobin went to look for his friend, and as soon as he had gone, the woman snatched a piece of bread, thrust it into Chansenets’s hands, and shoved him out the door without another word.

Devouring the bread, the marquis went as quickly as he could to the residence of a man who he was certain could help: Lord Grover, the English ambassador. Alarming news awaited him at the diplomat’s house. A horseman had ridden through the boulevards and made a proclamation: anyone caught aiding or abetting those who had defended the king at the Tuileries would be put to death. Lord Grover did not want to risk his neck, and the ambassador asked Chansenets to leave.

Initially at a loss, Chansenets remembered an acquaintance of his named Mrs. Meyler, an Englishwoman who lived alone apart from a maidservant. Both were royalists—maybe they would help. Sticking to bystreets, Chansenets strode as quickly as he could without arousing suspicion. Reaching the porter at Meyler’s building, the aristocrat introduced himself with a false name, “Monsieur Smith, for Madame Meyler.” He climbed four flights of stairs to her rooms and rapped on the door with his knuckles. Meyler was taken aback when she saw him—she thought he had been hacked to pieces along with the Swiss Guardsmen. Chansenets could stay with her for the time being, Meyler offered, but the porter had seen and spoken to him when he arrived. They could not have him knowing that an unfamiliar gentleman was staying in the building for an extended period of time. The group formulated a ruse. Meyler accompanied Chansenets down the stairs and out the front door, making sure the porter saw them as he they left. Then, Meyler hung back and struck up a conversation with the doorman, asking what he made of the violence at the Tuileries. With the porter preoccupied, under the pretext of letting a little dog into the building, Meyler’s maidservant sneaked to a side entrance and unlatched the lock, enabling Chansenets to slip back in. He hid in Meyler’s attic for the next three weeks. He was alive but traumatized, and his “nervous fever” worsened.

Around the first of September, the state unveiled a terrifying new form of surveillance and control. Starting after sunset and continuing into the night, armed soldiers were to search homes and businesses in every neighborhood. The purpose of these searches, referred to as domiciliary visits, was to ferret out concealed weapons and persons. During the domiciliary visits, the city went into lockdown. Scores of pikemen patrolled the streets, stood sentinel at the gates leading in and out of town, and manned a small fleet of boats along the Seine. A pall of fear and paranoia fell upon the city:

“Let the reader fancy to himself,” the editor of Elliott’s Journal writes, “a vast metropolis, the streets of which were a few days before alive with the concourse of carriages, and with citizens constantly passing and repassing, suddenly struck with the dead silence of the grave, before sunset, on a fine summer evening. [… .] Everyone supposes himself to be informed against. Everywhere persons and property are put into concealment. Everywhere are heard the interrupted sounds of the muffled hammer, with cautious knock, completing the hiding-place. Roofs, garrets, sinks, chimneys—all are just the same to fear, incapable of calculating any risk.

One man squeezed up behind the [baseboard], which had been nailed back on him, seems to form a part of the wall; another is suffocated with fear and heat between two mattresses; a third, rolled up in a cask, loses all sense of existence by the tension of his sinews.”

The domiciliary visits would take place that night, the second of September. It was untenable for Meyler to harbor Chansenets any longer. Word had gotten out that he had survived the slaughter of the Swiss Guardsmen, and the authorities were looking for him. He would be found, imprisoned, and killed, and she would be a fool to hope for mercy. Meyler was aware of Elliott’s flight to Meudon, and she believed that Chansenets could only be safe outside the city. Praying that Elliott would agree to take him in, Meyler dispatched the messenger boy to the courtesan’s home, summoning her to the capital.

Hiding Monsieur de Chansenets

Elliott agreed to harbor Chansenets. Timing was everything. It was now just after seven o’clock, and the domiciliary visits would commence at ten, which meant the two of them had to be out of Paris by then if they wished to avoid capture. Yet she and Chansenets could not set out now—it was still light out, and somebody might recognize the wanted aristocrat. If they left Meyler’s building just after sundown, Elliott reckoned, they could clear the city gates before the domiciliary visits started.

As soon as the sun had sunk below the horizon, Elliott and Chansenets boarded a cabriolet and rode to the Barrier de Vaugirard, the point where Elliott had entered Paris a few hours earlier. Coming to a stop before the guards, Elliott presented the passports she had obtained in Meudon. The guards gestured for her to put them away. The authorities had closed all gates in and out of the city, and they would not reopen until tomorrow at the earliest. Staying calm, Elliott protested that she was a foreigner and had no place to stay. Surely, they would not force a woman to spend the night on the streets. The guard shook his head—actually, they would. Elliott recalled, “The sad situation of Chansenets and myself at this moment may easily be believed.

He was almost dead with alarm, and my knees were knocking together; and what added to my distress was the heat of the night.” Elliott’s mind raced: where could she go with Chansenets? She couldn’t very well bring him back to Meyler’s, and she didn’t dare take him to her own home. She employed a Jacobin cook, a radical republican, who would quite possibly betray Elliott and the marquis to the authorities. Their best option, she concluded, was to scale the walls and cross the plains of Vaugirard the way she had on the tenth of August. It was almost ten, but they could still make it if they hurried.

A short while later, Elliott and Chansenets stepped out of the carriage near the Invalides, a short walk from the breech. But before they had taken more than a few paces, Chansenets reeled from exhuastion, nearly falling to the ground. Elliott guided the maquis to a tree nearby, and the two rested for a spell. Once the marquis had regained his bearings, they resumed their journey and headed toward the entrance of the alley that would take them to the breech. The two rounded the corner and stopped in their tracks. At the other end of the street stood a squadron of patrolmen, two or three dozen of them, armed with pikes. A wave of helplessness crashed over Elliott as it came home to her: The visits had begun.

Tears began to stream down her cheeks. Moved by her distress, Chansenets implored her to go home at once and save herself. He would sooner turn himself in and suffer the consequences than endanger her further. “This idea was terrible to me,” the memoirist remembered. “Had the scaffold been there before me, I could not have abandoned him, or anybody else in a similar situation.” Wiping her eyes, Elliott took a deep breath, linked arms with the marquis, and rotated 180 degrees so that now they had their backs to the patrolmen. This turn of events had dashed Elliott’s plans to escape via the breech, so they walked back toward the heart of the city, dodging two patrols along the way.

About a quarter hour later, they found themselves at the Champs Élyses. Here, the marquis asked if they could possibly seek refuge at the Duke of Orléans’s residence, a few minutes away.

Elliott had seen little of the duke since the outbreak of the Revolution, but she happened to know that a petty dispute between Orléans and Chansene had led to a bitter falling-out between them. For all she knew, Orléans might notify the authorities if she showed up with Chansenets in tow. Still, she couldn’t think of a better plan.

As it happened, the most direct route to Orléans’s residence took them right by Elliott’s home. When she and the marquis reached the end of the street where she lived, they spied a knot of Elliott’s servants sitting out front, her Jacobin cook included. They would never make it past them unnoticed. Frustrated by yet another misfire, Elliott nevertheless kept her wits about her and persuaded her companion to duck into a building under construction. Then, she sidled up to the front gate of her home, taking her servants by surprise. They had not seen her since the tenth of August. Elliott improvised a flimsy reason for being in town, and they all went inside.

Now that she was here, Elliott saw no other choice but to hide Chansenets in her own home. But she could never do so with her Jacobin cook in the house. Elliott took the chef aside and told her she was famished, having eaten nothing all day. The royalist wanted nothing more than a plate of roast fowl with a side dish of salad. The cook shook her head—there was no way she could leave the house to buy the ingredients now—patrolmen would arrest her. But Elliott held firm, threatening to fire her the very next day unless she did as she was told. The cook was getting ready to leave when a knock came at the door. Elliott went pale as the porter opened up to reveal Monsieur de Chansenets on the other side. Elliott pretended not to know him, chiding him for intruding at this late hour. The marquis played along, explaining that he lived in the area. He was going home when an intimidating squadron of patrolmen had emerged out of nowhere, and he had thought it best to get inside. He just so happened to be in front of Elliott’s residence. Her cook interrupted, having recognized the “nasty aristocrat” as the Marquis de Chansenets. The guillotine had been waiting for him all day long, the Jacobin spat. In fact, a reward had been offered for his arrest. What was he thinking, barging into their house like this? The whole lot of them could be mistaken for conspirators and executed.

The cook went outside, leaving Elliott and Chansenets alone with the porter and his wife. The porter, an ally of Elliott’s, suggested that they hide the marquis in the house. They could squeeze him between two of Elliott’s mattresses. Without a second to spare, they raced to Elliott’s bedchamber and separated two mattresses, allowing Chansenets to slip in between. Then, they tucked the mattresses back into their proper place, an alcove where the bed stood. Elliott changed into her nightgown and lay down in bed, arranging the covers so no one could see the man-sized bulge beneath the bedsheets.

She had her bedcurtains festooned and the candles in her chandelier and candelabras lit, more than enough firelight to illuminate the room. Elliott sat with her back against her headboard, waiting. Any minute now, the patrolmen would come. We’ll hear how Elliott fared during the domiciliary visit after a quick break.

The Visit

At a quarter to four in the morning, the door to Grace Eliott’s room flew open, and the cook rushed in; soldiers had gathered in the courtyard and were about to search the property, she announced. Elliott had known this moment would come, but she had not expected what the cook revealed next. The patrolmen had been alerted that Chansenets had entered the house without leaving. Elliott decided she would stay in bed, the better to conceal the marquis’s hiding place. As the visit got underway, the pikemen ransacked the servants’ sleeping quarters. Feathers flew in every direction as blades sliced into bedding where they thought the marquis might be hiding. Her heart pounding inside her chest, Elliott steeled herself: “Although my own life was of little value, still I had no reason to suppose that that the unfortunate man near me [that is, Chansenets] did not value his. I therefore thought that I had no right to commit any act of desperation, as the life of a fellow-creature depended on my conduct.”

Finally, it was time for the interlopers to pick over Elliott’s bedchamber. By the courtesan’s estimate, more than forty armed soldiers streamed into the room, barking threats and curses as they entered. A dozen or more surrounded the bed and demanded that Elliott rise at once. Before the mistress of the manor could protest, a chivalrous patrolmen raised an objection. It would be unseemly to compel a lady to rise and dress before so many men. By the grace of this lone dissenting voice, Elliott and Chansenets were still safe—for now, at least. But Elliott feared they would still insist on searching the bed with her in it. To head that off, Elliott made a hazardous gamble. Playing the solicitous hostess, she offered to get up and dress if they wished. She’d even be willing to conduct them around the property, one room at a time. The night’s exertions must have tired them, she went on. How about some wine or a spot of brandy? Maybe her cook could whip up some pie.

Disarmed by Elliott’s hospitality, the soldiers relaxed and apologized for disturbing her in the middle of the night. She need not trouble herself getting out of bed, one of them assured her, but protocol dictated that they search the mattresses. Elliott held her breath, as a soldier stepped forward and ran his hands along the sheets. Luckily, he treated the search as a formality, feeling around for only a moment before declaring all clear. Elliott exhaled, forcing a smile. Over the next hour, the soldiers scoured her bedchamber, drawing room, and bathing room, picking up sofa cushions and tossing them to the floor.

At one point, a patrolman sat down on her bed, less than a yard from Chansenets, only to stand up again a minute or two later. Finally, they satisfied themselves that the marquis was not on the premises—they must have heard wrong about his presence in the house. A guardsman thanked Elliott for her understanding, and one by one, the patrolmen filed out of the room.

Elliott stayed put until she heard the front gate shut behind the last soldier. Then, in one explosive convulsion, the royalist erupted into what she describes as “violent hysterics,” and servants ran in to comfort her. Collecting herself, Elliott turned down the mattress with the help of a maid who was in on the secret. They discovered Chansenets, half-asphyxiated and drenched in his own sweat. The two women helped him to his feet and then onto the floor, opening the windows for ventilation. Elliott’s maid poured a glass of brandy, which Chansenets emptied. As he drank, he praised Elliott’s bravery. Too tired to keep talking, Elliott shut Chansenets in her bodoir and locked the door. Then, she tumbled into bed and let sleep take her.

Salvation

Elliott awoke at two o’clock in the afternoon. Along with her maidservant, she looked in on the marquis. Placing the back of her hand against his forehead, the servant determined that he was running a high fever. He was nearly delirious, still so weak he struggled to stand. Elliott’s thoughts turned in morbid directions. After all they had been through, was he going to die? What would they do with the body? She was pondering these issues when she received another jolt. A servant informed her that the Duke of Orléans had arrived unannounced and wished to speak with her. What would Elliott tell him? He hated Chansenets ever since that stupid dispute of theirs. Shutting the marquis in the boudoir, Elliot met Orléans in her drawing room and learned that he had been heading to his nearby home at Monceau when he saw her gates open and poked his head in. Elliott looked ill, Orléans observed, insisting that she consult his personal physician. She brushed it off, and the conversation turned to politics, with Elliott imploring the nobleman to distance himself from the more violent elements of the revolutionary movement. For now, she decided, she would make no mention of the fugitive in her boudoir, but she was beginning to think that with his connections, Orléans might be the only person who could get Chansenets out of Paris. Orléans offered to check back in with her the next day, and Elliott accepted. In the meantime, she would talk things over with the marquis.

As planned, Orléans stopped by the next morning for breakfast, dismayed by the ongoing prison massacres. Midway through the meal, in as steady a tone as possible, Elliott revealed that Chansenets was hiding in her home. Thunderstruck, the duke reproached Elliott:

“I had exposed my life for a very bad purpose, for that Chansenets was a good-for-nothing creature; that many better people had been taken up and executed; that he wished I had saved anybody else; and that it would be cruel if I was to lose my life for such a poor miserable being.” When the duke was finished badmouthing Chansenets, Elliott redirected attention to the problem at hand. Could Orléans secure the marquis a passport or maybe hide him at Monceau? The latter was out of the question, Orléans asserted. His entire staff consisted of Jacobin spies. He would see what he could do to arrange safe passage out of France, but he could make no promises.

The next day, the Duke of Orléans called and came upon Elliott in the company of the beleaguered soldier. Startled by his unexpected presence, the duke gave a respectful bow. Taking this as a show of good will, Chansenets attempted to thank the nobleman and assure him that their past quarrels were behind them. But before he could speak more than a sentence or two, the duke cut him off: “Monsieur de Chansenets, no explanations. We will neither talk of the past nor on any other subject; but the situation of this good person who is trying to save your life at the expense of her own. She is ill, and I fear both you and she ate in a scrape. I would be of use to you on her account if I could, but I fear that it is impossible.

You and I must forget that we ever met before, as we never can again be in the same room; and I never wish to hear your name pronounced in my presence.” Orléans left both Elliott and Chansenets, crestfallen.

Not knowing what else to do, Elliott continued to shelter Chansenets, unbeknownst to much of her household staff, until the city gates reopened. Then, she and Chansenets took a carriage to Meudon, where he laid low for several weeks. One day, contrary to all expectations, a valet of Orléans’s, a stalwart royalist, arrived on Elliott’s doorstep with a letter from his master. In it, the duke explained that Chansenets could escape to freedom by way of a mail cart that stopped at St. Denis in Paris.

For the hefty price of fifty louis, the driver would smuggle Chansenets to Boulogne, and from there the marquis could proceed to his native England. Informed of the proposal, Chansenets feared that the duke might betray him, but Elliott prevailed on him to take the risk. Early one freezing January morning, the courtesan and her beneficiary boarded a cabriolet and rode to St. Denis, accompanied by a royalist neighbor of Elliott’s. The mail cart pulled up at four o’clock. Elliott paid the driver his fifty louis and bid farewell to Chansenets, who climbed aboard “in a deplorable condition and much disguised.” Later, Elliott learned that she had not risked her neck in vain; Chansenets escaped to England, where he made a full recovery. By the end of the month, Louis XVI was dead.

Spy

Over the next few months, rumors got around about Elliott’s covert activities. Members of the Jacobin club, where die-hard supporters of the revolution gathered to talk politics, accused her of various counterrevolutionary coups. In addition to the Marquis de Chansenets, the Jacobins believed, she had sheltered other fugitives and helped them emigrate. She belonged to a cabal of conspirators planning to break Marie Antoinette out of captivity to save her from her husband’s fate. (This claim is questionable, but Elliott does write about personally delivering sensitive materials to Belgian officials in the early days of the Revolution.) It was also suspected that Elliott was facilitating secret correspondence between her former lover, the Duke of Orléans, and powerful contacts in England. There were even whispers that Orléans wanted to crown himself king, filling the shoes of Louis XVI.

Amid the rabid paranoia of the Reign of Terror, it was only a matter of time before these rumors and insinuations led to Elliott’s arrest. It was nearly midnight one evening in 1793, when a servant burst into Elliott’s room. “Madame! Une visite des gardes!” she cried. The timing could not have been worse. Another aristocrat, a countess, had come to Elliott seeking help escaping the country, and quite by chance, the countess was meeting with Elliott in her study when the patrolmen materialized. The countess leapt into a closet—Elliott had removed the shelves precisely so somebody could hide inside. It was also concealed behind a sheet of paper, and whoever was hiding could fasten the door from inside. Elliott closed the door on her friend and turned to meet two or three dozen guardsmen as they filed into her rooms, demanding to examine her papers. Within minutes, the soldiers came across a suspicious envelope among her letters—an envelope addressed to the English Member of Parliament, Charles Fox. Elliott had been instructed to deliver this message on behalf of an acquaintance named Godfrey Wright. The envelope was sealed, and Elliott had no knowledge whatsoever of its contents. One guard asserted that this letter proved beyond question that Elliott was forwarding secret communications to the English. Elliott protested that the letter was more than likely innocuous, not least because the intended recipient, Charles Fox, supported the revolution. It was no use—they placed her under arrest. (The terrified countess emerged from her hiding place sometime later and made it to safety.)

It was two in the morning when Elliott’s captors escorted her into the guard room, where she would spend the night. The area was full of soldiers—some asleep, others drinking, smoking, or making small talk. She noted with dread that she was the only woman in the room. The patrolmen sat her on a bench and offered her wine, remarking that she might as well treat herself since she was headed for the guillotine. She spent the night sitting upright, her back against the bare wall, slightly nauseous from the stench of tobacco mixed with wine. At eight o’clock the next morning, the soldiers came to collect her and transferred her to the Marie, another facility where prisoners were being interrogated. The building was overrun with prisoners—Elliott counted something like 200—many of high rank. She spent the next thirty hours there, standing the entire time except for occasional five-minute breaks when an older inmate, a countess, lent her a chair. Finally, Elliott was marched to a fresh hell in Paris; she was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which had the power to sentence her to death if she was judged to have committed a crime. During this phase of her detainment, Elliott began to worry because she just didn’t know what was in Sir Godfrey’s letter. If even one sentence in it was deemed objectionable, the royalist was dead.

Elliott was admitted to a chamber with more than forty men inside, all staring down at her. She ascended a set of stairs that led to a chair facing the panel of inquisitors. The guards rehearsed her alleged offense and produced the unopened letter from Godfrey Wright, addressed to Charles Fox of England. One of the members of the tribunal blurted out, “It is a conspiracy. I know this woman, she is a royalist. She has been intriguing in England to make [the Duke of] Orléans’s daughter marry an English prince. Send her to La Force [a prison].” At this moment, a more level-headed interrogator broke in, pointing out that a letter to Charles Fox in itself was not grounds for imprisonment. He was a friend of the revolution, after all. But the first speaker insisted that they unseal the letter and read it aloud before the tribunal. They opened the envelope, unfolded the piece of paper inside, and asked Elliott to step forward and read it herself. Holding the missive in trembling hands, Elliott began to read. Much to her relief, the letter overflowed with praise for France—Sir Godfrey had even enclosed a French-language manifesto extolling the virtues of the revolution. “In short,” Elliott recalled in her memoirs, “the letter greatly delighted them.”

Elliott got out of this scrape, but it wasn’t the last time she found herself in trouble. In fact, in the spring of 1793, she was arrested again, and this time she would spend the better part of a year behind bars, in constant fear of losing her head to the guillotine. Many of her friends were indeed executed, including Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s much-reviled mistress. Elliott managed to survive the Terror, however, and she was released in 1794. She passed the remaining years of her life in relative comfort, provoking controversy every now and then, as she had done in her youth. (She was rumored to have had a fling with Napoleon, but who knows if that ever happened.) By the time of Elliott’s death in 1823, France had reverted from a republic to a monarchy, and King Louis XVIII was sitting on the throne. Elliott was rich, and so was the king. A lifelong royalist, she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.