The events of the French Revolution had a profound impact on world history. It ended the domination of absolute monarchs and established the right of the people. But as the revolutionary regime, of which the guillotine became the hallmark, became increasingly violent and bloody, people’s initial sympathy for the Revolution began to wane. The deaths of the royal duo of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette shocked monarchical Europe. The story of Jean-Louis Fargeon, a member of the bourgeoisie and a skilled perfumer closely linked to the royal court, offers us a different view of the revolutionary events of the time and an extraordinary glimpse into the world of Marie Antoinette, France’s most famous queen.
Initially, people were still willing to believe in progress under the royal duo, but when successive bad harvests caused a famine in the country that the court did not care about, enthusiasm began to wane. The King and Queen’s reputation was finally tarnished by a series of scandals, followed by the slanderous and pornographic pamphlets that circulated in Paris. The Bastille fell, the Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and stripped the King of many of his powers. Louis XVI resisted and tried to escape with the Queen, but failed. He was beheaded on 21 January 1793 and the hated Marie Antoinette was guillotined on 16 October of the same year.
In such times, the life of a perfumer was irrelevant to the French court; in fact, it was always hanging by a thread. Jean-Louis Fargeon was an insignificant cog in the whirlpool of the French Revolution. That is why the story of his life is a more realistic account of the events of the time than the other dry books written by historians.
In a letter kept in the archives of Montpellier, one can read: ‘Tomorrow, on the ninth of Thermidor, in the second year of the French Republic, I, Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer for the former royal court, will appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. All I want is to be free of the crimes of which I am accused, crimes which I never committed. The accusations that I am an opponent of freedoms and a follower of the old regime are not true. It is true, however, that I hate the bloody chaos that is now called revolution and that I remain a republican and faithful to the principle of live free or die.
By order of the Committee for Criminal Investigations, I sit in this prison, accused of being an opponent of the New Order and a disseminator of forgeries. They have sealed my house in Chaumont, my former shop in rue Roule and my laboratory in Suresnes. I was reported by my neighbours. What sad times we live in when people accuse each other. The prisons are full, trade has stopped and the workshops are closed.
I am a man of science and progress. I have dedicated my experiments, knowledge and inventions to the delicate art of perfume making. In doing so, I have trodden untrodden paths. And what do they ask of my art today? To prove my patriotism, I am asked to make a perfume with the smell of blood wafting through the air around the guillotine. As I meditate in this stinking dungeon, the sweet smell sometimes carries me back to the salons and gardens of the world where the lilies used to bloom. That was my art and that was my life. Tomorrow I shall know whether I have lost it.”
How to give women back their beauty
Under a brilliant sun, the scent of lemon and orange trees wafted through the streets and alleys of Montpellier, while the surrounding countryside smelled of thyme and lavender. Those who processed these wild plants earned a good living. It was the ideal place for a future perfumer for the Queen of France and Navarre. Perfume-making has been a tradition in the Fargeon family for over a hundred years.
In a city known for its advanced medicine, pharmacists not only sold imported medicines to patients, but also had a licence to sell perfumes. They used around 50 different plants and some animal substances for their medicines, some of which were also used to make perfumes. As the port of Séte was close to the city, where ships from the Orient came with their products and perfumes, they came into contact with the Arabs and soon learned from them how to distil extracts and perfumes, and were given the title of aromatic perfumers. After this early age, when apothecary and perfume-making were so fluently combined in one skill, the two professions separated.
Jean-Louis Fargeon was seven years old when Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria and future Queen of France, was born in 1755. It was then that he was rubbing shoulders at school, learning to read, write and do arithmetic, which was compulsory if he wanted to pursue a career as a merchant. The shop at home smelled strongly of roses, daffodils, orange blossom and perfumes imported from Italy and made from citrus fruits; lemons, oranges, tangerines and grapefruit. The scent of sandalwood, quinine and cinnamon gave the fragrances an exotic accent.
In their shop you could also buy small items, sewing boxes, toothpicks, tobacco snuffers, sponges, garters, gloves and sometimes olives and sardines in bulk. In the back of the shop, Fargeon had his own laboratory – a mystical centre for the preparation of fragrances. Here he ruled the roost among his kettles, retorts, presses, coils and mortars.
His grandmother Marie-Rose often told him the legend of the eau de la Reine de Hongrie, the lotion of the Queen of Hungary. According to her, Queen Jeanne, 72 years old, wrinkled, paralytic and gouty, received this fragrance from a hermit in the 14th century. She began to use it and soon regained her strength, beauty and youth, so much so that the King of Poland even asked her to marry him. The eau de vie was a cure for virtually everything, from rheumatism and ringing in the ears to stomach aches, and was said to protect against epidemics. Above all, it brought women back to their former beauty.
Perhaps it was the image of an old woman, magically transformed after wearing perfume, that gave Jean-Louis hope that he could make women beautiful and desirable again, if only he could discover how to enhance the beauty of their complexion, keep their skin fresh, hide their flaws, change the colour of their hair and conceal their age spots. For him, perfumery was closely linked to cosmetics.
Like many other members of the rural bourgeoisie, his father was fascinated by the works of philosophers. He wanted his son to receive a proper academic education before taking over his business, so the young man began to study the humanities in Montpellier. But in July 1760, his father died suddenly at a very young age, leaving a widow with five children.
Jean-Louis was not content with merely knowing by heart the many recipes used in perfumery, but wanted to understand the content of perfumes, which were defined by the French Academy at the time as a substance having a pleasant and fragrant odour, obtained by the use of fire, pressing or otherwise. In those days, Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments revolutionised chemistry, and Jean-Louis read a lot about it, even though he did not yet understand the real meaning. But he did understand that his discoveries opened up endless new opportunities in perfumery. Perfume was no longer just a fragrance, but the key to the human soul. Slowly, he began to realise that he would be working for clients who would be aesthetes, for people who would be looking for unusual, delicate and above all new fragrances.
While studying, he read works by Voltaire that he found in his father’s library. He discovered Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the bard of nature and sensibility, the first to argue that a man who feels is worth more than a man who thinks, and that the imagination dominates reason. When the widow Fargeon heard her son claim that the nose was the gateway to the soul and that the author of this idea was a philosopher, she thought he had gone mad. She was only reassured to see the enthusiasm with which he had taken up the art of perfume-making after leaving school.
Her son, even as an apprentice, was committed to making perfumes as natural as possible. He gradually developed his own range of fragrances and wanted to improve the family’s cosmetics, lipsticks, face washes, soaps and creams that made the skin on his face whiter, mouthwashes, various scented oils and hair dyes. But despite his best efforts, the family business stagnated. Since 1750, six perfumers from Montpellier have gone out of business, wiped out by competition from Grasse. There, the royal suppliers were enjoying various advantages, while Montpellier was being destroyed by heavy taxes on products coming from the Orient.
The road to Paris
In May and June 1770, Jean-Louis read in the newspapers about the festivities surrounding Marie Antoinette’s arrival in France and her marriage to the heir to the throne. The future Queen of France was just as he had imagined his best customer would be – young and beautiful. It is said that before her wedding, the sale of luxury items in Paris jumped threefold. In fact, Paris was the only place in France where Jean-Louis’s creative skills could come to the fore. It was a centre of good taste and elegance.
He informed his mother of his plans. The reputation of Fargeon’s perfumery in Montpellier reached Paris, where Jean-Louis’s cousin had Orizo, a boutique in the privileged courtyard of the Louvre. This provided him with an apprenticeship with the widow of Daniel Vigier, who was a perfume supplier to the King himself and a member of the prestigious association of Parisian perfumers. His clients included the beautiful courtesan Madame du Barry and other celebrities from the court and Paris. Here, Fargeon trained for a year as a perfumer with his widow.
In the spring of 1773, a young man of twenty-five set off for Paris in a mail coach. Paris was a dirty city at that time, with all the artisan workshops, residential houses and hospitals simply dumping their waste into the already polluted Seine. A disgusting smell of rot spread through the city. In the rue de Roule stood a four-storey building belonging to the Widow Vigier, similar to all the buildings on that street. At first glance, the perfume shop was not very different from Fargeon’s father’s, but everything was more cosmopolitan. The mahogany shelves reached to the ceiling and were full of small bottles and pots, gloves, garters and everything else that aristocratic ladies needed. The delicate scent of flowers overpowered the stench that wafted in from the streets.
Widow Vigier’s business was flourishing, but it required a great deal of prudence and discernment. In addition to Madame du Barry, her clients included the Princesse de Guéménée, who was a personal friend of Marie Antoinette. Some of her clients forgot to pay their bills and had to be discreetly reminded of this at all times, and they had very different tastes, often quite eccentric. The Marquise de Sainte-Hermine, for example, spent a fortune on perfumed garters, the Abbé d’ Osmond could not do without violet powder, and wealthy Parisians scented the walls of their apartments to suppress the unpleasant smell of onions. The Comte de Fersen, who later became Marie Antoinette’s lover, exclaimed on his arrival in Paris: ‘What a wasteful life and how much jewellery and perfume. And what strange fragrances I smell in the salons of this country.”
Jean-Louis soon discovered that the women in Paris were completely different from those in Montpellier. They were trusting, flirtatious and provocative. He was surprised how they talked about their superiors when they were not around. Madame de Marsan, the governess of the royal children, harshly condemned Marie Antoinette for her outlandish dresses. Madame du Barry , the King’s mistress, was often the target of unpleasant epigrams and no one hesitated to criticise the King himself.
One day, Madame du Barry asked to be introduced to the young perfumer her employer praised so highly. The presentation was followed by a visit to Versailles. Fargeon was enchanted by it, although he was disappointed by the stench that wafted from the many rooms.
“The terrible stench that spread through the parks, gardens and even the castle made my stomach turn. The halls, corridors and rooms stank of urine and faeces. In front of the Versailles wing, where the ministers held their offices, a butcher slaughtered pigs every morning and roasted them on a spit. The water stank of stale water in the ditches, with dead cats floating in it.”
When Madame du Barry received him in her second-floor apartment, he handed her a small bottle of eau de cypre composée, containing jasmine, daffodils, angelica, roses and orange blossom, peppered with nutmeg and spiced with amber powder. The Queen’s mistress put a drop of the fragrance on her hand, sniffed it and said it was delicious. This encouraged Jean-Louis and he offered her an even bolder fragrance. He mixed lemon, orange blossom and narcissus with eau de vie de Cognac, to which he added mace and an ounce of cinnamon.
He then presented her with a series of small pots with different pomades. Each one had its own purpose and name. Madame du Barry had always wanted to enhance the natural colour of her blonde hair, and Fargeon promised her a mixture of saffron, turmeric, fern, sandalwood and rhubarb, and assured her that if she washed her hair regularly with his product, it would become even brighter.
It was an hour before he said goodbye to her. He was surprised to see how different the Queen’s mistress was from the rumours that had been circulating about her. The heir to the throne referred to her as a “creature”, the Queen as a “creature”, and some of the ladies of the court preferred to be in the King’s disfavour rather than to associate with her. He thought otherwise: “There is nothing mediocre or vulgar about her. She is not above average intelligence, but she loves to talk and tell stories. She is kind, she likes to please, she is not vindictive and she was the first to laugh at the songs that were circulating about her among the people.”
Jean-Louis was preparing for his master’s exam in the following months and decided to launch his perfume toilette á la mode de Montpellier at that time. On 1 March 1774, he stood before an examination committee of four masters and passed the examination, then took the oath in accordance with the rules of the Corporation of Perfumers and was awarded the title of maitre gantier parfumeur poudrier and his name was entered on the list of members.
Now the widow Vigier realised that the time had come to marry him and quickly found a suitable bride, Victoire Ravoisié, whose father was a royal gunsmith and whose other relatives were jewellers, surgeons and members of the town council. Fargeon secretly saw the bride-to-be at a service in the church of Saint-Eustache. She was sweet, though not beautiful, well-bred and helped her mother keep the books. She knew nothing about perfume, having been in her father’s gunsmith’s shop all the time, but she was willing to learn.
The Countess du Barry promised to put in a good word for the young master with the King and praised his skills. But just a month after Fargeon became master, King Louis XV returned from a hunting trip with a fever one evening in April 1774. Doctors found that he had smallpox, a disease that ended in death or cure after nine days. His pus bubbles had dried up, but now he looked, according to a court lady, like a “Maverick, a black man, burnt and bloated”. An unbearable stench was emanating from him. He died the next day.
Louis XVI was only 20 and Marie Antoinette 19 when they succeeded to the French throne. They were young and resistant to pursuit. Thus, in December 1775, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother: “I am meeting with an epidemic of satirical poems. They have taken hold of me too. They accuse me of liking both women and men.” It was rumoured that she was having a lesbian affair with Madame de Lamballe and also with her milliner.
But the newly married Fargeon was not interested in such pursuits. He and his wife moved into the apartment where the widow Vigier had once lived and turned their attention to the future, as competition among perfumers was fierce.
Spendthrift Queen
The couple therefore decided to open two branches, in Nantes and Bordeaux, which had the advantage of being the departure ports for the French Antilles. But competition was also coming from abroad. The English aristocracy was much more in favour of cleanliness than the French. The English washed their hands and faces every day and their bodies two or even three times a week. Some were even proud owners of a bath.
England has a long tradition of perfume making. The court of Elizabeth I was fascinated by spices, pomades and animal extracts, things that Venetian ships brought from the Orient. In 1730, the Spaniard Juan Famenias Floris added wild thyme, rose petals and vanilla cream to lavender and immediately became famous, with his concoction driving London mad. So Fargeon went to London, talked to him and found that he could apply some of his experience to his own work.
He started pouring his perfumes into small containers or bottles that belonged to his customers. They were almost artistically crafted and richly decorated with motifs from mythical, romantic or pastoral stories, such as Cupid, Bacchus or Harlequin. It was Madame de Pompadour who reintroduced the old tradition of engraving in stone and most of the vessels were decorated with cameos. Since the discovery of lead crystal in England in 1750, which allowed perfume bottles to be fitted with gold or silver inlays, no one brought Fargeon plain and unadorned bottles.
At that time, the nobility was content with only the most refined perfumes. The marquises were surrounded by a cloud of amber dust, the fichfiri smelled of lavender, and the high-ranking civil servants wore so much musky scent that they could be considered weasels. Moralists, of course, objected strongly to this, but those who craved perfume did not give it the slightest thought.
As for fashion, everyone imitated the Queen, who was the centre of all the festivities and parties. Empress Maria Theresa was upset that her daughter had become a fashion icon in France and became angry when she saw her portrait: “No, that is not a portrait of the Queen of France. It is definitely a mistake. It’s a portrait of an actress.” The Empress of Austria no longer recognised her daughter.
Marie Antoinette’s taste changed according to her mood. One summer, she appeared before the King in a dress that he said was “the colour of fleas”. Suddenly, this reddish-brown colour became a fashion hit all over France, both in Paris and in the provinces, and the factories that dyed the fabrics produced only more versions of this colour.
But accusations of the Queen’s frivolity slowly began to shake her throne. Rumours spread that she was as extravagant as a paid mistress as she was sovereign as a consort. One day, without batting an eyelid, the King paid 487,000 livres from his private treasury to pay off her debts, and it was rumoured that the French ladies would destroy themselves for wanting to imitate her.
Fargeon wanted to enhance the Queen’s beauty in a not-so-brash but natural way. One of his clients, the Princess de Guéménée, had just succeeded to the position of governess of the royal children, and Fargeon saw in her an opportunity to consolidate his position at court. The Princess of Guéménée was one of those who often held private meetings on her estate. The Queen’s friends gathered there to play cards, sing and perform, while the King regularly went to bed at eleven o’clock at night.
One day, when Fargeon brought Princess Guéménée a new supply of perfume, he humbly confessed to her that he hoped the Queen would one day become his client. She replied that she would try to help him, but that he should give her an object to make her happy. Fargeon chose the gloves because he knew that the Queen liked to ride. In addition, like any well-mannered man, he knew how important gloves are to a woman.
He chose a young buckskin that he was sure would match the colour of her horses. Although white gloves were the fashion at the time, the Queen had the right to choose another colour. Fargeon scented the gloves with extracts of violets, hyacinths, blood-red roses and musk. For several months, he sent only gloves and bags of various fragrances to court.
One day, Madame Bertin, the Queen’s milliner, entered his shop and placed a wooden box in front of him. Inside were various extremely beautiful flowers made in an Italian convent. They were made of batiste, taffeta and veil, and covered with plaster. The only thing missing was the smell. He fulfilled the order and slowly became a supplier to most members of the royal family.
Servants would sometimes literally bend under the weight of things that nobles ordered from him and needed for weddings and other occasions. The Queen’s orders, of course, accounted for a large part of his shop’s annual turnover. He made fragrances especially for her, based on roses and daffodils and tuberose, which he distilled with a splash of wine.
A storm was coming
Fargeon was even more excited about the birth of his son, Antonio-Louis, than working for the Royal Family. His wife was pregnant at the same time as Marie Antoinette. So, absorbed in his work and private life, he did not pay much attention to the fact that his wealthy clients were paying with ever-increasing delays. Soon he ran out of money to buy the basic ingredients for his perfumes and the debts began to pile up. In January 1779, he had to declare bankruptcy.
For a while the family lived in constant fear of the future, but then the persistent Fargeon managed to recover his money from his creditors and pay off his debts to them, and when the Bordeaux and Nantes branches, which dealt with England and the Antilles, started to do well, he recovered at least a little and started to do business again in Paris.
Marie Antoinette spent her last years before the Revolution in Trianon. One day, she invited Fargeon to visit her and told him that she wanted a special perfume that would always remind her of Trianon. He promised to do his best to please her. He pressed roses, orange blossom, added lavender, iris and citronella oil, and finally mixed a perfume called eau de Trianon, which completely enchanted the Queen.
He was at the height of his career. But there was less and less money at court. To curb the Queen’s huge expenses, the court’s treasury prescribed exactly how much money the Queen could spend each year on clothes and how much on jewellery. Merchants were no longer allowed to bring her any of their wares before the Court Treasurer had given his approval. They had already spent a great deal of money renovating and extending the Trianon, where the Queen always preferred to stay. Such lavish spending was met with public indignation and Marie Antoinette became a laughing stock.
Even in Trianon, it had many enemies who dreamt of a social order based on the Enlightenment and the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Officers returning from the American War of Independence praised a country where freedom and equality had done away with privilege. Some also felt that the Queen had acted too much in favour of Austria, her true homeland. Many accused her of adultery, as she was extremely fond of the young and handsome Count Axel von Fersen.
Despite his loyalty to the Queen, Fargeon became interested in social events and corresponded with his brother, a member of the Masonic Lodge. Both denounced corruption and nepotism and the archaic social order. In Versailles, however, they acted as if nothing was happening and continued to spend almost without restraint. Marie Antoinette had a second son, the future King Louis XVII, in 1785, but this did not win her the sympathy of the people.
She was also deeply damaged by the “diamond necklace” affair, as many were convinced that she was involved in the planning of the Boehmer jewel robbery. In a high-profile trial, Jeanne de la Motte, who masterminded the theft, was sentenced to life imprisonment, before being flogged and branded with a glowing iron. Madame d’ Oliva, who impersonated Queen Marie Antoinette during the theft, was acquitted. So who was impersonating the Queen? The Queen herself, perhaps?
The Queen’s evil fate did not escape her in the future. The heir to the throne had tuberculosis, one shoulder was higher than the other and doctors thought he would be a hunchback. Then her 11-month-old daughter died. After all these misfortunes, the Queen was no longer the one to determine what French fashion would be.
Fargeon’s shop on rue de Roule became too small for all his concoctions, so he had to move his laboratories to Suresnes, near one of the Queen’s residences. Here he bought a large plot of land and also some houses, almost country mansions. He began to distil fragrant oils from jasmine and daffodils, built an orangery and studied the work of Denis Papin, who a century earlier had begun to harness the power of steam; now he too was trying to use it in his distillation process.
At the end of 1788, the social elite refused to believe that a storm was coming. People continued to have fun and enjoy life. But on 4 May 1789, the Estates, an assembly of representatives from three different sections of society, met and people were already singing offensive songs about the royal family in the streets. This clear dissatisfaction with the monarchy was the first sign that something was about to break.
Fargeon, though a republican at heart, never stopped saying that the Queen was good and noble at heart. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 seemed to him a welcome sign that royal autocracy would cease, but at the same time he deplored this act of violence. As a precaution, he joined the National Guard, founded by the Parisian bourgeoisie. On 4 August 1789, the National Assembly outlawed the feudal system and stripped the aristocracy of all privileges. A new and different social order was beginning to emerge.
Luxury items suddenly disappeared from sale, people started wearing caps with the national cockade. Aristocrats of foreign origin began to leave France as a precaution, and soon the locals followed. In November, church properties were seized. Fargeon’s clients spread across Europe. His shop was deserted, but all was not lost. Some of the aristocracy and foreigners still remained. Fargeon no longer hid his republican convictions, but he did not show them publicly either.
The Queen knew from the fall of the Bastille that the family would have to leave Versailles. On 5 October, a mob stormed the palace and forced the King and Queen to move into the Tuileries Palace. On their departure, they were surrounded by a crowd, howling that they would now have enough bread and pointing to the severed heads of the two murdered guards. In March 1791, the guilds and the association of glovers, belt makers and perfumers were dissolved.
Early in June 1791, Fargeon was told to report to the Tuileries Palace. He was taken to Marie Antoinette. She gave him two sheets of paper with a list of perfumes he urgently needed. Fargeon could not have suspected the reason for such a large order, as he did not know that the royal family was preparing for an escape that would end so miserably in Varennes. Marie Antoinette had, quite unrealistically, decided to take all her perfumes with her.
On 22 June, the carriage with the royal couple set off. Their departure was no longer a secret and the authorities were informed of it, but they tolerated the flight for political reasons and only arrested the royal couple halfway. In despair, King Louis XVI muttered: “There is no more King in France”. The wives thought that because they wanted to escape, they were criminals.
The journey back to Paris was terrible. The dust and the heat had completely destroyed the King and Queen. Anyone suspected of helping the royal family escape was arrested. Fargeon was also worried, because the carriage in which the royal couple were in was filled to the top with his products.
The flight to Varennes sealed the fate of the monarchy. The National Assembly forced Louis XVI to swear an oath on the Constitution, and foreign armies began to gather on the borders of France to return him to power. Fargeon remained at home when a mob stormed the Tuileries Palace on 20 June 1792, dragging behind them a guillotine bearing the words Death to the tyrant and a gallows on which hung a doll with the inscription For Antoinette.
The Queen, surrounded by an excited crowd, asked a woman what she had done to them. She replied, “You have brought about the downfall of an entire nation.” Antoinette explained to her, “You are ill-informed. I married the King of France and I am the mother of the heir to the throne. I am French and I will never see my native land again. I can only be happy or unhappy in France and I was happy when you still loved me.”
The National Assembly took charge of the safety of the King and his family and transferred them to Temple Prison.
The guillotine is enforced
No one dared to defend the previous regime any more, but Fargeon continued to serve the Queen, who was languishing in prison. She used his fragrances to help her cope with her new circumstances and to reduce the anxiety she was feeling. The situation in Paris was unstable. The revolutionaries searched houses and filled dungeons with suspicious people. Fargeon kept to his home and went out only rarely.
On 17 August, Dr Joseph-Ignac Guillotin’s device was used for the first time, when the head of a royal servant was cut off. As the experiment was successful, it was decided to start using it regularly. At the beginning of September, people broke into the dungeons full of prisoners and killed several bishops and 120 priests. Blood flowed in torrents.
Fargeon subscribed to a number of newspapers to keep up to date with what was going on, as he was reluctant to go away. The articles increasingly incited violence. When a cache of the King’s correspondence with France’s enemies was discovered in the Tuileries Palace, the King’s fate was sealed. He was informed that he would be tried. On the morning of 21 January 1793, drums and cannon shots announced that Louis XVI had been executed. Marie Antoinette knelt down and sobbed. The “Widow Capet” was allowed to order mourning dresses, leather shoes, a cape and a black tulle.
Antoinette was 37 years old, but she showed many more. Her legendary beauty is gone. She was an ageing woman in unstable health and plagued by cramps. Fargeon submitted his accounts for the last two years of Louis XVI’s reign to the new authorities. Citizen Henri, who had control of the provisional budget, approved them with disgust and wrote: “The Republic’s payment for the care of Citizen Capet, widow of the last French tyrant.”
Victoria, Fargeon’s wife, took the time to look through the books and found that the Queen’s first order had been placed seventeen years earlier. Jean-Louis lit a fire and threw all the Queen’s accounts into it, which would have weighed heavily on him if he had been arrested. All the other suppliers in Versailles probably did the same.
For Marie Antoinette, the saddest day was when her child was taken away from her on a July day in 1793. On the second of August, she was taken to the prison Conciergerie , which she knew to be the death chamber. She sighed and said, “Nothing can hurt me now.” She slept on a wooden bed with a straw mattress, covered with a dirty blanket. On 16 October 1793, the former Queen of France went to the morgue.
Fargeon did not want to witness the scene, so he read the news in the newspaper. “She showed no emotion as she listened to the verdict and left the courtroom without saying a word.” Later, in another newspaper, he read the testimony of an eyewitness: “I would like to tell you about the satisfaction of the people as she drove past them in the carriage that was taking her to the guillotine. I saw her head fall into the sack. Her cursed head was finally separated from her harlot’s neck. The air was filled with shouts of Long live the Republic.”
After Marie Antoinette’s death, Fargeon was not moved from home. He did not miss the old regime, but the new one had soiled itself with such terrible crimes that he could not expect anything good from it. He was more disturbed by the fate of Madame du Barry, who had spent eighteen months of forced penance in the Pont aux Dames convent and then returned to the life she had led before, along with new love affairs. But she paid dearly for her past. Before her execution, she screamed terribly and tried to free herself from the hands of the executioner and his two assistants, who struggled to push her down. When they tried to tie her to it, she begged them, “Mercy, just one more moment.” Only the blade silenced her. Thus ended Madame, who came from the people and whose only sin was that she was the king’s mistress.
Jean-Louis was now no longer a supporter of the Republic. He was, as they used to say about such people, a man who belonged to the old regime. The perfumes that were now being sold had terrible names, such as Elixirs á la Guillotine. A handkerchief soaked in essence du lys or eau de la Reine could cost the owner his life. The Capet perfumes, as the members of the former royal family were now called, disappeared from the market altogether.
Fargeon started looking for someone to sell his company to. So he had to go to Paris, where he had not set foot for months. The city was almost unrecognisable. People behaved completely differently and the fashion was different. Fargeon saw that it was no longer the place for him. Instead of peace, terror reigned and the lists of those sentenced to death by guillotine grew longer and longer. His clients were gone, and even if they had been in Paris, no one was willing or able to pay the debts they owed him. His family lived on their savings.
In December 1793, he managed to sell his shop to new owners, but they wanted nothing to do with the man of the former regime and refused to employ him. He called the manager of his Nantes branch in Paris, hoping that he might be able to help him. But he, too, told him terrible things. The situation in the provinces was no better than in Paris. Foreign trade had become suspicious and there were police squads all over the place. Building owners had to post lists of the occupants on the doors of their houses, stating their age and occupation.
On 4 January 1794, while Fargeon was waiting for payment from abroad, there was a heavy knock at the door of his apartment. He opened it and a squad of armed people’s militia burst into the apartment. Fargeon was not surprised, as he had been expecting something like this for a long time. In fact, many former court suppliers have been arrested in recent weeks. The head of the militia department quickly read to him from a piece of paper: “The National Security Committee decides that a man called Fargeon should be brought to the prison and all documents sealed in his presence, except those that are suspicious.”
He was accused of making deals with a group of American merchants accused of counterfeiting revolutionary money. Counterfeiting money has always been punished very severely. A few centuries ago, such culprits were simply thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil. The French Republic followed the practice of the kingdom, except that now the guillotine was used to carry out the sentence. Fargeon tried in vain to prove that he was an active member of the local section of the Republican Guards, a patriot and a supporter of liberty. His explanations fell on deaf ears and he was taken to prison to await trial.
During the search of the apartment, two rifles, a pistol and some ammunition were found, which investigators believe Fargeon intended to use for subversive activities. It did not help that he claimed that he sometimes went hunting around Paris. As the weeks and months passed, his health deteriorated in prison. He was suffering from consumption and from the after-effects of an operation he had had years before. He seemed to have been forgotten, even though he was kept informed of what was happening outside, as new prisoners arrived. Most of them ended up under the guillotine or were transferred to another prison, but very few were released.
Fargeon was always awake at night, bathed in sweat and afraid that they would come and take him to the guillotine. Only the morning light brought him relief. He was convinced that the bloody terror could not last forever. In just 430 days, the Revolutionary Court had already handed down 1,251 death sentences, and in the two months that followed, as many as 1,376, made possible by a new law that gave the Revolutionary Court unlimited powers. The guillotine worked non-stop, and people had become so used to it that fewer and fewer people were curious to see the death sentences, so it was removed to a more hidden place.
But the day came when he too was summoned to court. He was not the only one, as at least ten other prisoners were waiting to be sentenced on the same day. The president of the tribunal read out the indictment. Fargeon was the supplier of the last French tyrant and his Austrian wife. As such, he was in the service of the aristocracy and not in the service of the people. His dealings with the Americans and with counterfeit money were also a crime against the Republic. His relative wealth was only the result of the extortion of the citizens.
It proved that all Americans had been released as innocent, including the famous American advocate of freedom and human equality and politician Thomas Jefferson. The hearing dragged on and on, and when the judge finally read out the verdict, Fargeon, who had already shown how much money he had donated to the Republic, was acquitted and one of the few to be released.
On the day of his release, news spread that Robespierre, one of the fathers of the French Revolution, had been arrested. The Revolution was killing its own children, Fargeon was convinced. Now that he had escaped the guillotine, all he wanted was to retire and spend his last years in peace. But he failed to do so. He soon returned to his former shop, which had been brought to the brink of ruin by new owners with no knowledge of perfume. He was still making perfume, but his time in prison had taken its toll on his health. He died in November 1806, aged 58. His widow and sons continued to run the perfumery until his widow’s death in 1815.
