Agnès de Buffon is an author’s gift. We know tantalizingly little about the woman who played such a significant role in the life of the Duc d’Orléans. She is mentioned only fleetingly in memoirs and letters. Louis Philippe refers to her as his father’s ‘only friend in Paris’ (aside from Biron) and remarks that their ‘liaison was unfortunately very public’. He defends her by saying that ‘she never gave him anything but good advice’ and that ‘her affection for him never failed’. Others were not so kind. The Duke de Lauzan commented that her ‘stupidity’ was convenient, as one didn’t have to worry that she was filling Orléans’s head with inflated notions. However, it’s more likely that Agnès was playing a careful game. Grace Elliot asserts that she was a firm supporter of the Revolution and very close to Orléans’s political advisors. She was also known to attend the sessions at the Assembly, with or without the Duke at her side. Perhaps it was this that gave rise to concerns that she was manipulating Orléans into believing he could rule as a constitutional monarch.

Whatever the case, Agnès did not trust Grace Elliot. ‘Madame de Buffon and the Duke’s friends did everything they could to prevent his coming to me,’ Grace writes. ‘They used to tell him that as I saw none but royalists and his enemies, I should get him assassinated.’

That which is written about Agnès’s relationship with Orléans suggests that theirs was truly a union of hearts and certainly contained a lot of sexual passion. ‘She’s like a little animal in bed,’ Orléans writes to Lauzan at the outset of their affair. She accompanied him on his visit to London, and when he joined the Army of the North she took a house to be near him at Valenciennes. During the troubled second half of 1792, she seemed to take up permanent residence at the Palais-Royal. As I have written in The French Lesson, Agnès was pregnant during that summer of bloodshed and gave birth as the September Massacres raged. Perhaps the most widely repeated anecdote about her is the story of her breakfast with Orléans and his bankers, when the crowd outside their window raised the decapitated head of the Princess de Lamballe. Agnès is said to have become hysterical and cried, ‘My God! That will be my head there one day!’ before collapsing. Shortly thereafter, Victor Leclerc de Buffon, Orléans’s illegitimate son, was born. He became the Chevalier de Saint Paul and for part of his short life was looked after by his exiled half-brothers. He died in 1812.

Grace Dalrymple Elliot (or Elliott) (1754–1823)