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Video: Who was the prototype of Lady Winter from Dumas' novel "The Three Musketeers": Jeanne de Lamotte or Lucy Hay
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The insidious beauty Lady Winter, the heroine of Dumas's novel, could not leave anyone indifferent. Despite the fact that Milady was clearly a negative hero, it was impossible not to admire her intelligence, ingenuity and ability to find a way out of almost any situation. But this charming spy had a very real prototype, as well as a very real story with the royal pendants. True, as a prototype of the heroine of the novel, two women are called at once.
Jeanne de Lamotte
She was the daughter of the illegitimate son of Henry II, but how close her story is to the events of the novel by Alexandre Dumas, today it is almost impossible to know. The young lady's family was very poor, but rumors of kinship with the king himself helped the young lady to make a good party. Jeanne married the Comte de Lamotte and received the coveted title.
At the court of Marie Antoinette, the Countess felt quite comfortable and soon was able to win the favor of Cardinal Louis de Rogan, became his mistress and quite confidently declared that she was friends with the queen herself. In fact, the lovers skillfully used rumors of friendship with Marie Antoinette in order to calmly turn around a variety of scams and help the notorious Count Cagliostro.
Jeanne de Lamotte was able to fraudulently seize a necklace that was made by Bemer and Bassange for one of the favorites of Louis XV. True, the king did not have time to redeem the necklace, and the jewelers could not sell their product. Jeanne in some unthinkable way was able to convince the manufacturers that the queen dreamed of acquiring jewelry.
Then, in 1784, the capital of France was buzzing: the incredible necklace, which contained 629 diamonds of different sizes, disappeared without a trace. Later it turned out that the diamonds were sold separately, and the necklace itself was never seen again. It was after the arrest on the shoulder of the swindler that the brand in the form of a lily appeared.
This person was not going to serve the life sentence to which Jeanne de Lamotte was sentenced: she managed to escape from prison. Somehow, the Countess managed to get to London, where she started writing her memoirs, and then, according to unverified data, went to the Crimea, where she found her last refuge. True, no one could find the grave of Jeanne de Lamotte or Countess de Gachet (the name by which she was allegedly known in Crimea).
In fact, Dumas the father really immortalized the image of Jeanne de Lamotte in the novel "The Queen's Necklace", he did not even change the name of the heroine.
Lucy Hay
This woman had a truly incredible charm. Contemporaries called Lucy Hay (Countess Carlisle) a witch and were completely unable to understand how the chamber-maid of honor of Queen Henrietta Mary of England weaves her many intrigues and manages to get out of the water even when her guilt seemed obvious.
Poets dedicated poems to her, writers tried to perpetuate her image in prose, and Lucy Hay (née Percy) favorably accepted signs of attention and skillfully used men for her own purposes. She had many lovers and only one allowed himself to leave the insidious beauty. It was the Duke of Buckingham, who was once in love with her, and then simply abandoned, inflamed with feelings for Queen Anne.
The story of the royal pendants, described by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers, is based entirely on real events. Lucy Hay did know about Queen Anne's gift to the Duke of Buckingham, and wanted revenge on the Frenchwoman and her former lover. The cut pendants were supposed to be irrefutable proof of Anna's infidelity to the king. Buckingham was also killed with the active participation of Lucy Hay.
In Dumas' novel, Milady is caught up in revenge by the Musketeers, but in real life, Countess Carlisle again escaped punishment. She became a triple agent, collaborating with the queen, the new parliament and opponents of the monarchy. True, one day she still ended up in prison on espionage charges and spent a year and a half in the Tower. But the time spent in prison cannot be called a real punishment.
The Countess was allowed to receive visitors, to eat very well, and her dinners with lavish tables with game, wine and truly royal desserts could hardly be called prison stew.
18 months after her arrest, Lucy Hay was released and lived out her life on her own estate, completely retiring from affairs and palace intrigues. She died at the age of 60. Undoubtedly, it was Lucy Hay who became the prototype of the heroine of the novel by Dumas.
The heroes of the novel "The Three Musketeers" are known and loved all over the world. One of the attractive things about this book is that almost all of the protagonists are historical figures. It is known that Alexandre Dumas, embellishing and slightly misinterpreting history, nevertheless usually kept “close to the text” of reliable facts. Almost all of his heroes belonged to the top of the nobility of the 17th century. Today we can find out quite reliably how they looked in reality, thanks to the preserved portraits of that era.
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