In 1768, when the king wished to make Jeanne maîtresse-en-titre, etiquette required her to be the wife of a high courtier, so she was hastily married on 1 September 1768 to Comte Guillaume du Barry.

The wedding ceremony was accompanied by a false birth certificate, created by Jean-Baptiste du Barry, the comte's older brother.

[9] From 1763 Jeanne worked as a milliners assistant and grisette in the fashionable haberdashery shop called "La Toilette" of Madame Labille and her husband.

From 1766 du Barry helped establish Jeanne's career as a courtesan in the highest circles of Parisian society, including the aristocracy.

The popular Queen Marie Leszczyńska was dying, and Jeanne was escorted to the king's boudoir so frequently as to cause Lebel concern for his position.

As a woman of low birth as well as a prostitute, Jeanne could not qualify as maîtresse-en-titre; but the king ordered she be married to a man of good lineage and brought to court.

[14] The marriage ceremony included a false birth certificate created by Jean-Baptiste du Barry, making Jeanne appear younger by three years and of fictitious noble descent.

Finally, Jeanne was presented at court on 22 April 1769, amid a cacophony of gossip among the crowds outside the palace and the courtiers in the Hall of Mirrors.

She wore a silvery white gown brocaded with gold, bedecked in jewels sent by the king the night before, and with huge side panniers, whose like had never been seen.

[16] Jeanne first befriended her husband's sister, a cultured spinster, Claire Françoise du Barry, who was brought from Languedoc to instruct her in etiquette.

[21] According to Stanley Loomis' biography Du Barry, Jeanne's everyday routine began at 9.00am, when Zamor would bring her a morning cup of chocolate.

[22] When Madame de Béarn told Jeanne of their situation, she begged the king to pardon them, refusing to rise from her knees until he agreed.

"[23] Jeanne was visited by a Monsieur Mandeville who asked a pardon for a young girl condemned to the gallows for infanticide after concealing the birth of a stillborn child.

Du Barry exposed his plot to the king on Christmas Eve 1770, and Choiseul was dismissed from his ministry and exiled from court.

Despite this intrigue,[27] Jeanne, unlike her predecessor Madame de Pompadour, had little interest in politics,[28] reserving her passion for new gowns and jewellery.

[29] An anecdote recounts that the king said to the Duc de Noailles that Madame du Barry introduced him to new pleasures; "Sire" – answered the duke – "that's because your Majesty has never been in a brothel.

[32] In 1772, the infatuated Louis XV requested that Parisian jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge create a necklace for Jeanne of unprecedented extravagance, at an estimated cost of two million livres.

Following the death of the king and his grandson's ascension to the throne as Louis XVI, the new Queen Marie Antoinette had Jeanne exiled to the Abbey du Pont-aux-Dames near Meaux-en-Brie.

In time, Seymour became fed up with his secret love affair and sent a painting to Jeanne with the words 'leave me alone' written in English at the bottom, which the painter Lemoyne copied in 1796.

Late that night, Jeanne heard a drunken crowd approaching the Château, and through the opened window where she looked came a blood-stained cloth with Brissac's head, at which sight she fainted.

[42] Jeanne's Bengali slave Zamor, along with another member of du Barry's domestic staff, had joined the Jacobin club.

Based largely on Zamor's testimony, Madame du Barry was suspected of financially assisting émigrés who had fled the revolution, and she was arrested in 1793.

When the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris accused her of treason and condemned her to death, she vainly attempted to save herself by revealing the location of the gemstones she had hidden.

Although her French estate went to the Tribunal de Paris, the jewels she had smuggled out of France to England were sold at an auction at Christie's in London in 1795.

Eventually, during a ball on New Year's Day 1772, Marie Antoinette spoke indirectly to Jeanne, casually observing; "There are many people at Versailles today",[46][2] giving her the option to respond or not.