It was a privileged life, but it was still life in a gilded cage. And think how astonishing it is that we know anything about the lives of these young women at all. Barbe-Nicole and her sister had learned from the time they were small girls studying catechism in their convent school that the only women with public reputations were prostitutes or queens. Even the two most famous women of Barbe-Nicole’s day—Marie Antoinette and Joséphine Bonaparte—were famous only because of their choice of husbands. It is probably not a coincidence that the public still thought of them both as whores.
