page_title: Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil
section_title: Versailles
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil / Versailles
context_page_description: Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, comte de Vaudreuil was a French nobleman at the court of King Louis XVI of France. He was the alleged lover of Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac, the favourite of Marie Antoinette and over whom he exerted a powerful influence.
  He was a connoisseur and collector of art, and a patron of artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun who painted two known portraits of him in 1784.
context_section_description: The Comte de Vaudreuil was born in Saint-Domingue, West Indies, the son of Joseph de Rigaud (1706-1764), Marquis de Vaudreuil, the French governor of the island, and his aristocratic white Creole wife, Françoise Guiot de la Mirande. His paternal grandfather, Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, was Governor General of New France. At the age of nineteen, he entered the army and during the Seven Years' War served as staff officer under Charles, Prince of Soubise. When the war ended, he moved to Paris.
  At the French court, he attached himself to the king's youngest brother, the comte d' Artois (later Charles X of France), and formed a strong attachment to the beautiful Duchesse de Polignac, an intimate friend of Queen Marie Antoinette and one of the leaders of high society at Versailles. The liaison with Gabrielle was viewed as sexual by many observers then and since, but some suggested that Gabrielle's nature was too essentially cold, class-conscious (given Vaudreuil's Creole ancestry) or remote to have succumbed to an affair. Many of her friends despised him, but whatever the nature of their relationship, whether it was sexual or not, she found it increasingly hard to resist his domineering demands for her attention and support. Vaudreuil, highly cultured and possessed of great charm and fascination for women, also had a violent temper and ambitious nature.
  Capitalising on Gabrielle's indifference to what she saw as the vulgar matter of intriguing, Vaudreuil insinuated his way into her inner circle. He quickly became head of a notorious coterie of courtiers, sycophants, and relations of the Polignacs who surrounded the queen. This coterie soon turned into a cabal which constantly sought positions, favours, and pensions for themselves and their ambitious relatives. Vaudreuil made his mistake in assuming that Queen Marie-Antoinette's close friendship with Gabrielle would automatically make her amenable to his ambitious demands. However, the Queen despised the Count and she complained of him to several of her ladies-in-waiting, including Madame Campan, who recalled the Queen's fury when Vaudreuil broke one of her ivory billiard cues in a fit of temper at losing a game. Thus Vaudreuil never obtained a position at Court higher than that of royal falconer; a post which earned him 30,000 livres a year. This was not enough to satisfy the ambitious Count who dreamed of becoming minister of the king's household. The Abbé de Vermond, the Queen's confessor and spiritual adviser, shrewdly advised her not to appoint him; thereby Vermond incurred the hatred of the entire Polignac clan, with the curious exception of Gabrielle, who remained silent on the matter.
  On 14 May 1780, Gabrielle gave birth to a son, Jules de Polignac whom everyone at Court whispered had been fathered by Vaudreuil and not her husband. King Louis XVI and the Queen did not believe the child was Vaudreuil's and the King took the unprecedented step of publicly visiting the new baby in a vain attempt to quash the rumours.
caption: Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac, alleged mistress of the Comte de Vaudreuil
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