Exclusive interview with Joan DeJean and her new historical novel based on a true story of star-crossed lovers in France and their exile to the new city of New Orleans in 1719
Review by Gabrielle Pantera
“I thought of calling my book Love in a Time of Stock Market Fever,” says Queen’s Embroiderer author Joan DeJean. “It is both a great, star-crossed love story and a cautionary tale about the lengths to which men can be driven by the dream of windfall profits. To understand the story, I follow two Parisian dynasties…the families of Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot, the Montagues and Capulets of this story…from 1600 to 1789, the two centuries during which the Bourbon monarchy made France the most powerful nation in Europe and Versailles the most famous court in the world.”
The story moves from Paris, Versailles, the Bastille to the Louisiana territory, where Frenchwomen were forcibly exiled to marry colonists. In 1719 Paris, the world’s first millionaires are buying everything in sight. The stock market is surging. The Chevrot and Magoulet families gain wealth but then both fall in the first stock market crash. Louise Magoulet’s family are master embroiderers for Queen Marie-Thérèse and her husband King Louis XIV. Louis Chevrot’s family were lawyers who built their wealth on the emerging financial industry. Like Romeo and Juliet, Louis and Louise meet and fall in love, upsetting their families’ plans.
“This book began with an image, the earliest surviving image of a real shop with a known owner: the Parisian shop of a master embroiderer whose official title was The Queen’s Embroiderer,” says DeJean. “I was working on an article on the first upscale fashion boutiques for Luxury, a periodical edited by Jonathan Faiers, professor of Fashion at Winchester School of Art, and I wanted to feature that image.”
The image is in the collections of Waddesdon Manor, the renowned National Trust property in Buckhinghamshire, but archivist Phillippa Plock couldn’t say whether Jean Magoulet, the Queen’s Embroiderer, actually owned the furniture depicted in the image of his shop. DeJean set off for what she expected would be a day or two in France’s National Archives in Paris.
“In the National Archives, I found two documents,” says DeJean. “The first, Magoulet’s letter of appointment as the Queen’s Embroiderer, was no surprise. The second stopped me in my tracks. August 5, 1719. Lock Marie Louise Magoulet up in prison and ship her off to Louisiana. In 1719, such a royal decree was unequivocal. Marie Louise Magoulet had been accused of prostitution and was being deported to the newly founded city of New Orleans as an undesirable.”
DeJean eventually did find a record of the furniture, that Magoulet did indeed own everything depicted in the image. But by then, she no longer cared much about chairs.
“I wanted to answer these interrelated questions,” says DeJean. “How could a father have done that to his own child? And how was he able to get away with it? The answers to those questions all took me to the Scottish economist John Law and to the phenomenon known as the Mississippi Bubble.”
The Mississippi Bubble was the first great stock market speculation. In seven months, stock in a trading company directed by Law rose from 500 livres (the French currency, pre-Franc) to over 10,000. Meanwhile, Jean Magoulet declared his daughter a prostitute. The reason? Money. To get his hands on a small sum that was legally hers. When the stock crashed, and the economies of France, England, and Holland collapsed.
“I spent long days going over prison files and the records’ of Parisian notaries,” says DeJean. “I also got to do less traditional and less ordinary research. Textile and embroidery curators, especially Susan North of the V and A, gave me a first-hand introduction to the wonders, and the work is truly wondrous, of the great embroiderers of the early 18th century.”
DeJean is currently writing a book about the other women, nearly a hundred of them, who were also accused of prostitution in 1719 in Paris and shipped off with Louise Magoulet.
DeJean is based in Philadelphia and spends several months a year in Paris. She was born in Louisiana.
The Queen’s Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis by Joan DeJean. Hardcover: 400 pages, Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (May 1, 2018), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-1632864741 $30
