The Queen's Embroiderer

A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis

Joan DeJean

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781632864765
• Subtopic: Fashion Design
• Index: History

From the author of How Paris Became Paris, a sweeping history of high finance, the origins of high fashion, and a pair of star-crossed lovers in 18th-century France.
Paris, 1719. The stock market is surging and the world's first millionaires are buying everything in sight. Against this backdrop, two families, the Magoulets and the Chevrots, rose to prominence only to plummet in the first stock market crash. One family built its name on the burgeoning financial industry, the other as master embroiderers for Queen Marie-Thérèse and her husband, King Louis XIV. Both patriarchs were ruthless money-mongers, determined to strike it rich by arranging marriages for their children.
But in a Shakespearean twist, two of their children fell in love. To remain together, Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot fought their fathers' rage and abuse. A real-life heroine, Louise took on Magoulet, Chevrot, the police, an army regiment, and the French Indies Company to stay with the man she loved.
Following these families from 1600 until the Revolution of 1789, Joan DeJean recreates the larger-than-life personalities of Versailles, where displaying wealth was a power game; the sordid cells of the Bastille; the Louisiana territory, where Frenchwomen were forcibly sent to marry colonists; and the legendary "Wall Street of Paris," Rue Quincampoix, a world of high finance uncannily similar to what we know now. The Queen's Embroiderer is both a story of star-crossed love in the most beautiful city in the world and a cautionary tale of greed and the dangerous lure of windfall profits. And every bit of it is true.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Magoulet Family Tree
• Map of Paris in the Early 18th Century
• Timeline
• How This Began
• Chapter One: The Queen’s Embroiderers
• Chapter Two: Star-Crossed
• Chapter Three: Upward Mobility 1: Salt and Taxes
• Chapter Four: Upward Mobility 2: Purveyors to the Crown
• Chapter Five: Salad Days
• Chapter Six: Annual Income, Annual Expenditure
• Chapter Seven: Secrets and Lies
• Chapter Eight: A Person of Consequence
• Chapter Nine: The Great Winter
• Chapter Ten: The Deadly Years
• Chapter Eleven: The Gold Rush
• Chapter Twelve: The Invention of Money
• Chapter Thirteen: Personation
• Chapter Fourteen: “The Incredible Madness of the 20th Year of the Eighteenth Century”
• Chapter Fifteen: Aftershocks
• Chapter Sixteen: Total Eclipse
• Chapter Seventeen: “A Diabolical Person”
• Chapter Eighteen: The Remains of the Day
• Chapter Nineteen: The Prince’s Embroiderer, The Prince’s Designer
• Chapter Twenty: The King’s Prosecutors
• Aftermath
• Chapter Twenty-One: To the Islands
• Chapter Twenty-Two: A Royal Wedding
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Noise of Time
• Afterword: A Father’s Love
• Coda: The Bourbons
• Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Price Index
• Notes
• Archival Documents Consulted
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• A Note on the Author
• Also Available from Joan DeJean
• Copyright