Jeanne du Barry ending explained: why she's thrown out of Versailles before Louis XV is even dead
Maïwenn's film gives its heroine everything Versailles has to offer and then takes it back in a single afternoon. Here's what happens in the last twenty minutes, and why the order of events is stranger than it looks.
The king is still breathing when the carriage is called. That detail is not a dramatic invention, and the reason behind it has nothing to do with Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, or anyone at court who disliked her.
Maïwenn's 2023 film — she directs and plays the title role opposite Johnny Depp's Louis XV — ends where the historical record ends: in April 1774, at the Petit Trianon, where the king falls ill. It's smallpox. He is moved to Versailles, and the machinery of a royal deathbed starts up around him.
The rule that removes her
A dying king of France has to confess and receive the last rites. A priest cannot absolve a man who is still keeping a mistress under the same roof. So the mistress goes.
On 4 May 1774, Louis XV himself told du Barry to leave Versailles — framed partly as protecting her from infection, entirely necessary for the sacraments. She withdrew to the Duc d'Aiguillon's estate at Rueil. The king died six days later, on 10 May. She was not there, and she was not summoned back.
The expulsion isn't a punishment handed down by the incoming regime. It's an administrative step in the king's own dying, arranged by the king, in the week he had left.
Louis XVI's court finished the job afterward. Marie Antoinette had her exiled to the Abbey of Pont-aux-Dames near Meaux, where the nuns received her coldly and then, over a year, warmed to her. She got limited freedom after twelve months and returned to her Château de Louveciennes after two years.
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Where the film bends things
Maïwenn stages a deathbed farewell with the Dauphin's permission, which is the film's most significant departure. Louis XV was nursed by his daughters. The future Louis XVI had no interest in his grandfather's mistress and ignored her entirely.
- The family — three of Louis XV's grandchildren are missing from the film, including two future kings.
- The rivals — Mesdames, the king's daughters and du Barry's most committed enemies at court, are compressed almost out of existence.
- The reconciliation — Marie Antoinette did secure du Barry's release from the abbey, but the two never met again and did not correspond.
- The last words — the film gives her a graceful exit line. Witnesses described her panicking on the scaffold and crying out that they were going to hurt her.
The nineteen years the film narrates instead of shows
Everything after Louveciennes arrives in closing text rather than scenes. She took up with the Duc de Brissac, who was killed by a mob. She dismissed her page Zamor in 1792 after discovering he had joined the Jacobin club, and Zamor denounced her to the Committee of Public Safety. She was arrested in 1793 on charges of aiding émigrés, condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and guillotined on 8 December 1793 at the Place de la Révolution.
The film premiered at Cannes on 16 May 2023 and took a seven-minute standing ovation, then split critics almost exactly down the middle — 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, 48 on Metacritic — and made $14.9 million worldwide.
For the record: the woman who spent her adult life being told she did not belong at Versailles was thrown out of it by the one person there who wanted her to stay.