Our part of Europe is so often chopped and reshaped by partitions and border shifts that well known anecdotes include that of the old man who lived in the town of Przemyśl at the "Three Josephs Boulevard" (known before WWI as Franz Joseph Boulvard, after WW1 as Joseph Pilsudski Boulvard, and after WWII as Joseph Stalin Boulvard) or the old lady who, having lived in the same house in Uzhhorod all her life, managed to be a citizen of Austria-Hungary, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the USSR and Ukraine...

But you don't have to limit yourself to the 20th century. Henrietta Lullier, the protagonist of this sad epitaph, moved around quite a bit. She supposedly received her education in the French town of Luneville, where the ex-Polish King Stanisław Leszczyński had once lived, and went on to meet the young pantler Stanisław August Poniatowski in Paris, a city she repeatedly visited while on secret diplomatic missions that would take her to Vienna as well. At the same time, Poniatowski’s mistress -- she was a dwarf and a courier with wise, small, black eyes -- lived through at least eight distinct epochs in Warsaw. These included the election of the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Bar Confederation, the "Stanisław Renaissance" of the 1770s, the patriotic upheavals of the late 1780s, the Four-Year Sejm [Parliament], the Targowica Confederation, the insurrection, the collapse of the state, and ultimately a few amazing, almost forgotten years when Warsaw, where she died on December 22, 1802, was in the Prussian hands.

Seekers of "secret springs"

Not entirely unknown, she has a special appeal for imaginative seekers of "secret springs" and the mysteries of the bedchamber and conspiracies. She is a protagonist of "Posiedzenie Bacciarellego malarza" ["The Painter's Bacciarelli Meeting", published after 1839] by the since forgotten Romantic novelist Dominik Magnuszewski and Manuela Gretkowska’s unforgettable novel "Faworyty" ["Favorites", 2020]. Moreover, it never ceases to amaze that the latter work, with its briskly matter-of-fact mix of rather rough reflections about the techniques of fellatio and the dialogue between Poniatowski and Russian ambasador Nikolai Repnin can be so deceptively reminiscent of transcripts of interrogations done by officers of the SB [the secret police operating in communist Poland] as well as a satire on tradeswomen, waving crucifixes from under birch crosses in Krakowskie Przedmieście, and that it was published not by the weekly Nie, but by the Znak publishing house. The tenement house at Warsaw’s Krakowskie Przedmieście, known as "Lullierka" after the owner’s surname, was an indispensable element of Old Warsaw’s literary panorama, whether in works by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski or those of Wiktor Gomulicki.

In the above-mentioned and more substantive works, however, Madame Lullier is usually portrayed quite seriously, as an important instrument of Stanisław August's behind-the-scenes diplomacy. She is perceived as the administrator of numerous intrigues, even to the extent, to use Gretkowska's language, as "a selector in the king's bedchamber" -- ironically, a kind of double of Prince Potemkin, who played a similar role in the bedchamber of Catherine II.

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  Yes, she was often used in missions or as an envoy. "In the spring of 1771, [Henrietta] Lullier, accompanied by Andrzejowa Poniatowski [the wife of Andrzej, the brother of Stanisław August], chamberlain L. Gutakowski, J. Lind and P. Hennequin, left for Vienna. In July, she was already in Paris, where she contacted Mrs. Geoffrin", her biographer Edmund Rabowicz writes. Lullier was delivering letters and invitations. Within the walls of her residence there was space both for a tryst house as well as a sitting room, visited incognito by the King.

While it is all true, I fear that such descriptions attribute too much significance to Lullier. For example, they place her on wedge heels which, despite her small height, she never wore (as opposed to the rouge and powder she so loved). They make a housekeeper out of a lady who rolled through her life like a sugar ball.

Kabbalist-fortune teller and upholsterer

Or maybe it was different. The eighteenth century is tortured in history and literary textbooks like no other epoch. From out of their inquisitorial wringer, all the heroes emerge flat and white as sheets, writing endless treatises on reason, political reforms and the benefits of streets paving. Students perusing them fall asleep poring over the biography of Bishop Ignacy Krasicki. Yet the truth is different. It was a wonderful and uncouth age, abounding in magicians, freemasons and magnetism, in which, just as today, the wildest superstitions flourished in place of ridiculed metaphysics. And the supposedly rigid "division into estates" was so semi-permeable that an upholsterer's wife could receive and dismiss ambassadors...

Take for example Henrietta Zofia Lullier, maiden name Puszet… Just hearing her name makes you want to write her story! Some (including such a seasoned Varsavianist as Stanisław Szenic), following the sound of her name, want to match her with Simon Antoine L'Hullier. This Swiss mathematician tormented not just the children of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, where he was a teacher, with topology but also all the pupils of the National Education Commission, for which he wrote a textbook on geometry. Others, hearing the term "kabbalist-fortune teller" mentioned in her biographies, and not knowing that it is about playing solitaire, think of Frankists [a heretical Sabbatean Jewish religious movement], marranos [Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity but continuing to practice Judaism in secrecy] and the Warsaw kahal 's [the local governing body of an European Jewish community] collusion with the last king of Poland.

Meanwhile, Henrietta Zofia came from a respectable French family of petty nobility, that bound its fate with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as early as the rule of the kings of the Saxon dynasty. Her grandfather, Jacob Benedicte Puchet de Puget, was the secretary of Augustus II the Strong and an envoy in Rome. His son, Benedict, already spelled his surname as Puszet and managed the salt warehouses. He orphaned Zofia early. However, she could count on the protection of the Poniatowski family, to whom she owed a "scholarship" for education in France and an arranged marriage to August III's chamberlain, Antoine Lullier.

Ah, how those Enlightened couples could teach today's catwalk and TV "wall" regulars, those enthusiasts of patchwork families, a lesson in how to be carefree! Henrietta was Antoine's second wife. They separated before his early death and the chamberlain’s two sons from his first marriage disappeared somewhere between a wet nurse and the page school. From her husband, Henrietta Lullier inherited her acquaintance with the Bishop of Kraków, Kajetan Sołtyk, and the first of the nicknames that Warsaw gave her. Before becoming a chamberlain, Antoine Lullier worked as a decorator of royal chambers so she became an "upholsterer".

The most peculiar portrait

In the early 1760s, Lullier’s ties with the young Stanisław August Poniatowski, then still a Lithuanian pantler and (titular) mayor of Przemyśl, became closer! Public opinion attributed to her an affair with the king (probably wrongly) and with his elder brother Kazimierz (highly probable).

Lullier's political role consisted primarily of mediating, facilitating contacts, reaching out to people to whom it was not appropriate to send chamberlains or messengers in royal livery. So she was a delivery woman because of her profession, and a "dwarf" because of her small height. Successive nicknames by which she was known are hardly appropriate to quote or translate. Even the highest society of the time, though scandalized by her love affairs, hid their more savory remarks about her behind a veil of French language so as not to scandalize the lower-born. I like this practice more than Gretkowska's gutter directness. I would like to quote here an opinion about Lullier's portrait by Jan Hieronim Grandis himself, the court painter of King Stanisław August. The Warsaw salon deigned to comment on her likeness, presented by the king to his brother: Grandis ne peint que des bas endroits ”

Indeed, this portrait must have been most peculiar – a hundred years ahead of Gustave Courbet's famous canvas! But was this really what he represented?

Unfortunately, the portrait is missing. However, a satirical print from 1764 has survived, giving the best testimony to both the sharp tongues of contemporary Warsaw as well as its intellectual polish. Here, in a humorous, fictitious list of newly created publications ("Registry of newly published books"), the king's correspondent was credited with authoring the treatise "Collection of paints according to Newton's use and lecture"!

 Let's decipher this malice. At that time, Newton was not yet translated into Polish but French translations of his works in the field of optics from the 1720s, dealing with the dispersion of light in a prism and the multiplicity of colors, were already in circulation. Henrietta Lullier, as it has already been said, was famous even among fashionistas of the time for her daring in the selection of powders and blush as well as for her panache in the use of lipstick. Understandably, her colorfulness drew attention and scandalized. But how was it associated with the arguments of the English physicist and why was the joke universally understood?

Let's try to imagine that someone from the contemporary right-wing Warsaw tries to maliciously comment on another bold hairstyle of the writer Sylwia Chutnik. And he does it not directly, but by invoking the so-called violet shift of some galaxies, referred to by the first law of Hubble-Lemaître's observational cosmology. And that everyone is laughing at this delicious joke!

  Monetizing Venus

So Lullier was famous for her lipsticks, non-standard portraits, her ownership of a luxurious tenement house in Krakowskie Przedmieście (No. 371), the most fashionable tryst house (gift from Kazimierz Poniatowski) and the Hermitage Palace in Łazienki, the roof of which can be seen when standing next to the monument of Jan III Sobieski (gift of Stanisław August). And then suddenly she disappeared from memoires, satires and letters, as though someone had torn several pages out of a manuscript. Most likely, that's exactly what happened.

Maybe she died, maybe she got sick? Since the summer of 1773, when she set off on another delicate diplomatic mission to the West (she visited Spa, and from the autumn was in Paris, showing it off to Stanisław Poniatowski, the son of Kazimierz), mention is only made of some furniture and renovations, especially new upholstery (again that upholstery thread!), carried out at the Hermitage at the expense of the king.  

 But no! In the summer of 1796, 23 years after her Parisian trip, we read about her visit to Grodno, where Stanisław August, the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is locked up. Did she come there on a secret mission? Was she supposed to establish contact with the royal party and recalculate the armed forces after the lost battle of Maciejowice [in 1794, between Poland and Russia]?

 Not at all. Colonel Joachim Denisko in Wallachia or General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski in Lombardy deal with such things. These are men's matters. Meanwhile Henrietta quarrels with the king over the furnishings of the palace in Łazienki, which the bankrupt Stanislaw August would like to sell at auction to cover the expenses for tea. But there is no consent. "My bed warmers," exclaims Lullier indignantly. "My shelves!" Finally, after much bargaining, which was mediated by Repnin, a frequenter of the tenement house in Krakowskie Przedmieście, she agrees to sell (really, no writer could have dreamt this up) a statue of Venus received years ago from the king.

Is the sale of Venus a symbolic farewell to an old passion? Not at all. Lullier still managed to attract the attention of the head aide-de-camp of the King of France (later Louis XVIII), Philippe Fleury, who was in exile in Warsaw, and made him the executor of her estate. It was not difficult, since the exiled Bourbon, staying in Warsaw semi-incognito as Count de Lille, lived in Krakowskie Przedmieście next door to Lullier, in property number 372...

 Jay birds’ chatter

Having bequeathed the tenement house and the income from it to her relatives, the Puszets (including the priest, Canon Józef Puszet), and not forgetting  her maid Regina Petrasz, Lullier died on December 22, 1802.

So few graves have survived from those years! The remains of Stanisław August wandered from St. Petersburg through Wołczyn to Warsaw, and who knows how many of the king’s ribs have survived these peregrinations? Kazimierz Poniatowski was first buried at the now non-existent church in Ujazdów, on the site of today's Belweder Palace. After 1818, the remains were moved to a mass grave in the church of St. Krzyża where they disappeared in the rubble after the Warsaw Uprising. But Henrietta Lullier has been safe for 220 years in the Powązki catacombs.

Even her epitaph has been preserved! A bit chipped, but still easy to decipher: "Here lies the corpse of Zof (...) Łuillier [sic!], from the Puszet, born 21st of May, 1716 [looks like this date makes her older than she was], and of many virtues, especially mercy and (...) She was helping the poor and suffering humanity in a Christian way (...) until the last (...) moments of her life (...). She ended her life in (...)rsaw on December 22, 1802. When passing by, please sigh for her to God, a friend is asking" [Who was this friend? Perhaps Colonel Fleury?]. A friend who, out of gratitude only, (...) dedicates a memorial to her". And further, in German, as in the Prussian Warschau: "Er stein deckt die gebeine der (...)Wit weten sophia Luilliei geb:b (...) S v puget gel.d.21 m (...) 22 Dec. 1802 ali 8 (...) Ang war hire laufbahn aber…”.

These are beautiful words, giving justice to the dead. However, whenever I think of Lullier, another epitaph comes to my mind.

 The American poet Edgar Lee Masters, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, was famed for his poetic "Spoon River Anthology" [literary journal Reedy's Mirror, 1914], a collection of fictional gravestone inscriptions from an anonymous Midwestern town somewhere between Indiana and Illinois. It is a unique and moving collection, worth reading. As a masterpiece of poetry it inspired T.S. Eliott and Zbigniew Herbert, according to the philosophy "Memento mori". Whoever finds and reads this book, will probably read the confessions of a girl "born in Weimar of a French mother and a German father":

 ... Orphaned at fourteen years,
Became a dancer, known as Russian Sonia,
All up and down the boulevards of Paris, Mistress betimes of sundry dukes and counts,
And later of poor artists and of poets.
At forty years, passée, I sought New York
And met old Patrick Hummer on the boat,
Red-faced and hale, though turned his sixtieth year,
Returning after having sold a ship-load Of cattle in the German city, Hamburg.
He brought me to Spoon River and we lived here
For twenty years -- they thought that we were married
This oak tree near me is the favorite haunt
Of blue jays chattering, chattering all the day.
And why not? for my very dust is laughing
For thinking of the humorous thing called life.


  –Wojciech Stanisławski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

 –translated by Agnieszka Rakoczy