Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford

  Together they composed a memorandum, which they gave to the King, accusing M. de Maurepas of allowing the navy to become dangerously weak. They had not entirely invented this; as early as 1745 the Duc de Luynes says that many people considered Maurepas responsible for the fall of Louisburg, whose garrison he was supposed to have kept short of ammunition. He was also accused of an act of gross negligence – it was said that three ships of the Compagnie des Indes were captured by the English, because Maurepas had omitted to tell them the route which could safely have been taken.

  Of course he answered this memorandum with the plausibility of an old hand at the political game; nothing had been his fault. The money, he added – with a dig at Madame de Pompadour – which should have been used for building ships, seemed to have gone into other channels. One morning, the Marquise ordered her sedan chair and, accompanied by Madame d’Estrades, she went to call on him. ‘Nobody shall say that I send for the King’s ministers.’ Then, very sharply, ‘When will you find out who it is that writes these poems?’ ‘As soon as I do find out, Madame, I shall of course inform His Majesty.’ ‘You are not very respectful, Monsieur, to the King’s mistresses.’ ‘On the contrary, Madame, I have always respected them whoever they may be.’

  The Court was naturally buzzing with the news of this unaccustomed morning call, and that evening, at a party, somebody said to Maurepas that he seemed to have had an interesting visitor. ‘Yes,’ he replied carelessly, for all to hear, ‘the Marquise. It won’t do her any good, I’m not lucky to the mistresses. I seem to remember that Madame de Mailly came to see me two days before her sister took her place, and of course everybody knows that I poisoned Madame de Châteauroux. I bring them all bad luck.’ These rash words were immediately reported to the private apartments; Maurepas had gone too far. Next morning at the King’s lever he was in wonderful form, never had he talked more brilliantly and never had the King laughed so much at his sallies. He announced that he was going to Paris that afternoon for a wedding.

  ‘Enjoy yourself’, said the King, as they parted. He himself was going to Madame de Pompadour’s house at La Celle, near St Cloud, with a few friends, including Richelieu. The next morning at eight o’clock Son Excellence was seen leaving for Paris, in such tremendous spirits that the onlookers wondered if some misfortune had not befallen M. de Maurepas. Also at eight o’clock the Comte d’Argenson, who had received a note from La Celle in the middle of the night, went to wake up Maurepas, sound asleep after his wedding party. One look at d’Argenson’s face told the Minister what had happened. The wretched man, who lived but for society, politics and the life at Court, rubbed his eyes and read the following note: ‘M. le Comte de Maurepas, having promised to tell you myself when I have no further use for your services, I request you herewith to resign your ministry. As your estate at Pontchartrain is too near, I request you to retire to Bourges during this week, without having seen anybody but close relations. Send your resignation to M. de Saint Florentin. Louis.’

  Smiling, imperturbable as ever, Maurepas got up, dressed and went his way. He knew his master well enough to know that this was final. Ministers who lost their jobs at that Court were always exiled, since the King did not care to see their gloomy, reproachful faces, with an implied, ‘I told you so’, when things went wrong. Nobody had ever been recalled. Maurepas, luckier than most, did return to Versailles; some twenty-five years later Louis XVI made him Prime Minister and was not well-advised in doing so.

  The Duc de Nivernais, Madame de Pompadour’s petit époux, was married to Maurepas’ sister, and a few months later (1749) he wrote from Rome to the Marquise: ‘… May I be allowed to describe his condition, without society, with nothing to occupy him, in a country which is literally a desert, where the air is unhealthy most of the year and where the roads are impassable from November to May … You know quite well how delicate Madame de Maurepas is; not a single day that she doesn’t suffer either from colic of the stomach or from sharp pains in the head, where she very likely has a growth such as killed her father. Should she get a fever, she would certainly be dead before a doctor could arrive from Paris. She and her husband have this prospect ever before them; it goes to my heart to think of it; surely I can touch yours, and that of the King, always so good and understanding. All we ask, and it seems not unreasonable, is that His Majesty should allow him to live on his estate at Pontchartrain, to be understood that Paris would be out of bounds – his punishment would still be terrible enough …’ (Two more pages on these lines).

  The Marquise merely replied that this letter did not surprise her at all; it was what she would have expected from such a nice person. In fact the King had been more thoughtful and merciful than he might have been in this matter. He had chosen Bourges because Maurepas’ greatest friend and close relation, the Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, was Archbishop there, and the Maurepas went to live with him. Four years later they were allowed to return to Pontchartrain, both in perfect health.

  In September 1749, the King decided to inspect his fleet at Le Havre and to take Madame de Pompadour with him. His popularity among the Normans was still as great as it had been at the time of Fontenoy and they do not seem to have been at all put out by the presence of a mistress instead of a wife; a double line of people waited to cheer them the whole way between Rouen and Le Havre. The only slight set-back was when the Bishop of Rouen, the Queen’s Chaplain, indicated, by a respectful silence, that he would prefer not to have Madame de Pompadour under his roof for the night. They were obliged to make other arrangements. The account of this journey shows what enormous physical endurance Louis XV expected of his friends. The party left Crécy in the morning, Mesdames de Pompadour, du Roure, de Brancas and d’Estrades in a berline, the King and the Duc d’Ayen en tête-à-tête in a smaller carriage. They took riding horses and some hounds with them and hunted most of the way. That evening they arrived at the Château de Navarre, where the Duc de Bouillon gave a big party. All next day the King hunted in the forest; after supper they got back into their coaches and travelled through the night, arriving at Rouen at eight in the morning. They did not stop, but went straight on, through cheering crowds, to Le Havre, where they arrived at 6 p.m.

  After an enthusiastic reception, the governor took them up a tower to look at the sea, which most of the party had never seen in their lives. A bitter wind soon drove them back to the Hôtel de Ville, where supper for twenty-eight was prepared. Next morning the King got up early to go to church while Madame de Pompadour received presents and compliments from the municipality, exactly as if she had herself been royal. All that day there were ceremonies, lasting well into the night, when two hundred ships were illuminated in the harbour. Next morning the party left for Versailles, only stopping once on the way.

  Except with the Normans this journey was very unpopular; it was supposed to have cost a fortune and the King was blamed for taking his mistress with him so openly.

  From now on Louis XV shut himself up in his houses and hardly ever left them again, never even going to Paris unless absolutely obliged to. He felt himself criticized unjustly, and misunderstood, and a serious riot which broke out in Paris confirmed him in this feeling. There were various causes for discontent. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which had been signed the year before, 1748, had brought no relief from taxation. Corn was scarce and prices were high. The immediate reason for the uprising, however, was the disappearance of a little boy. Waifs and strays, together with prostitutes and other undesirables, were rounded up from time to time by the police and shipped off to colonize Canada; the story went round that the police received so much a head, and Parisian parents lived in terror that their children would be picked up by mistake, or even kidnapped. The small boy of certain respectable citizens disappeared mysteriously; the frantic mother roused her neighbours; finally a whole quarter of the town rose in fury. Howling against Madame de Pompadour, the mob pursued Berryer, who was, justly, considered as her creature, to his house, threatening to kill him and bur
n it down. With great presence of mind he threw them a policeman, who was torn to pieces while Berryer opened all his doors and windows. The rioters, suspecting a trap, beat a hasty retreat.

  Of course, neither Berryer nor his masters believed a word of the kidnapping story, and they were all outraged by the accusation. The King refused to drive through Paris when next he went to Compiègne – ‘Can’t see why I should go to Paris to be called Herod’ – a new road was made for him across the plain of St Denis; it is still known as the Chemin de la Révolte. He suffered when his people behaved, as it seemed to him, so unreasonably. He felt that he and they were united by a religious link; he loved them, he lived for them, and like a father with naughty children he was vexed. But he was as far from understanding the root of the trouble as he was from knowing how it could be cured.

  He had been brought up to consider that France was his property in the same way as an estate was the property of its owner. Taine, writing in 1875, says that the King would have thought it as surprising and unfair to be put on a civil list, as a modern millionaire if the state took away part of his income. A huge proportion of the national revenue was spent on the royal household. This had been regarded as a natural order of things by his subjects while taxes were low, but France had been at war for seven years, taxes were high, those who paid them thought they were not collected fairly and there was a great deal of murmuring. Unfortunately, like so many of the rulers of France, Louis XV did not understand money at all. When he was younger he came back from Paris one day so horrified by the poverty and famine he had seen there, that he immediately dismissed eighty gardeners. Then it was pointed out to him that these men and their families would die of starvation, so he took them back again. He had the irritating impression that he could never do right.

  As for Madame de Pompadour, who loved Paris so much, she almost gave up going there. When she did so, it was at the risk of an embarrassing incident. If she went to the Opéra she would be greeted with ironical cheers, too loud, and lasting too long to sound quite real; if she went to the convent to see her little girl, her carriage would be covered with mud; and on one occasion when she went to dine with M. de Gontaut, such terrifying crowds gathered that he was obliged to hurry her off by the back door. But none of this in any way affected her rise to power: after the exile of Maurepas and the journey to Le Havre she was regarded at Court as paramount. Only God or another woman, it was felt, could now bring a term to her ascendancy; no man could hope to do so.

  Her enemies bided their time and bided it in vain, for it never came. Henceforward the King, though very faithful to his old friends, made no new ones except through the Marquise; favours and advancement could only be obtained through her. The courtiers assumed a new attitude towards her as she did towards them. Her staircase was thronged with people who wanted her to do something for them; she received them kindly and patiently and always tried to help them if she could.

  Marmontel describes calling on her, at her toilette, with Duclos and the Abbé de Bernis. ‘Bonjour, Duclos, bonjour, Abbé,’ with an affectionate tap on his cheek, and then, in a lower, more serious tone of voice, ‘bonjour, Marmontel.’ He was, at the time, a penniless, unknown, unsuccessful young writer; he took her a manuscript which she promised to read. When he returned for it she got up on seeing him, and leaving the crowd of courtiers standing there, she led him into another room. They talked for a few minutes and she gave him the manuscript covered with pencilled comments. Back among the courtiers, Marmontel saw that the effect of all this on them had been prodigious. Everybody pressed forward to shake his hand, and one nobleman, whom he scarcely knew, said: ‘Surely you’re not going to cut your old friends?’

  As in the Queen’s bedroom there was no chair for her visitors, who were therefore obliged to stand, whatever their rank, even if they were Princes of the Blood. (In those days the difference even between a chair and an armchair was a matter, not of comfort, but of etiquette.) In the whole history of France no other commoner had ever dared to behave thus, and yet there only seem to have been two protests: the Prince de Conti dumped down on her bed one morning, saying ‘That’s a good mattress,’ and the Marquis de Souvré perched on the arm of her chair while talking to her. ‘I didn’t see anywhere else to sit.’ But these daring actions were not repeated, and the Marquise got her way in this as in most other things. She began to study Court usage of the previous reign and modelled herself on Madame de Montespan, sitting in the former mistress’s box at the theatre and in her place in the chapel. It was noticed that she spoke of ‘we’, meaning herself and the King.

  ‘We shall not see you for several weeks,’ she said to the ambassadors on the eve of a voyage, ‘for I suppose you will hardly come all the way to Compiègne to find us.’ Guests at her country houses were obliged to provide themselves with uniforms as at the King’s little houses. Her retinue of fifty-eight servants included two gentlemen, decorated with the order of St Louis, and ladies of quality. She built the Hôtel des Réservoirs, in Versailles, to house them and as an overflow for her collections; it was almost an annex to the palace and joined to it by a covered passage. All these signs of power came gradually; gradually the courtiers understood that there were now two Queens of France within the walls of Versailles, and that it was not the wife of the King who reigned.

  11

  Friends and Table Talk

  VOLTAIRE, BUSY AND consequential, with two posts at Court, King’s historian and gentleman in ordinary, with his room over the Prince de Conti’s kitchen and the public privy, and with his great friend in such an exalted condition, might have been thought to have reached a harbour where he could spend a most agreeable old age. Versailles was not a bad place in which to work. Marmontel, to whom Madame de Pompadour had given a sinecure in Marigny’s department and a little lodging, so that he could be sheltered from material worries, says that he spent there the happiest and most profitable years of his life. There was a splendid library (happily still intact) second only to that of the rue de Richelieu in Paris. So great was the crowd hanging round King and Court that it was easy to be left alone, forgotten for weeks at a time. But Voltaire, as usual, gave the ladder under his feet a good sharp kick. He wrote an exceedingly tactless poem in which he said that Madame de Pompadour was an embellishment to la Cour, Parnasse et Cythère and charged her and the King to keep what they had each conquered. This was followed, after the victory of Berg op Zoom in 1747, by:

  Et vous et Berg op Zoom vous étiez invincibles

  Vous n’avez cédé qu’à mon roi

  Il vole dans vos bras du sein de la victoire

  Le prix de ses travaux n’est que dans votre cœur

  Rien ne peut augmenter sa gloire

  Et vous augmentez son bonheur.

  It was too much for the King’s real family; Queen, Dauphin and Mesdames were outraged. The King was none too pleased, and the Marquise, whatever she may really have felt, had to pretend to be very much annoyed. The atmosphere at Versailles turned so threatening that Voltaire thought he had better make himself scarce. He packed up his things and went off to Lunéville, where King Stanislas, always on the look out for entertainers, received him with open arms. Perhaps Madame de Pompadour breathed a sigh of relief; perhaps she thought she had heard the last of him for a while.

  Somebody told her that Crébillon, her old friend and teacher, was living in terrible want, starving to death really, in the Marais, surrounded by the dogs he loved so much. ‘Crébillon, in misery?’ she cried, and immediately rushed to the rescue; she gave him a pension, asked him to supervise Alexandrine’s education and arranged for an edition of his collected works to be published by the royal printing press. He came down to Versailles to thank her, and found that she was ill in bed; however, she insisted on receiving him.

  As he was bending over to kiss her hand, in came the King – ‘Madame, I am undone,’ cried the old man, ‘the King has surprised us together.’ The King immediately took a great fancy to him, and backed up Madame d
e Pompadour when she said that he ought to write a last act to Catalina, a play which he had begun many years ago and had never finished. She saw that this would do more to raise his morale than any pension. So he went off and finished it. Madame de Pompadour gave a little party at which he read it out loud, and then, through the King’s influence, she had it produced at the Comédie-Française.

  When Voltaire, at Lunéville, heard all this he could not contain his jealous fury – of course, he said, the Marquise had done the whole thing on purpose to make him miserable. He worked himself into a passion, and would gladly have killed her. As he was never very good at keeping his feelings to himself, his enemies in Paris soon heard of them; unlike Madame de Pompadour they really were delighted to seize an opportunity of torturing him. Led by Piron, they leagued together to hail Catalina as a masterpiece. Now Catalina, as it happened, was a very bad play, and furthermore was written in an old-fashioned idiom which sounded affected and absurd on the modern stage. Madame de Pompadour was perfectly aware of this; she looked forward to the first night with considerable misgivings. The audience, thanks to her, was a galaxy of rank and fashion, and probably, like all Parisian first-night audiences, more inclined to be interested in itself than in the play – but what of the critics? The Marquise went up from her house at St Cloud. The King put her into her carriage at three in the afternoon, and then entertained a party of men friends. At ten o’clock he ran downstairs and out into the courtyard crying: ‘Well, so have we won our case? Is it a success?’ It had been a huge success.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Voltaire, when he heard the news, ‘but there’ll never be a second performance.’ He was quite wrong and had to endure the fact that there were twenty performances, which for those days was an enormous run. ‘Never will I forgive the Marquise for supporting that old madman.’