Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford

  The clergy, richer than any other section of the community, did not care for the prospect of paying the tax and still less for that of declaring their revenues. Their system of tax-paying was that they made presents to the State from time to time, the amount fixed by themselves; it was against their conscience to do more. They spoke a great deal about their divine immunity. Every year the Secretary of State and the Archbishop of Paris would meet to discuss this matter; the Secretary of State exposing in energetic terms the King’s financial needs and difficulties, to which the Archbishop would riposte with a heart-rending account of the desperate position in which the Church found itself. Machault, however, attacked with rather more vigour and determination than his predecessors; public opinion seemed to be on his side and the clergy saw the moment coming when it would be impossible to avoid paying taxes any longer. With a perfect indifference to any call of patriotism, they made a diversion by stirring up as much trouble as they could, against the ministers, against the Parlement, against the Protestants, and above all against the Jansenists.

  Jansenism proper had practically died out under the persecutions of Louis XIV. The plough had been driven over the ruins of Port Royal, the inhabitants of its graveyard had been dug up, hacked into suitable joints and removed to some spot where there was no danger that they would attract pilgrims. In 1713 the Jesuits completed their victory by procuring a Papal Bull, Unigenitus, condemning 101 propositions in a popular book of devotion as Jansenist and therefore heretical. The result was that many people, who had never suspected the fact before, found themselves labelled Jansenist. At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV, a popular kind of Jansenism had evolved, anathema to the Court and the fashionable world – dowdy and ridiculous, with its nuns mewing like cats and barking like dogs, its convulsionists and flagellationists, eaters of earth and swallowers of live coals. The King regarded it with a great distaste, while the Queen felt so violently against it that she was nicknamed ‘Unigenita’.

  The Jesuits were determined to establish control of the Church in France; the great Magistrates of the Parlements, who considered themselves guardians of this Church’s liberties, were equally determined to prevent them from doing so. It was this struggle between the Jesuits and a neo-Jansenist section, supported by the Parlements, which the clergy now saw fit to exacerbate. They refused the sacraments, including extreme unction, to anybody unable to produce a certificate stating that he had confessed to a qualified priest. Confession to priests of the lower clergy suspected of Jansenism was not accepted as valid. Those dying without billets de confession were refused extreme unction. Their relations would then apply to the Parlement de Paris, which would issue an order for the arrest of the priest who had refused. The Archbishop of Paris would then appeal to the King who in his turn would issue an order quashing that of the Parlement.

  A bitter quarrel now broke out between Parlement and the Church. The Magistrates alleged that it was part of their police duties to ensure that citizens duly received the sacraments. The Church itself was given over to the old arguments, which had been thrashed out times without number in the course of a hundred years, between Jesuit and Jansenist. ‘The country,’ says Mgr Knox, ‘that had once been so rich in saints and mystics was now condemned to dissipate its energies in controversy … which weakened [the Church’s] influence and left her ill-prepared to face the crisis of the Revolution.’ The importance attached to this affair may be judged by the fact that Maupeou, senior President of the Parlement, wrote to the King: ‘Your Parlement has never been brought to the steps of your throne by a matter of such gravity …’

  The King was now obliged to make up his mind whether to support his Church or his Magistrates. So far he had always managed to avoid taking sides between them; but a grave situation was developing. In Paris there were riots, priests were beaten up or forced at pistol point to take the sacraments to dying Jansenists. A nun called Sœur Perpetuée was said to be paid by the Parlement to die slowly and ostentatiously, while an argument raged as to whether she should, or should not, receive extreme unction. At last the King had her shut up in a convent and no more was heard of her. People began to fear a civil war, the dreaded word Fronde was heard again, and it began to look as if the rivers of ink which had already flowed over Unigenitus were going to turn into rivers of blood. On the whole the King leant towards the Jesuits, though he was far from approving everything they did. His family was blindly on their side. Madame de Pompadour, with her philosophical upbringing, should have provided a counterweight, but the years at Court had not been without their effect on her; the word Parlement seemed to strike rather a dubious note, evoking Cromwell, and dreadful republicanism. Besides she knew quite well that the Magistrates disapproved of her extravagance, at a time when public funds were low and there was talk of a new tax. Let it not be thought that the Parlements were any more anxious to pay the vingtième than was the Church.

  Finally the King came down on the side of the Church and exiled the Grand’ Chambre (the highest court) of the Parlement to Pontoise (May 1753). He said that in the future he himself would be the arbiter as regarded sacraments. The place of the Grand’ Chambre was taken by a chambre de vacations composed of Conseillers d’Etat and Maîtres des Requêtes; but this lacked the authority of the Parlement.

  At Pontoise Messieurs les Présidents kept great state. They never went out except in coaches-and-six; they entertained each other and the whole neighbourhood lavishly. After some months, the inconvenience of the King’s action began to be felt. Nobody could go to law. Perhaps this did not matter very much, people often settled out of court, but there were other consequences. The Magistrates were putting out a very convincing propaganda in which they represented themselves as the defenders of public liberty. The winter was a hard one; all the humble but literate men who depended on the Palais de Justice for a livelihood were unemployed and consequently in great distress. They stirred up trouble among the masses. The police were afraid to interfere in the cafés and on the streets where insurrection was openly being planned. ‘Burn Versailles’ was heard and other revolutionary slogans. The Prince de Conti, who, as he lived in Paris, was more in touch with public opinion than the King, saw the necessity of recalling the Grand’ Chambre, and, if possible, of raising something in the way of taxes from the clargy. The King seemed to be on the point of recalling it, but then he changed his mind and issued further lettres de cachet sending some of its members to Soissons and some to other provincial towns. This was a very severe measure; the Magistrates were now debarred from holding any meetings. It was not until September 1754 that the King decided to reinstate his Parlement, which returned to Paris, amid scenes of wild rejoicing, the same week that Louis XVI was born.

  The King enjoined a ban of silence on the subject of the recent controversy, and the prelates were advised to lie low for a bit. But the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, was not an accommodating man. When the King appointed him, in 1745, he did not at first want to accept. In those days he was said to have a sweet, and even timid, nature; if so he had hardened up considerably. He was the most implacable enemy of the Encyclopédie and hated Madame de Pompadour so much that he said he would like to see her burnt; he refused her permission to reserve the sacraments in her chapel at the Elysée. Very soon he broke the King’s ban of silence and refused extreme unction to yet another old dying Jansenist.

  The King, taking no notice of his family, who filled the palace with their moans and groans, exiled the Archbishop to his country house, 3 December 1754. Three days later the Parlement registered taxes to the tune of a hundred million livres.

  ‘That,’ they said, ‘is the end of the Bull.’

  ‘Unfortunately, though,’ said the King, as he once more imposed silence on the subject, ‘the Bull happens to be the law of the land.’

  The sacraments continued to be refused; the next victim of note was the Duchess of Perth. However, it transpired that her husband had been one of the convulsionists of St Médard,
a church which had been shut by the King when the convulsions there were forbidden in 1732.

  De par le Roi, défense à Dieu

  De faire miracle en ce lieu.

  (‘By order of the King, God is forbidden to perform miracles on this spot’ was written by some wag on the church door.) So the case of the Duchess was allowed to drop, but others came up almost every day and in every part of the country. Between the years 1751–56, Barbier, the Parisian notary and diarist, who always reported parliamentary doings in his journal, has nothing to record but the intensely dreary details of this squabble. Not a thought is given to foreign or colonial affairs; all of every page is devoted to the Bull, the refusal of sacraments, remontrances from Parlement to King, his replies, burning of books by the public executioners, and pastoral letters. Even the Duc de Luynes turns his attention from details of court usage to those of Jansenist deathbeds.

  All the Bishops were not as intransigent as Christophe de Beaumont, and in May 1755 the Assembly of the Clergy met in Paris to decide once and for all whether non-submission to the Bull necessarily meant separation from the Church. The Bishops were divided on the question and the King resolved to ask the Pope for a ruling. This delicate matter was entrusted to Stainville, now ambassador in Rome; it was his first big political opportunity and one of which he made the most. He received his instructions from Versailles via the Marquise, with whom he was in constant correspondence.

  ‘I madly love the Holy Father,’ she wrote, ‘and I hope my prayers are efficacious as I pray for him every day. What he said about the billets de confession is worthy of a pastor who wishes for peace … They seem to be satisfied with your services. M. de Machault is thin and altered. I am doing all I can to be instructed about the well-being of the State.’ In the intervals of thanking for cameos and asking for a piece of the True Cross, and the price of a rose diamond in which to set it – finally she put it in a crystal heart with a cross of rose diamonds – she explained to him that he must somehow get a statement out of the Pope which would, without repudiating the previous Bull, uphold the freedom of the French Church.

  Benedict XIV was an enlightened and scholarly man, very much admired by Voltaire. He had already written to Cardinal de Tencin suggesting that the French clergy might occupy itself with useful and edifying works rather than spend its time squabbling over ragazzate. He and Stainville were on excellent, even joking terms, and understood each other perfectly. On one occasion when Stainville, always very emphatic, was laying down the law, the Pope rose from his throne, and pointing to it he said: ‘Perhaps you would like to sit here?’ Between them they drew up an encyclical, which limited the refusal of the sacraments, but maintained that the bishops had an ultimate right to refuse. ‘In order to avoid a scandal, the priest must warn the dying, suspected of Jansenism, that they will be damned, and then give them communion at their own risk and peril.’

  This encyclical displeased the extremists on both sides; neither the Parlement nor the Jesuits wanted to accept it. On 13 December 1756, the King, however, went to the Palais de Justice, which he was legally entitled to do, and registered the encyclical. He also registered an edict of submission to himself by which he removed certain powers from the two courts known as Enquêtes and Requêtes. Their members immediately went on strike as a protest. The encyclical served its purpose, as far as Jansenist deathbeds were concerned, and from now on they ceased to occupy the attention of the whole country. The King had scored a distinct triumph. He was satisfied with the part played by Stainville and sent him the order of the Saint Esprit. ‘I madly love the Holy Father.’ While Madame de Pompadour was busy learning the affairs of state, she turned her attention to another interest of the King’s, in which it seemed desirable that she should share. During the early days of her life with him, she had studied the story of Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s superb mistress, mother of his children; now she concentrated on that of Madame de Maintenon, the barren but enormously powerful wife of his old age. She read all the biographies of her that she could find, and subscribed to a new one that was being written. The author was advised, if he wished to please his patroness, not to make too much of Louis XIV’s affairs with younger and prettier women. The Duc de Saint-Simon died in 1755 and the manuscript of his memoirs passed into the royal archives; she had all the passages about Madame de Maintenon copied out for her. In those days the history of preceding reigns was not easy of access; most of the relevant letters and diaries were still unpublished, and the Gazette de France was a very rudimentary news sheet (the Versailles correspondent was always one of the King’s musicians). We, today, know much more about the seventeenth century than anybody knew in the eighteenth. Madame Geoffrin, admittedly not very well educated, thought that Henri IV was the son of Henri III until she read Président Hénault’s History of France.

  Madame de Pompadour made one little mistake about her predecessor. She saw old fashioned pictures of an elderly widow all over the palace; she knew that Madame de Maintenon was forty-nine when she married Louis XIV, and too virtuous to have been his mistress before that, and she therefore assumed her hold over the King to have been purely intellectual and religious. She must have forgotten to take the Bourbon temperament into account. We know that when Madame de Maintenon was seventy-five and the King seventy she told her confessor that it tired her very much to make love with him twice a day and asked whether she was obliged to go on doing so. The confessor wrote and put the question to his bishop, who, of course, replied that as a wife she must submit. However, religion and a community of interests had, in fact, been the chief link between Madame de Maintenon and Louis XIV, and it was one which Madame de Pompadour wished to strengthen between herself and her King. She decided that she must become devout so that she and he could have a holy old age together; once again she demonstrated her perfect incomprehension of the Roman Catholic religion.

  She began by going a great deal to the Convent of St Louis, and interesting herself in the young women of poor, but noble, families who were educated there. She also became a regular visitor to St Cyr, so full of august memories, founded by Madame de Maintenon, and the scene of her death. Here the nuns fell under her charm, and the Mother Superior spoke of her as ‘that Vestal.’ She ordered a beautiful Book of Hours, illuminated by Boucher, with a Turris Davidica strangely reminiscent of the three towers on her own coat of arms. Lazare Duvaux, who supplied her with bibelots, was called in to mend her crucifix. Among such items on her account with him as a seal in the form of a negro’s head, decorated with rubies and diamonds, a transparent blind in Italian taffetas, painted with bouquets and garlands, a chocolate box in rock crystal, we find a vessel for holy water in Vincennes china, decorated with cherubs, on black velvet with a gilded frame and destined for the Holy Father whom she loved so madly. She fasted in Lent, which she had never done before, spoke of giving up rouge, which would indeed have been considered a sign of piety; she prayed very often at the tomb of Alexandrine, and her conversation was full of such clichés as ‘revealed religion’, ‘a Christian life’, ‘a state of Grace’. She read holy books and urged Voltaire to translate the Psalms, went every day now to the chapel, sitting downstairs among the ordinary people instead of in her semi-royal box in the gallery, and stayed on long after the service was over, plunged in interminable adoration. Most extraordinary of all, she had the secret staircase between her room and the King’s walled up.

  This spectacular piety was the talk of the Court. The Duc de La Vallière wrote to Voltaire: ‘A ray of grace has fallen, but there is no intoxication. A few little changes bear witness to it. We have given up going to the play, we fast three times a week during Lent … the few moments we can spare for reading are devoted to holy works. Otherwise, charming as ever and quite as powerful, we lead the same life with the same friends, of whom I flatter myself that I am one.’

  The Abbé de Bernis saw fit to talk to her like a nanny: ‘I told her straight out that not one soul was going to be taken in by this play acting,
everybody would say she was nothing but a hypocrite and that as it wasn’t real she would soon be tired of it; that she looks stupid enough now, nothing to what she will when she gives it all up again – she wasn’t pleased.’

  Was it play acting? The most reliable witnesses, Croÿ and Luynes, were not sure. Luynes says she was a sick woman, and that ill health often brings people to God. He says, several times, that no doubt she really wanted to be converted and hoped that grace would come to her if she prayed fervently enough. Croÿ, though puzzled and seeing all the various contradictions, thought there was something in it because of her extremely honest character; he often says that he never knew her to tell a lie about anything. The most likely explanation is that she longed to be converted but was incapable of it. Since the death of her child she had been very unhappy; she saw people all round her deriving consolation from their religion. She also thought it would bring her a new and even closer union with the King; no effort was too great to achieve this and she set about it with determination. Of course an element of frivolity crept in; Madame de Pompadour could never banish that from any of her activities.

  Père de Sacy, a Jesuit, was now sent for. The Marquise explained to him that she wished to make a general confession and go to communion. He replied that this would be difficult. The order to which he belonged had not forgotten that, very soon after they had accorded all these spiritual comforts to Louis XIV, the Comte de Toulouse was born. The royal confessor on that occasion had been the laughing-stock of the palace. But, she said, there was nothing wicked any more between her and the King – see the blocked-up staircase – nothing but friendship, chaste and pure. The father then said that, the scandal of her relationship with the King having been so open, there was only one thing for her to do; she must leave Versailles and go back to her husband. Otherwise the Church would be unable to believe that her conversion was genuine.