The queen was all too aware of her husband’s philandering, even complaining to her father about Louis’ repeated infidelities. As he worked his way through his first four mistresses, a quartet of siblings (the Mailly-Nesle sisters), she salved her wounded heart in philanthropy and piety. On the other hand, she claimed to endure her husband’s lovemaking because it was her duty to submit, so how much fun could the woman have been as a bedfellow? If Marie was looking for ways to chase him from her boudoir, she surely found them, by waking several times a night to complain of the cold, or to look for her lapdog, or to fret about the ghosts that might be haunting the room, which necessitated the presence of a trusted maidservant to sit by the bed and reassuringly hold her hand. Louis was also a libidinous man living in the most licentious of eras. A Catholic, to be sure, but a man of strong passions, who for the sake of his kingdom, like most royals, hadn’t the freedom to choose his wife, nor wed for love.
In 1744, eleven years after he took his first lover, Louis decided to personally take command of his army, leaving Versailles to fight the War of the Austrian Succession. His mistress of the moment, the youngest Mailly-Nesle sister, the formidable redheaded duchesse de Châteauroux, insisted on meeting up with him at Metz. But Louis became gravely ill, and it was touch-and-go as to whether he would survive. For safety’s sake, so his soul would not go to hell, he had to confess and be shriven. This meant he would have to dismiss his mistress with whom he had been living in adultery. The duchesse would be exiled from court, never to return, although by then it was assumed the king was about to die anyway.
Unfortunately for those who were so eager to get the favorite out of the way, Louis recovered. He deeply regretted the sacrifice of his beloved and didn’t forgive those who had compelled him to dismiss her. The incident at Metz changed the king; henceforth he chose temporal solace over the spiritual. He would not make his confession again until thirty years later, when he was clearly at death’s door, and even then he delayed the event until the last possible moment.
When he decided to recall the duchesse de Châteauroux to the royal bosom, it was too late. She had only a day or two to gloat before she caught a cold and died. Louis was bereft.
For surviving the illness at Metz, Louis earned the epithet le Bien-Aimé (the Well Loved). From 1745 to 1748, his armies made tremendous strides on the continent, triumphantly conquering the land known as the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), and further cementing his renown.
Yet Louis shocked his subjects in 1748 by deciding in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to restore his Austrian territorial gains to the Hapsburgs, declaring that he was perfectly content to maintain and cultivate his square field (as he defined France) rather than expand it, averring that he made peace “as a king and not as a merchant.” His bold statement even impressed some of his detractors and won him a reputation as the “arbiter of Europe.”
Diplomatically, Louis might have been taking the deathbed advice of Louis XIV to heart, but his personal life was a mess. The Well Loved loved too well, and often unwisely, which hastened the demise of his popularity. His personal debauchery, as well as the licentiousness of his court and its extravagance, were harshly criticized in an era of increasing hard times for the poor and the bourgeoisie. His reputation was further and more irreparably tarnished by the costly and unpopular conflict known as the Seven Years’ War that was sparked in 1755, when Great Britain violated international law by seizing three hundred French merchant ships. It ended up being fought on two continents from 1756 to 1763.
France lost a good deal of territory in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. By the Treaty of Paris, concluded in 1763, France handed over to Britain all lands in North America east of the Mississippi, as well as all French territories in India. Spain received France’s lands west of the Mississippi.
Public discontent with Louis grew. He was neither an inept nor an incompetent monarch, but he was a vacillator who avoided dealing with anything unpleasant. The excesses of his court were no greater than those of Louis XIV or of his rival monarchs Catherine the Great of Russia or Prussia’s Frederick the Great. But the scurrilous propaganda that spread about his powerful mistress Madame de Pompadour, beginning in the mid-1740s, gave the public a skewed and distorted image of his reign.
Perpetual criticism from the Parlements only inflamed matters. On March 28, 1757, a mentally deranged man named Robert-François Damiens, who had once worked as a menial at the Paris Parlement, attempted to assassinate the king as he walked across the Marble Courtyard of Versailles. Luckily for Louis, it was an exceptionally chilly evening and he was wearing several layers of clothing, so the blade of Damiens’ knife did not severely injure him. The king asked that his attacker be imprisoned and not executed, but the Parlement enforced the traditional punishment: an exceptionally medieval torture followed by a gruesome public execution.
Louis was roundly criticized for being too passive, for permitting his ministers, and even his mistresses (or so it was publicly perceived), to push him around. He hated to make decisions for fear of seeming unpopular. And he did nothing to dispel his negative publicity, never fighting back. Three of his mistresses, the duchesse de Châteauroux, and Mesdames de Pompadour and du Barry, imbued him with self-confidence in his capabilities and instincts, and in his own sense of judgment. In the plus column of his reign, Louis recognized that France’s real threat on the European continent was not her age-old enemy Austria, but Prussia. To that end, his chief minister, the duc de Choiseul, brokered a historical alliance with the Hapsburgs that paved the way for one of the most famous unions of all times: the marriage of Louis’ grandson and heir, Louis Auguste, with the youngest daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, Archduchess Maria Antonia, who would come to be known as Marie Antoinette. It was a diplomatic coup: A Franco-Austrian alliance would make Prussia think twice about aggressively engaging France.
Toward the end of his reign, Louis finally took control of his own government and disbanded the corrupt and antiprogressive Parlements, whose perpetual refusal to register his taxation orders further mired the treasury in debt. He engaged a workaholic chancellor and a finance minister who didn’t care about becoming unpopular and insisted that the nobles and the clergy finally pay their fair share of taxes.
Unfortunately, these reforms all took place in the final months of Louis XV’s life. His successor, the nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, dismissed his competent ministers and recalled the former corrupt Parlement. As a result, all of the fiscal reforms that Louis XV had begun to effect were immediately reversed, causing lasting, irreparable damage to the financial health of France.
The king contracted smallpox in the final week of April 1774. He died on May 10, and his infection-riddled corpse was rushed with little fanfare to Saint-Denis.
His fifty-nine-year reign is the second-longest in French history, surpassed only by his predecessor, Louis XIV. Louis XV had gone from the Bien-Aimé to the reviled—no longer loved, but so scorned that his subjects jeered his coffin as it passed.
LOUIS XV AND
JEANNE-ANTOINETTE POISSON, MARQUISE DE POMPADOUR (1721–1764)
At five years old, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, with her bouncing brown curls and perfect oval face, was answering to the nickname “Reinette” (little queen). Four years later the family jest was pegged as her destiny when her mother brought her to visit the celebrated Parisienne seer Madame Lebon.
As an adult, Jeanne-Antoinette would later confide to her good friend François-Marie Arouet (better known as Voltaire) that Madame Lebon’s prediction had struck her like a thunderbolt. And at the end of her life, the marquise would remember the fortune-teller in her will, leaving “[s]ix hundred livres to Madame Lebon for having told her at the age of nine that she would one day be the mistress of Louis XV.”
Nevertheless, at the time it was made, such a prediction would have seemed like an impossibility. Kings’ mistresses came from the nobility, not the bourgeoisie, or middle class, the social strat
a into which Jeanne-Antoinette had been born. François Poisson (though rumors abounded even then that he was not her biological father, despite his acceptance of her paternity) worked for the Pâris brothers, the quartet of financiers who kept France afloat and provisioned her army with food and munitions.
But in 1726, Poisson was compelled to flee the country, the scapegoat in a scheme to speculate on wheat. His wife received a formal separation from him the following year. While he remained in exile for nearly a decade, Madame Poisson and Jeanne-Antoinette’s godfather, the wealthy fermier général (tax collector) Charles Le Normant de Tournehem (who was likely one of Madeleine Poisson’s lovers), schooled the young bourgeoise for the lofty role Madame Lebon had foretold. They exposed the teenage Jeanne-Antoinette to sophisticated Parisian society and the conversation of the most exclusive salons, and provided her with an expensive education. Private tutors at the top of their professions in the arts taught her music, acting, singing, declamation, and the traditional womanly pursuits. By the time she turned eighteen she had become quite a beauty, slender, taller than average, with an enviably flawless complexion, excellent teeth (another rarity), and eyes of a changeable green-gray-blue color that were already being complimented for their intelligence and depth. She was elegant, poised, cultivated, charming and amusing, and a witty conversationalist.
On March 9, 1741, at the age of nineteen, Jeanne-Antoinette wed her godfather’s twenty-four-year-old nephew, Charles-Guillaume Le Normant. Monsieur de Tournehem set the young couple up very nicely, giving them a townhome in Paris and the country estate of Etioles at the edge of the forest of Sénart, not far from the Château de Choisy, which Louis XV had just purchased as a hunting lodge. Consequently, many noblemen began to spend time in the area, and the lovely chatelaine of Etioles, known for her vibrant house parties, did not go unnoticed.
Jeanne-Antoinette’s marriage provided her with an entrée to Paris’s social elite: libertine clergy, artists, financiers, men of letters, and magistrates of the Parlement.
Madame d’Etioles’ first child, a son, was born in December, but died in 1742. On August 10, 1744, she gave birth to a daughter, Alexandrine, who would eventually be placed in a posh convent to derive the benefits of a fine education. By the time Alexandrine was born, Jeanne-Antoinette had become the perfect package for a royal mistress, except for the matter of her low birth.
Fortunately, she had relations in high places. Monsieur de Tournehem played fairy godfather, placing Jeanne-Antoinette in the king’s path as often as possible and arranging for his nephew to receive a plum job as a fermier général far, far away, his assignments keeping him on the road in Grenoble and Provence. One of Louis’ valets, Binet, was a distant relative of Madame d’Etioles; he coached her on where to stand so she might catch the thirty-five-year-old king’s eye as he strode through the palace of Versailles. Louis’ other valet, Monsieur Lebel, who was one of His Majesty’s chief procurers of nubile young girls, had once been a lover of Madame Poisson’s. These were not the classiest references, but they stood Jeanne-Antoinette in better stead than most other hopeful aspirants to the king’s bedchamber. And a pretty, poised, and sophisticated young lady who was anything but a jaded aristocrat was the perfect tonic for a man who craved diversion.
For by then, Louis XV was bored yellow; everyone at court knew his pallor would grow jaundiced when he was beset with ennui. In 1725, at the age of fifteen, he had married Marie Leszczyńska, a dull Polish princess seven years his senior, and got right down to the business of begetting an heir. It was said he honored her with proofs of his love no fewer than seven times on their wedding night. To the shock of his courtiers, Louis actually fell in love with his bland and pious queen and didn’t even consider taking a mistress, convinced by his confessor that if he did so he would be forever consigned to the flames of hell—or at least, he would be if he took a lover before he sired a son.
He didn’t stray for a decade, and by the time he was twenty-seven he had ten children to show for it. But Queen Marie couldn’t keep pace with the Bourbon libido and was sick of always being pregnant. Toujours coucher, toujours grosse, toujours accoucher—always in bed, always pregnant, always giving birth, she would grumble. Finally, she began to invent excuses to keep her randy husband from her bed—Sundays and holy days, for example, were out. Finally, after ten children and too many excuses, in 1738 they ceased sleeping together entirely. Louis became exasperated and turned to the eldest of the five aristocratic Mailly-Nesle sisters. Buxom, homely, and grasping, four of these women in turn became his maîtresse en titre, with the last of them, the youngest, prettiest, greediest, and nastiest of the quintet, Marie Anne de Mailly, Madame de Châteauroux, dying in 1744.
The post of maîtresse declarée thus became vacant. The field lay open for Jeanne-Antoinette, Madame d’Etioles, to fulfill her destiny. Wearing a petal-pink gown and driving through the forest of Sénart in a sky blue phaeton, or gowned in baby blue and holding the ribbons of a pastel pink chariot, the young woman with the waist-length ash blond hair, oval face, and doll-like mouth had already caught the king’s eye, making sure to accidentally-on-purpose cross paths with his hunting party. And more than the king took notice. As “la dame en rose” and “la petite Etioles,” she was hardly invisible to the snooty courtiers.
The king’s two greatest passions were hunting and women, and by the early weeks of 1745, only one of those itches was being adequately scratched.
By the time they met, Louis was already considered the handsomest man in France. Tall with sparkling black eyes, he had a husky timbre to his voice and a way of looking at people that was described as “caressing.” And no less a connoisseur than Casanova described Louis as having “a ravishingly handsome head…No painter, even very skillful, could sketch the movement of this monarch’s head when he turned to look at someone. One felt compelled to love him instantly…. I was certain that Madame de Pompadour had fallen in love with that face.”
No one has been able to pinpoint the exact date when the first overtures were made. But by February 25, 1745, at a masquerade to be forever immortalized as the Yew Tree Ball, one of the numerous celebrations in honor of the dauphin’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa Rafaela, the king and the petite bourgeoise were seen dancing all night together—and it was commonly known that His Majesty didn’t even like to dance. To preserve his incognito, Louis and eleven of his companions had burst through the doors of the Hall of Mirrors midmasquerade, identically dressed as taffeta-leafed topiaries. But Madame d’Etioles, clad as the goddess Diana, carrying a miniature bow and arrow, with a diamond crescent moon adorning her hair, had already been tipped off as to which tree was His Most Christian Majesty. The king purportedly greeted her with a jolly, “Fair huntress, happy are those who are pierced by your darts; their wounds are mortal.”
Before the ball ended, the lady dropped her handkerchief at Louis’ feet in a symbolic gesture—a tantalizing dare. The king picked it up and raised it to his lips, then pressed it to his bosom, in full view of his guests. And up rose the murmur, “Le mouchoir est jeté”—“The handkerchief is thrown!”
The following evening, after dancing the night away at a public ball in Paris, both incognito in black dominos, they disappeared into a private supper room. After dining, they hailed an unmarked hackney. “Where to?” the king inquired of his new conquest. “Home to mother!” came the reply.
The monarch finally arrived at Versailles, somewhat disheveled, at nine the following morning. Throughout the following week Madame d’Etioles’ carriage was seen numerous times on the road between Paris and Versailles as well as in the palace courtyard. With the exception of military campaigns that would take him abroad, Louis XV would not be separated from her for the next two decades.
When Jeanne-Antoinette had wed in 1741, she’d promised her husband, only half in jest, that the only man who could ever induce her to cheat on him would be the king. Ha-ha-ha, Monsieur d’Etioles chuckled, chucking his pretty wife under
the chin. But in the winter of 1745, when the royal romance began to blossom, after Charles-Guillaume returned from another distant business trip, it fell to Le Normant de Tournehem to break the news to his nephew. He did so by explaining that “he could no longer count on his wife, that she had such a violent predilection for the King that she could not resist, and that there was no other part for him than to separate from her.”
Unfortunately for Jeanne-Antoinette, her spouse was no mari complaisant. He fell into a dead faint at the news and, upon his recovery, wrote a sad little letter begging Jeanne-Antoinette to return to him. When she refused, urging him to understand the situation, he took the high road and declined thenceforth either to take her back or to speak with her again. Jeanne-Antoinette committed the faux pas of showing his letter to the king. Louis surprised and somewhat embarrassed her by responding, “Your husband seems to be a very decent sort of man, Madame.”
Monsieur d’Etioles’ emotional reaction to his wife’s royal liaison compelled the king to make a decision about the affair: Was it serious or merely a fling? The king chose to pursue the romance, and Monsieur d’Etioles was subsequently persuaded to accept a formal separation. He remained discreetly out of the way as a fermier général in Grenoble for the remainder of Jeanne-Antoinette’s life, and she saw to it that he always received any legal or financial aid that he might need.
According to Voltaire, Jeanne-Antoinette “always had a secret presentiment that she would be loved by the king, and…she had felt a violent inclination for him…. The king noticed her, and often sent her presents of roebucks. Her mother never stopped telling her that she was prettier than any of the king’s mistresses, and the bonhomme Tournehem often exclaimed: ‘One must admit that the daughter of Madame Poisson is a morsel fit for a King.’ In short, when she finally held the king in her arms, she told me that she had firmly believed in her destiny, and that she had been proved right.”
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 16