After Madame Adélaïde came Mesdames Victoire, Sophie and Louise, not very interesting characters; Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire survived the Revolution and died in exile. There was no question of any of them marrying. The magic of Versailles worked as strongly upon the royal family as it did upon the nobles; to leave its precincts seemed the most dreadful of fates, no crown on earth could compensate for it. A child of France, as they were called, would never have been allowed to marry a subject. The King went to Madame de Pompadour one day in a great rage because he thought he had noticed that a certain young man was in love with Madame Adélaïde who, at seventeen, was exceedingly pretty. This young man soon found himself back on his estates. Madame de Pompadour told her maid that no death would be cruel enough, in the King’s view, for somebody who seduced one of his daughters.
To all outward appearances, the Marquise was on excellent terms with these girls, but they really wanted to get their father away from her. As they grew up they began to have a good deal of influence with him, and but for Madame de Pompadour would have been very powerful indeed. Bigoted, and, like their mother and brother, led by the Jesuits, they were almost more shocked by her friendship with the philosophes than by her relationship with their father. Among themselves they called her ‘Pom-pom’, not an unfriendly little name, and probably were charmed by her when she was there; nevertheless they intrigued against her whenever they saw an opportunity. As for her, with her usual warmth, she encouraged the King to see more and more of his daughters, always arranged for one or other of them to join the voyages, and sat them next to him at meals. She spoke and wrote as if she loved them all dearly. In any case they soon found out that it was useless to cross swords with the Marquise; the King always took her side in the last resort. They had their real revenge after she was dead, when they moved into her two favourite houses and altered them out of all recognition.
Like the King, Madame de Pompadour loved her own family. She was very lucky in her brother. The Marquis de Marigny, a charming and clever man, entirely devoid of ambition, was the exact opposite of the grasping relations who have so often blackened favourites such as Madame de Pompadour in the eyes of posterity. He always refused honours until he felt he had earned them; greatly to her annoyance he always refused the heiresses to whom she hoped to marry him.
‘He writes to me’, she said, angrily, to her maid one day, having just read a letter from him, ‘because he doesn’t dare say it to my face. I had arranged a marriage for him with a certain nobleman’s daughter; he really seemed quite in favour of it and I had given my word to the family. Now he tells me he has heard that the father and mother are arrogant, and the daughter spoilt, that she knows all about the proposed marriage and has spoken of it in terms of the utmost contempt, and that she despises both of us, me even more than him. He says he knows that this is all quite true. Yes – well, perhaps, but these people will be my deadly enemies from now on; he should have thought of it sooner.’ She was very angry indeed with Marigny. However, she arranged another good marriage for the little girl, whose conduct in a very short time forced her to admit that her brother had been quite right.
Shy, modest and unassuming, Marigny saw all the dangers of his position and was fully conscious of its ridiculous side. Indeed this seems to have preyed on his mind almost too much and to have made him too surly and grumpy to the courtiers, who positively detested him. They were furious enough when he was made a Marquis, but his Saint Esprit was almost more than they could endure. ‘Here comes Marinière, with his Cordon Bleu.’ Though devoted to the King, he never cared for Versailles, he was a real Parisian and his life and pleasures were centred in the capital. Very rightly and wisely he refused various ministries proposed to him by his sister, who, as she became more and more involved in politics, would have liked to have his support. He pointed out that it would be sheer folly for him to be in charge of a government department; the moment anything went wrong, she would be doubly blamed. All he wanted was to inherit the post which Tournehem occupied, Intendant of the King’s Buildings; he felt, and rightly, that he would make a success of this job. Indeed, he made a resounding success of it; Marigny’s administration is an important chapter in the history of French art.
In 1749, Madame de Pompadour, realizing that a talented and energetic young man should be given something better to do than kick his heels at the Court, conceived the idea of sending him to study art in Italy. It was clever of her to think of it, and rather original, for unlike the English at that time, Frenchmen seldom travelled; Croÿ says that in all his life he only knew two well-bred men who had been abroad for pleasure (though every artist who could do so, went sooner or later to Italy). She chose, as companions for her brother, the artist and engraver Cochin, the architect Soufflot and the Abbé Leblanc, an art critic, famous in his day; the four of them set off, primed with good advice from her and followed by more good advice which arrived by every post.
‘Don’t imagine that because I am young my advice is worthless. After living here for four and a half years, I have as much experience as a woman of forty.’ She begged him not to make jokes about the various royalties he would meet, or at any rate not to write them to her, as their letters would surely be opened. ‘Be agreeable to everybody’ was the burden of her song. Poisson also wrote saying: ‘Listen to your sister, she may be young but she is very sensible.’ Madame de Pompadour wrote to the Duc de Nivernais, now French ambassador in Rome, where his chief occupation seems to have been trying to keep the works of French writers off the Index. She always called him petit époux (little husband; he had been her husband in a play). ‘My brother leaves in about six weeks – I ask your friendship for him – he deserves that of anybody who appreciates good qualities … He is not at all stupid, but he is too frank, so truthful that sometimes he seems unsympathetic. Curiously enough, this virtue does not pay, at Court. I have suffered from that, and have made a resolution never to tell anybody the truth as long as I live – I only hope I can keep it. My brother is going with a certain Soufflot of Lyons, a very gifted architect, Cochin whom you know, and I think the Abbé Leblanc. Good night, petit époux.’
Nivernais replied: ‘… One thing is lucky for him [Marigny]: they love frankness here, rather as we love that stuff from India which we can’t make at home. So I guess he will have a great success. I can’t say the same for poor Abbé Leblanc; French abbés are not liked in Rome, where they are treated as an enormous joke.’ He ended this letter with a P.S. saying that the King ought to go to Rome for Holy Year (1751); after all, there were precedents as Charlemagne and Charles VIII had both done so.
Marigny was received everywhere in Italy, saw all the reigning princes, had success with the women and made an excellent impression. People put themselves out for him to any extent; Madame de Pompadour writes that this would be quite understandable in ce pays-ci where they might need her help one day, but was most unexpected and gratifying abroad. But the object of this tour was not to see reigning princes and flirt with Italian beauties; it was to become conversant with classical art.
French architecture had been very little dented by either the baroque or the rococo, and it was now moving to a new and even greater severity of line. Madame de Pompadour liked everything that was new and she foresaw that furniture and interior decoration would slowly but surely follow the architecture; she told her brother to bear this constantly in mind and study all the classical remains that he could find. Cochin says that the Italian journey of M. de Marigny and his companions marked a turning point in French art; the turning point in fact from the style of Louis XV, all curves and arabesques, to what we call the style of Louis XVI, but which is also that of a long part of the reign of Louis XV, all straight lines and angles. From the acanthus leaf to the laurel. It is a pity that Madame de Pompadour did not live long enough to direct this new trend, and that it should have fallen into the incompetent hands of the uneducated Madame du Barry and feather-brained Queen Marie-Antoinette.
Towards the
end of the tour, Madame de Pompadour wrote, ‘They say that M. de Tournehem is going to resign when you return, but I hope not. I would do everything in my power to stop him; for one thing it would kill him and then you are really too young, not yet twenty-five, and although you are beginning to know a great deal I think you should be at least twenty-eight or thirty before taking on such a job.’ Hardly, however, had he returned than Tournehem died; so the problem resolved itself and Marigny became director of the King’s buildings. He found that Tournehem had left a flourishing charge. He had put order into the finances, introduced a system of inventories, reformed many abuses, and founded a museum in Paris by opening the royal collections in the Luxembourg to the public. Thanks to M. de Tournehem’s probity and hard work, Marigny was able to develop his new department unhampered by administrative worries.
Poisson’s old age was very happy, owing to his daughter. He thoroughly enjoyed being a country squire, with enough money to indulge the family passion for building. Madame de Pompadour thought of many little ways in which to please him, and wrote to him regularly; she and her daughter Alexandrine were the light of his life. He hardly ever went to Versailles, except to see her act, but he often accompanied the Court to Fontainebleau and Compiègne. In Paris he and M. de Tournehem lived together, and Madame de Baschi kept house for them; when Poisson was at Marigny, M. de Tournehem constantly sent him news of Reinette and Alexandrine.
10
Power
THE KING’S MISTRESS was a traditionally unpopular figure in France. She was also a convenient scapegoat. The French could thus love their monarch, while laying his more unpopular actions at her door. (Marie-Antoinette, who doubled the role of wife and titular mistress, suffered in her turn from this long established attitude.)
After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, Madame de Pompadour became more unpopular every day. The public was displeased by the treaty and indeed, considering the splendid victories of French arms during the past years, it did seem rather unprofitable. Louis XV said he was a king, not a shopkeeper, and refused to make various demands suggested by his ministers. The only advantage it brought to France was a not very exalted establishment for Madame Infante whose husband received the duchy of Parma. ‘As stupid as the Peace,’ said the Parisians, and blamed Madame de Pompadour.
Only those who have known what we call now a bad press can realize what a perpetual source of irritation it is, nearly always, to its victim. Nowadays the victim can at least answer back, with a dignified letter to The Times, or a less dignified libel suit, or he can hire a publicity agent. But the bad press of the eighteenth century was impossible to combat, taking, as it did, the form of horrid little poems and epigrams passed from mouth to mouth, posters, pamphlets and leaflets, all anonymous. Hundreds of these were directed at Madame de Pompadour, they were called the ‘Poissonades’; dull and dirty, they are untranslatable, since they nearly all depend on a play of words round her maiden name. Most of them originated at Court, with courtiers too stupid to realize that in thus attacking the monarch they were casting opprobrium on their own way of life. M. Berryer, the chief of police, a devoted friend of Madame de Pompadour, was crossing the state rooms at Versailles one day when he was rudely stopped by a group of courtiers who asked him how it was he could not run to earth the authors of the libels. ‘You ought to know Paris better,’ they said. He gave them a sharp look and said he knew Paris like the palm of his hand, but was not so much at home at Versailles. The Parisians lapped up the Poissonades, added to them and eagerly distributed them; the King was not spared and the two names were bandied about with evil intent. Nothing they could do was right. If they entertained they were wasting money, if they did not it was her fault because she wanted to prevent him from meeting other women. When they built the house at Bellevue, they were abused by half the public for spending too much, and by the other half for building such a wretched little house, smaller than that of a fermier général.
Each taxpayer felt that her houses, furniture and works of art were paid for out of his own pocket, and to make matters worse, her taste was for small things of an impermanent nature. Instead of great monuments like those of Louis XIV, the King’s money was being frittered away on such toys as little wooden pavilions in the forest, built and furnished with amazing elegance, surrounded with large groves of exotic trees, and aviaries of tropical birds, visited once or twice and then taken down again so that the next year it was impossible to see where they had been. Croÿ describes a visit to Trianon with the King, who showed him the hothouses, the rare plants, the hens (which he specially liked), the charming pavilion, the flower and the vegetable gardens; all arranged so prettily. Croÿ is full of admiration, but deplores the fact that Madame de Pompadour should have given the King ‘an unfortunate taste for expensive little things which cannot last’. This view was shared by the public. Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.
* * *
When the Marquise first arrived at Versailles she had four implacable enemies there, the Duc de Richelieu, the brothers d’Argenson (the Marquis and the Comte), and the Comte de Maurepas. The last three were ministers, of bourgeois antecedents, sons of ministers in the government of Louis XIV. The Marquis d’Argenson, already out of favour, was sent away in 1747, more through the influence of Madame Infante than that of Madame de Pompadour. He was not disgraced, since he was allowed to resign, but he left the Court and would never have been heard of again had he not kept a diary. Unfortunately for Madame de Pompadour, since it is largely devoted to envenoming her memory, this diary is far the wittiest and best written of the memoirs of her contemporaries. However, d’Argenson overdoes it and the reader ends by hardly believing a word he says. He is one of those diarists who are fond of prophesying and whose prophecies never seem to come true. The King is getting tired of her, she has completely lost her looks: old, yellow, faded and withered, her teeth have gone black, her neck is all scales, her bosom a terrible sight, she is spitting blood: the King cannot bear to go near her, she disgusts him, he will send her away and go to live with his family. Everything she touches turns to ruin, and so on. At the same time the other diarists, who, after all, lived at Versailles and saw her every day, entirely contradict him; they record that never has she been prettier, gayer, or the King more in love, and everything she does is delicious and delightful.
D’Argenson, scribbling furiously away in the country, was no menace to Madame de Pompadour in her lifetime, but the other two politicians were. Maurepas was the first to show his claws. He was a minister of thirty-one years’ standing, at this time Minister of the Marine, and he had enormous influence with the King, who had, of course, known him from a child. He was a most entertaining, lively fellow, who roared with laughter, especially at his own jokes; except for the Duc de Richelieu, he amused the King more than anybody. Writing in his journal the best account we have of Madame de Pompadour’s presentation at Court, he adds: ‘She is excessively common, a bourgeoise out of her proper place, who will displace everybody if she is not soon herself displaced.’
It was his aim to see that this should happen, as quickly as possible. But, so far from her being displaced, he found her daily becoming more powerful. She was nearly always present when he saw the King; she would not hesitate to burst in, when they were working together, with some such request as the cancellation of a lettre de cachet issued by Maurepas. Should he venture an objection, the King always took her side: ‘Do what Madame suggests, please.’ None of the mistresses had liked Maurepas but none had dared to treat him in such a way. ‘M. de Maurepas,’ she said, on one occasion, ‘you are turning the King yellow. Good day to you, M. de Maurepas.’ The King said nothing, and Maurepas was obliged to gather up his papers and go.
His revenge was to heap ridicule on her, to imitate her bourgeois ways as soon as her back was turned, and to invent Poissonades. He was an accomplished rhymester; all the m
ost spiteful and beastly of these were attributed to his pen. Madame de Pompadour was determined to get rid of him, but Maurepas, quite well aware of this, was not at all alarmed; he thought himself indispensable to the King. This was a misapprehension under which each of Louis XV’s ministers suffered in turn; it is very curious to see how little they seem to have understood the circumstances of their predecessors’ exits. The King was too shy, he hated any form of embarrassment too much, ever to hint that somebody was displeasing him. He would let matters go on until, having had enough, he would strike with a dreadful swiftness; a letter of dismissal and banishment, couched in freezing terms, would be delivered to the unsuspecting offender.
In 1749, more and more hateful verses were being whispered round the Court until finally Madame de Pompadour, sitting down to supper, found, in her napkin, the famous quatrain:
Par vos façons nobles et franches,
Iris, vous enchantez nos cœurs;
Sur nos pas vous semez des fleurs
Mais ce ne sont que des fleurs blanches.
The disgusting implication of this rhyme, that Madame de Pompadour suffered from fluor albus, whether true or not, was perfectly clear to all who read it and the Marquise, usually rather philosophical about such things, was thoroughly upset. Dr Quesnay went to the King and said the whole affair was preying on her mind and making her ill; indeed she now had a miscarriage, followed by one of her attacks of fever. She told the King that she was thoroughly frightened, Maurepas would murder her, she said, as, some thought, he had murdered Madame de Châteauroux. But the King still hesitated to dismiss him. He was fond of Maurepas, old friend of all his life; he enjoyed working with him, and thought him good at his work. Above all, he loved his jokes. Madame de Pompadour made a temporary alliance with Richelieu over this affair; Son Excellence hated the minister even more than he hated the mistress and for the same jealous reasons.