Madame de Pompadour

  We only know of one occasion when she was actively concerned with these pleasures of the King. She sent for Madame du Hausset, who found her alone with him, and said: ‘I want you to spend a few days at a house in the Avenue de St Cloud, where you will find a young woman about to have a baby. You must take charge of the household; preside, like a goddess in a fable, over the birth; be present at the christening and give the names of the father and mother.’

  Here the King began to laugh, saying: ‘The father is a very good sort of fellow.’ ‘Loved by all,’ said Madame de Pompadour, ‘and adored by those who know him.’ She took a diamond aigrette out of a little cupboard, and showed it to the King; ‘I thought it should not be too grand.’ ‘How good you are,’ he said, kissing her. Her eyes filled with tears and she laid her hand on his heart, saying: ‘That’s what I want’; whereupon they all began to cry. Presently the King spoke of godparents for the baby, saying: ‘Better get two people out of the street, so as not to attract attention, and give them a few livres.’

  ‘Oh, give them a louis,’ said the Marquise, ‘or it will really seem too little.’ The King said: ‘Do you remember the cab driver? I wanted to give him a louis but the Duc d’Ayen said we should be recognized if I did.’ Perhaps they had another little cry after this touching reminiscence. He then gave fifty louis to Madame du Hausset, saying: ‘Look after the mother, won’t you? She’s a good girl, though not particularly brilliant.’

  Madame du Hausset went off to the address she had been given, and here she found one of the King’s menservants, already known to her, the ‘abbesse’ or matron in charge, a nurse, three old servants and a between-maid. The expectant mother, pretty and well-dressed, was very much pleased with Madame de Pompadour’s aigrette. When the child, a boy, was born, it was taken away and its mother was told that it was a girl, and dead. But later on it seems to have been given back to her. Madame du Hausset says that these children received a good income, which they inherited from each other, most of them dying young; seven or eight, she adds, had already died.

  After the French Revolution, when the monarchy was being blackened in every possible way, fabulous stories were told about the Parc aux Cerfs. It was said to have been a harem fit for a sultan, the scene of orgies without name, and to have cost the country millions. In fact, it was a modest little private brothel, run on humane and practical lines.

  Madame de Pompadour’s new apartment, where she now established herself and lived for the rest of her life, had once housed Madame de Montespan. It now belonged to the widow of her second son, the Comte de Toulouse. The Toulouse family were by far the most human of all Louis XV’s relations, and Madame de Toulouse, born a Noailles and married for love, was the nearest thing to a mother he had ever known. She was the only woman at Versailles who could go and see him without being announced; she even had the key to his study where the most secret papers were kept.

  Now there was a general reshuffle of lodgings. Madame de Toulouse moved into the flat of her son, the Duc de Penthièvre, and his wife. The Penthièvres were given that of the Duc d’Orléans, who had just died. The Duc d’Ayen got Madame de Pompadour’s old flat on the second floor.

  Everybody seems to have been delighted by the new arrangement, except the King’s daughters, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire, who, now that they were grown up, had wanted the Toulouse apartment for themselves. Some said that Madame de Pompadour had been very clever in preventing this. Had the King got into the habit of going down one staircase to see his daughters they might have stopped him going up another to see his mistress. In this matter the Queen surprised the Court by taking Madame de Pompadour’s side against Mesdames. She was jealous, and not very fond of them; it was the Dauphin whom she loved so much. Unfortunately for Versailles, the King was determined to have the Princesses near his own rooms; he pulled down the beautiful Ambassadors’ Staircase, designed by Le Vau, with frescoes by Lebrun, and built an apartment for them in its place.

  Madame de Pompadour’s ground-floor apartment has been entirely destroyed. When Louis-Philippe turned Versailles into a museum he altered the shapes of these rooms, took down the panelling and stored it in the cellar. Madame de Pompadour, who hated Prussians so much, would not have been surprised to learn that all the carving done for her by Verberckt ended up in stoves to keep the German soldiers warm in 1870. One of her rooms was panelled in red lacquer by the Martins; she liked it better than any she had ever had. Altogether the work took a year. Among other things the drains had to be entirely renewed; a huge marble bath, old-fashioned even in Madame de Montespan’s day, dating from the time when two or three people liked bathing together, was removed and made into a fountain at the Hermitage. Twenty-two men could hardly lift it. (They were always tinkering about with the bathrooms at Versailles – there were 250 altogether in the palace – and on one occasion when the Queen’s was out of commission for some reason, she sent a message asking if she could use one of the King’s; this was immediately accorded.)

  Madame de Pompadour had set her heart upon moving into her new flat after the voyage to Fontainebleau in 1751, and she bullied and teased M. de Tournehem to have it ready for her by then. He in his turn bullied and teased the foreman; their letters still exist and evoke all the difficulties of trying to get workmen out of a house, all the horrors of a move. ‘Much more to be done than we expected; floors and chimneys are in a bad state; the carpenter never sends anything when he says he will; none of the built-in cupboards have come, so the painters cannot get on with their work.’ Who has not had these things to contend with? Only – the carpenter was Verberckt and the painters were the Martins. Madame de Pompadour sent M. de Gontaut to see how it was getting on, but his report cannot have been very encouraging. In the end, she only moved in after Christmas. Then she complained that she could hear everything that went on in the state apartments overhead, so while she was at Compiègne the flooring was taken up and stuffed with gun cotton and flock. M. de Tournehem’s last job as Intendant des Bâtiments was to arrange this palatial apartment for his niece; he died just before she moved into it.

  * * *

  The clique at Versailles whose avowed aim was to get rid of Madame de Pompadour were furious to see her so splendidly housed in a semi-royal apartment; and this against all their calculations. For 1751, Holy Year, was by way of being a difficult time for the Marquise, and her enemies had long centred their hopes on it. A wave of religious hysteria swept the land; the Jesuits thundered in the pulpits against immorality; in Paris the penitents heard Mass in sixty different churches, and were supposed to take part in at least five processions; the Dauphin and his sisters, buried in devotion, prayed night and day for the soul of their father. No doubt the Queen prayed too, but her prayers may have been modified by a certain spirit of realism. ‘Madame de Pompadour had fever yesterday and was bled,’ she wrote to Madame de Luynes at this time. ‘I was terribly frightened, and not only, I must confess, from charitable motives.’

  There was a great deal of speculation as to whether the King would, or would not, faire son jubilé, in other words, communicate at Easter; and the efforts of all the priests at the Court were directed at making him do so. Their hopes rose when he announced that he would not leave Versailles at all during Lent, and even altered his hunting days in order to hear the sermons. He particularly appreciated those of Père Griffet, which were well-composed and only lasted three-quarters of an hour.

  At the end of Lent, while this moral offensive was at its height, Madame de Mailly died. After her sister had driven her from the Court, she had lived only for God and good works, had worn a hair shirt and had mortified the flesh in every possible way. She was exactly the King’s age, forty-one; he became very thoughtful on hearing of her death and wanted to hear all the holy details of her latter years. These things, coming together at a time when Madame de Pompadour said herself that she had lost her physical hold over him, were considered to be very dangerous for her, and the courtiers awaited developments with a breat
hless interest. Nothing whatever happened. The Queen performed her Easter duties one day, the Dauphin and the Dauphine on another and then the Princesses; but the King did not.

  As soon as Lent was over, the little voyages began again as usual; the King and the Marquise collected the eggs and visited the goats, they gambled, he hunted and together they planned the decoration of her new rooms. There was rather an unsuccessful season of the private theatre at Bellevue. The Duc de La Vallière was not too sure of his words; but on the other hand M. de La Salle sang charmingly and was rewarded with the governorship of a province – a piece of news very badly received by various Marshals of France who would have liked the job.

  A more serious occupation was the project for the Ecole Militarie. This was entirely Madame de Pompadour’s idea, to show the soldiers that the King took a true interest in them and their welfare. The old and disabled had already been provided for at the Invalides by Louis XIV; now, within a stone’s throw, his descendant would create an establishment for theirs. The cradle and the grave of heroes, side by side. Five hundred boys, sons of officers whose families had a claim to nobility, were to be taken at the age of eight and given a general education, to include Latin and foreign languages. At eighteen, they would receive commissions in the army. Madame de Pompadour had arranged the financial side of her scheme with Pâris-Duverney, who put up the money for it; he was to be repaid by the profits on a lottery and a tax on playing-cards. The King approved the plan, and it now remained for M. Gabriel to do his part. He was given a studio over the Réservoirs at Versailles; here he made an enormous model of the school, which was to be built on the Plaine de Grenelle, with its grounds extending to the river. Very soon, stone brought by the Oise and wood by the Marne came floating down the Seine, to be unloaded and dumped on the future Champ-de-Mars. Building proceeded apace, and in five years the first batch of little boys was housed there. The whole project was only completed in 1770; in 1784 the name of Buonaparte, Napoleone, appeared on the register, as having arrived for his first term, aged fifteen. Owing to money troubles the Ecole Militaire was only one-third of its intended size, but even so, nobody would ever be able to say again that Louis XV had not left a durable monument to posterity.

  14

  The Affaire Choiseul-Romanet

  THE CHURCH HAVING failed to separate King and Marquise, in spite of the spiritual power so impressively displayed during Holy Year, Madame de Pompadour’s enemies saw that their only hope now lay in another woman. A pretty face, cleverly manoeuvred, must do their work for them. Her chief enemy, the most dangerous and the most determined, was still the Comte d’Argenson, and he was seconded by Madame d’Estrades.

  This cousin and bosom friend whom Madame de Pompadour had brought with her to Versailles now began to show her true colours; she was not very nice. She seems to have been eaten up with jealousy. In spite of daily acts of kindness and countless privileges received at the hands of the Marquise the horrible little creature turned on her friend almost from the beginning. First of all, though excessively plain, with her pendulous cheeks, she tried to worm herself into the King’s bed. One night at Choisy, when Madame de Pompadour was ill upstairs, the King got very drunk – a thing which seldom happened – and Madame d’Estrades had him to herself for an hour or two. He never could remember afterwards what had occurred but she did not fail to tell the Marquise that she had been obliged to fight for her honour.

  After this Madame d’Estrades began to plot with d’Argenson against Madame de Pompadour, carrying tales, making trouble, dangerous as only an intimate friend can be. She became d’Argenson’s mistress and soon she was the most powerful woman in France, except for the Marquise herself; those who, like the Prince de Croÿ, had affaires to prosecute were obliged to be very assiduous in their attentions to her. Some people liked her, Croÿ for one. She was clever and amusing, and knew the Court inside out; her love for d’Argenson was certainly quite genuine. But nothing can excuse her behaviour to Madame de Pompadour.

  The Marquise continued to trust her, even after the episode at Choisy, and never believed those who uttered words of warning. She made the King appoint her lady-in-waiting to Madame Adélaïde, a post which brought a good income and greatly increased her importance at Versailles. In 1752, when the Court barometer was still registering stormy days ahead for the Marquise, Madame d’Estrades and d’Argenson saw a chance of getting rid of her. If they could do so they thought that their influence with the King would be so great that they would really be the rulers of France.

  Some years before, Madame d’Estrades had arranged a marriage between a young cousin of her own, a Mademoiselle Romanet, and a member of the aristocratic Choiseul family. Madame de Pompadour, to whom the most remote family connexions, even the cousin of a cousin of her husband, were always dear, had arranged a wedding party for the young people at Bellevue. She had lent them the house for their honeymoon, had given them sumptuous presents, and thereafter had been kindness itself to them. Entirely owing to her they became members of the King’s little set, often went on the voyages, were invited to the supper parties and so on; they had a much better time than most young couples at the Court.

  The bride, a pretty little prattler, hardly out of her nursery, amused the King, and Croÿ says in his journal that it was perhaps not very wise of Madame de Pompadour to throw them together quite so much. A great deal of amorous ragging went on, and Madame de Choiseul was heard to say that never would she leave her husband, except, of course, for the King. She was not the first to have expressed this sentiment. In fact the King was very much taken with her. She kept him on a string and kept Madame d’Estrades informed of her progress, hour by hour. Madame d’Estrades knew him well enough to know exactly how he should be managed; and she conducted this vicarious affair brilliantly. She told the little girl what she must do, adding that it was essential for her to make Madame de Pompadour’s exile a first condition of surrender. Things reached a climax during the autumn voyage to Fontainebleau. The King had twisted his knee on a dark staircase leading to Madame de Choiseul’s room, without any reward; he was getting cross and impatient, the time had clearly come for the angel to fall.

  While the angel was thought to be engaged in doing so, Madame d’Estrades and d’Argenson were waiting impatiently in the Minister’s room. Dr Quesnay, and Dubois, d’Argenson’s secretary who described the scene to Marmontel, also happened to be there. At last the door burst open, in came Madame de Choiseul, very much rumpled, no doubt at all as to what had been happening to her, and flung herself into Madame d’Estrades’ arms. ‘Yes, yes, I am loved, he is happy, she is to be sent away.’ All were delighted, except Dr Quesnay.

  D’Argenson said to him: ‘But, Doctor, this will make no difference whatever to you – you will stay on at the Court.’ ‘Me, M. le Comte?’ said the doctor shortly, as he got up to go, ‘I stick to Madame de Pompadour, fair or foul’, and he left. D’Argenson looked rather worried, but Madame d’Estrades said: ‘He’ll never give us away, I know him too well to think that.’ She was quite right, Quesnay could be counted on never to give anybody away. But all the same, their plans were defeated.

  A new character now came into Madame de Pompadour’s life, who was soon to play an enormous part in it. This was the Comte de Stainville, another member of the Choiseul family (known to history as the Duc de Choiseul, which he became in 1758). He was the brother-in-law of M. de Gontaut, Madame de Pompadour’s friend from Etioles days, who was for ever telling these two how well they would get on; indeed given their characters it seemed that they must rejoice in each other’s company. Greatly to Gontaut’s disappointment, however, they at first particularly disliked each other. Stainville went but seldom to Versailles, he was a Parisian by inclination and a soldier by profession; he only paid his court to the King when duty obliged him to do so.

  It so happened that he was at Fontainebleau during this fateful voyage, and had observed the conduct of his young cousin with a good deal of disgust; he was proud of hi
s family name and had no wish to see it dragged in the mud. One of the greatest lady killers of the century, he was on semi-flirtatious terms with Madame de Choiseul and she, either to make herself more interesting in his eyes, or because she was not quite certain of her next move, took him into her confidence and showed him a letter from the King. It was very long, left no doubt as to their relationship and was full of promises to send away Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Choiseul assumed that Stainville would be only too delighted to see her installed as a titular mistress; few cousins at that Court would have objected to a relationship so greatly to the advantage of the family concerned. When he asked if he could keep the letter until next day, to think it over, the little goose consented.

  Stainville’s motives in this matter are rather mysterious. Was he really so much preoccupied with the honour of the Choiseuls? Was he himself in love with the young lady? Or did he see that the opportunity of a lifetime had come his way? With Madame de Choiseul installed as the King’s mistress he would have had every opportunity of feathering his nest. But money was of less interest to him than to most people, since his wife was one of the richest women in France. If he had already turned his thoughts to power he may have considered that his silly little cousin would never be much help in achieving that. Be it as it may, he put the letter into his pocket and went off to find M. de Gontaut, who, like everybody else by then, could talk of nothing but the affaire Choiseul-Romanet. Madame de Pompadour, he said, was in a perfectly frantic state of mind over it, and the faithful fellow was very much distressed on her account. His brother-in-law let fall a great many mysterious hints; he had it in his power, he said, to put an end to her anxiety; but as he and the Marquise were on the worst of terms, it really rather amused him to sit back and watch the situation develop, knowing all the time that he had but to say a word …