François Poisson was doing well. He had moved from the rue Cléry to a big house in the rue de Richelieu, with boiseries and modern comfort, sumptous, up to date. But in 1725, when his little girl was four years old, there broke some sort of black-market scandal to do with corn supplied to the population by the Pâris brothers. Owing to a succession of cold, wet summers, there was a famine in the capital, tempers were running high, and Poisson seems to have been made a scapegoat. He got over the German frontier only just in time to avoid arrest, leaving Madame Poisson to cope with his affairs, and saying, rather sadly perhaps, that as she was so very pretty she would surely fall on her feet. He was quite right, she did; but not before she had suffered trials and humiliations; the house in the rue de Richelieu, with all its contents, was seized and sold over her head. She was rescued from her misfortunes by M. Le Normant de Tournehem, one-time ambassador to Sweden, now a director of the Compagnie des Indes, and a fermier général, or collector of indirect taxes. The fermiers généraux were always respected bourgeois of the financial world; and he was a great friend of the Pâris. (Tournehem is often credited with the paternity of Mlle Poisson, but this does not seem very likely. Had he already been Madame Poisson’s lover, he would hardly have left her for months in horrid embarrassment after the flight of her husband.)
This jolly, rich fellow cherished Madame Poisson and took charge of the whole family. He saw to the education of the children, Jeanne-Antoinette and her brother Abel; he finally made it possible for François Poisson to come back to Paris, after an exile of eight years. He was completely cleared of the charges against him and was given an important job to do with army supplies. From now on, Tournehem and the Poissons all lived cheerfully together.
Little is known of Jeanne-Antoinette’s childhood; the lives of children were not carefully documented in those days. At the age of nine she went to a fortune-teller who told her that she would reign over the heart of a king – in her accounts twenty years later, there is an item of six hundred livres to this woman, ‘for having predicted, when I was nine, that I would be the King’s mistress’ – after this she was called ‘Reinette’ by her family. At her father’s wish, she spent a year in a convent at Poissy, where his two sisters were nuns. They wrote to him, in Germany, saying that when he sent money he had better let them have it direct, and not through Madame Poisson. Reinette was very delicate and spent much of her time in bed, with whooping cough and sore throats. Whatever else the good nuns may have taught the little girl, they certainly failed to give her any understanding of the Roman Catholic religion. After leaving the convent she was educated at home, under the eye of Tournehem and of her mother, and this worldly education left nothing to be desired; a more accomplished woman has seldom lived.
She could act and dance and sing, having been taught by Jéliotte of the Comédie-Française; she could recite whole plays by heart, her master of elocution was Crébillon, the dramatist; she played the clavichord to perfection, a valuable gift in those days, when tunes could not be summoned by turning a knob. She was an enthusiastic gardener and botanist, and knew all about the wonderful shrubs which were pouring into France from every quarter of the globe; she loved natural history, and collected rare and exotic birds. Her handwriting, curiously modern, was both beautiful and legible. She painted, drew and engraved precious stones. Last, but not least, she was a superlative housekeeper. Abel, too, was taught everything considered necessary to a rich young man of the day. More important perhaps than lessons, the Poisson children were brought up among people of excellent taste, who had knowledge of and a respect for art in all its forms; honest bourgeois who, when they patronized an artist, paid for what they ordered. Both the children profited in later life from this example.
From the earliest days Reinette was a charmer. She charmed her ‘stepfather’ Tournehem; she charmed the nuns at the convent, who loved her tenderly, and took an interest in her long after she had left them; her father, mother and brother worshipped the ground she trod on. She grew up endowed with every gift a woman could desire but one, her health was never good. Without being a regular beauty, she was the very acme of prettiness, though her looks, which depended on dazzle and expression rather than on the bone structure, were never successfully recorded by painters. Her brother always said that not one of her many portraits was really like her; they are certainly not very much like each other. We recognize the pose, the elegance, but hardly the face. More informative are the descriptions by various contemporaries, written in private journals and memoirs, which did not see the light for many years after her death.
Dufort de Cheverny, himself of bourgeois origin, always deeply jealous of her brother, says: ‘Not a man alive but would have had her for his mistress if he could. Tall, though not too tall; beautiful figure; round face with regular features; wonderful complexion, hands and arms; eyes not so very big, but the brightest, wittiest and most sparkling I ever saw. Everything about her was rounded, including all her gestures.
‘She absolutely extinguished all the other women at the Court, although some were very beautiful.’
The Duc de Luynes, a dry old member of the Queen’s set, rather fond of dwelling on the physical appearance of Court ladies in the most denigrating terms – their cheeks too flat, their noses too fat, their figures almost deformed and so on – is obliged to admit that she is fort jolie. The Prince de Croÿ, who disapproved of her, says over and over again that it would not be possible to be prettier. Président Hénault, the Queen’s greatest friend, writes: ‘One of the prettiest women I ever saw.’ An honest, rather unimaginative soldier, the Marquis de Valfons, writes: ‘With her grace, the lightness of her figure, and the beauty of her hair, she resembled a nymph.’
Le Roy, a gamekeeper at Versailles, after praising all her features, her figure and her beautiful light brown hair, goes on: ‘Her eyes had a particular attraction, perhaps owing to the fact that it was difficult to say exactly what colour they were; they had neither the hard sparkle of black eyes, nor the dreamy tenderness of blue, nor the special delicacy of grey; their indeterminate colour seemed to lend them to all forms of seduction and shades of expression. Indeed her expression was always changing, though there was never any discordance between her various features; they all unfolded the same thought, which presupposes a good deal of self control, and this applied to her every movement. Her whole person was half way between the last degree of elegance and the first of nobility.’
Finally, the Marquis d’Argenson, who hated her so terribly that his whole diary is really written with the aim of destroying her in the eyes of posterity, finds nothing worse – at the beginning – to say than: ‘She is snow white, without features, but graceful and talented. Tall, rather badly made.’
By the time she was of marriageable age, she was already spoken of in Paris society as fit for a king; and she herself had lived in a dream of love for the King ever since her visit to the fortune-teller, a dream which was most unlikely to come true, since it was impossible for a bourgeoise to be presented to him, and he had a mistress already. Meanwhile her parents were not finding it easy to marry her; the reputations of both left too much to be desired. Poisson was an amusing rough diamond, but he had been mixed up in shady business, some said hanged in effigy by the public hangman after his flight, and his origins were lower rather than middle class; he had never tried to seem other than he was, or bothered the least bit about appearances, and many people would not have cared to have him in the family. As for lovely Madame Poisson, she was clever and cultivated but not, alas, virtuous; alas too, this lively but doubtful couple was not even very rich. However, M. de Tournehem, who was, now took the affair in hand. He suggested to his nephew, M. Le Normant d’Etioles, that he should marry Reinette. D’Etioles did not like the idea, but Tournehem offered such excellent terms – an enormous dowry, a guarantee that the young couple should live with him for the rest of his life, all expenses, even the wages of their own servants, paid, and should inherit his fortune when he died ??
? that d’Etioles gave way. They were married in March 1741.
The young couple and M. and Madame Poisson lived with M. de Tournehem in the Hôtel de Gesvres, rue Croix des Petits Champs, and at the Château d’Etioles in the forest of Sénart. One of the most delicious of the many houses lived in and arranged by Reinette, Etioles did not escape the bad luck with which they have nearly all been cursed. Its owner pulled it down early in this century to avoid paying rates on it. Le Normant d’Etioles was no sooner married than he fell passionately in love with his wife and she, for her part, often said that she would never leave him – except, of course, for the King. This seems to have been a family joke; but it was more than a joke to Madame d’Etioles.
Her daughter, Alexandrine, was born when the King was ill at Metz; somebody told her that his life was said to be in danger, whereupon she had a relapse and nearly died. (Alexandrine was her second child; a little boy had already died in infancy.) Yet if, like many women, she had dreams of a different life, her real life was most agreeable. She was young, beautiful and rich, surrounded by relations she loved, and who regarded her as the pivot of their world. She did not have to express a wish before it was granted. At Etioles a big theatre was built, with proper stage machinery, for her to act in; soon she was recognized as one of the very best amateur actresses in France. Her horses and carriages were the envy of the countryside and so were her jewels and dresses; she was of an extreme elegance, a more difficult achievement then than it is today, as the great dressmakers did not exist, and each woman invented her own clothes.
Madame d’Etioles was a person of decided character who knew what she wanted in life, and generally got it. Now that she was married and ‘out’ in society she thought that she would like to have a salon and entertain the intellectuals of her day. This was a career for which her talents and fortune obviously fitted her. The intellectual life of Paris centred round those writers, known as the philosophes, who were presently to compile a great encyclopædia of human knowledge; a spectacular occupation and one that continually got them into trouble with the Church and the Court. They lived in a blaze of publicity, with the eyes of the world upon them, partly because of this encyclopædia and partly because Voltaire belonged to their group. Their ideas produced the moral climate in which the French Revolution finally took place; but had they lived to witness the Revolution, it would have horrified them one and all. Though they were not Christians, they were, for the most part, neither atheists nor anarchists; Voltaire believed in God and loved kings. But they did want to prevent the dead hand of the Church from producing, in France, the intellectual paralysis which we see today in Spain. Where government was concerned they wanted more justice and less secrecy, a few mild reforms. Unfortunately the system left by Louis XIV was impervious to mild reforms, it had to be blown up by a bomb.
These philosophes lived and worked in Paris, and they frequented the houses of certain hostesses, where they were able to exchange ideas in an atmosphere whose component parts, of exalted mutual admiration and miserable little jealousies, proved intensely stimulating. The talk, always good in France, has probably never reached such heights, before or since, as the conversations between Voltaire, Vauvenargues, Montesquieu, Marivaux, Fontenelle, and Helvétius. The stars, of course, would be Voltaire, with his enormous stock of interesting information, his brilliant flashes of fun, and his tender regard for the other star, Vauvenargues, who, in his turn, had a deep respect for Voltaire’s genius. The lesser lights, but not to be despised, were Marivaux, waiting impatiently for the ball to come his way; Montesquieu waiting too, but rather more calmly; Fontenelle who, though over ninety, was always ready when it did come with some appropriate story or remark that never took more than a minute; and Helvétius, fonder of listening than of talking, storing it all up in his memory. This miraculous entertainment went on round the supper tables of a few women, Mesdames Geoffrin, du Deffand, de Tencin, Madame Denis, the niece of Voltaire, and one or two others. Madame d’Etioles, with her gifts and her fortune and the liking she always had for clever men, seemed ideally suited to be such a hostess and this very soon became her object in life. She probably thought she would beat the old ladies at their own game: better educated than Madame Geoffrin, more cheerful than Madame du Deffand, less bossy than Madame de Tencin, richer than Madame Denis and prettier than any of them. Already the potential guests were very well-disposed towards her; Crébillon, Montesquieu and Fontenelle went to her house; she had been painted by Nattier and Boucher; and Madame du Deffand had written to the Président Hénault saying, ‘don’t be unfaithful to all of us with Madame d’Etioles.’ Voltaire took an almost proprietary interest in her; ‘well brought up, amiable, good, charming and talented,’ he said. ‘She was born sensible and kind hearted.’
But Madame d’Etioles had enough worldly wisdom to realize that it is never enough for a young woman to receive; she must also be received. She knew, too, that writers like meeting society people; a salon only frequented by the intellectual bourgeoisie lacks elegance. The Marquise de La Ferté d’Imbault, daughter of Madame Geoffrin, says that two difficulties stood in the way of Madame d’Etioles’ ambition at this time. One was pretty Madame Poisson, who was received by certain hostesses, but was considered rather too disreputable by others, including Madame Geoffrin. The Geoffrins lived only four doors from the Hôtel de Gesvres and one day, rather to their horror, Madame Poisson and her daughter paid them a call.
‘The mother’, says Madame de La Ferté d’Imbault, ‘had such a bad reputation that we could not possibly have made friends with her; the daughter, however, was quite another story. I had no wish to seem rude, and it was difficult to see one without the other, but in the end I managed to return Madame d’Etioles’ call and not Madame Poisson’s. Madame d’Etioles asked my mother if she could often go and see her, to improve her knowledge of the world … One New Year’s day, she and her husband called on me at my toilette, so polite to me that I scolded her in a laughing way; next New Year’s day, at her own toilette, she had the whole Court, and the Princes of the Blood, bowing to the earth. I still laugh when I think of it.’
The other difficulty was that his business as fermier général compelled M. de Tournehem to receive a great many bores at the Hôtel de Gesvres, where his niece acted as hostess. Amusing people like the Abbé de Bernis and the Duc de Nivernais, whom she often met, and would have liked to entertain, would not fit in at all with Tournehem’s financial friends.
The first of these obstacles was soon removed in a very sad way; Madame Poisson was laid low with a cancer. She was forced to give up society and prepare to face an agonizing and lingering death. Madame d’Etioles, on her own, was a highly desirable guest, with her looks and elegance, and possessing as she did that intense love of life, and interest in human beings, which is perhaps the base of what we variously call charm, sex appeal or fascination. She was not only clever and amusing, but modern in her outlook, quite prepared to ‘think philosophically’ and never likely to be shocked even by the most outrageous sallies of the philosophes.
She was soon asked everywhere; her name began to be known at Versailles, where the love of gossip extended to tales about people who would never be seen at Court. Curiously enough it seems to have been the Widow Mailly who first spoke of her there, having met her at a party, and been so carried away by her singing, and playing of the clavichord, that she gave her an enthusiastic hug. The King soon knew her by name; he also knew her by sight; she was a country neighbour. His favourite hunt was in the forest of Sénart where he had a hunting lodge called Choisy, his own little house, altered for him by Gabriel, and which he loved more than any of his palaces, some said more than any of his mistresses. He came here for privacy, bringing with him six women and various men friends, but no spoil-sport husbands; life was so free and easy that the women were allowed to float about without panniers, an unheard-of licence in a gentleman’s house. A mechanical table came up from the kitchen with the food already on it so that there need be no
servants in the dining-room; after dinner the King made the coffee himself. Let nobody think, however, that orgies took place; they were not at all to the taste of Louis XV.
Although the bourgeoisie was never allowed to ride with the King’s hunt, only families noble since 1400 having that privilege, the rule was relaxed in favour of near neighbours, who had permission to follow it in carriages. Madame d’Etioles took full advantage of this opportunity. She drove her own phaeton, knew the forest like the palm of her hand, and was always popping up in the path of the King. Dressed in pink, driving a blue phaeton, or in blue driving a pink one, a vision of prettiness, a skilful, dashing driver, she could hardly have failed to attract his attention. He was too shy to speak to a stranger, but he did sometimes send a present of game to her house. Meanwhile somebody else had noticed her, and with no friendly eye. The Duchesse de Chevreuse, who had known Madame d’Etioles from a child, happened to mention her name in front of the King, whereupon Madame de Châteauroux stepped so hard on her foot that she nearly fainted from the pain. Next day Madame de Châteauroux called on her to apologize, saying: ‘You know they talk of giving that little d’Etioles to the King.’ After this, Madame d’Etioles was warned to keep away from the hunt, and had no choice but to do so; it would have been madness to provoke the enmity of Madame de Châteauroux.
* * *
Fate now took a curious turn. Madame de Châteauroux died; the second of the Mailly sisters to be removed from the King by death. As in the case of Madame de Vintimille, he was heartbroken if not inconsolable; this time, however, he did not return to Madame de Mailly. Naturally there was now but one topic of conversation in society, both at Versailles and in Paris; who would be the next mistress? At first it was taken more or less for granted that it would be the fourth Mailly sister, Madame de Lauraguais. The King, sad and out of spirits, supped with her every night, but this was really from habit; she had been the inseparable companion of Madame de Châteauroux. The Duc de Richelieu was known to support her candidature; he also had one or two other duchesses up his sleeve, and his influence with the King in these matters was great.