The King and the Duc d’ Ayen, his boon companion, left Versailles immediately after the King’s coucher, at about midnight; they were in black dominoes. First they went to while away an hour or two at a public ball in the town; then they started off for Paris, a drive which, with the King’s special horses, known as les enragés, took about an hour and a quarter. At Sèvres they met the Dauphin going home to his darling new wife; he had thanked the Parisians very charmingly for their kind enthusiasm, after which it had been almost impossible for him to get through the crowd at the Hôtel de Ville, even with a guard clearing the way. The two carriages stopped, and the Dauphin crossed the road to tell his father what it had been like at the ball; he heartily advised him not to go on. Himself lazy, religious and home-loving, he always disapproved of his father’s passion for gay society; no doubt he thought him far too old to go dancing all night. The King, however, had a tryst which he fully intended to keep.
When he arrived in Paris he went to the Opéra; here he trod a measure or two and then, sending away his own carriage, he took a cab to the Hôtel de Ville. He soon found Madame d’Etioles, very much dishevelled, as were all the women by then, but none the less pretty for that. They got somehow into a private room and had a little supper, after which even the King decided that the crowd was too much for enjoyment; he asked if he could take her home. D’ Ayen went for a cab and the three of them got into it. The streets were almost as crowded as the ball, and at one moment the cab was held up by the city police. The King, rather nervous by now, said, ‘Give them a louis.’ ‘No, no, Sire,’ said d’Ayen, ‘if we do that we shall be recognized at once and your escapade will be in the police reports tomorrow.’ The King, who greatly enjoyed reading about other people’s escapades in the police reports, but had no wish for his own to be all round the town, sat as far back as he could while d’Ayen handed the cab driver an écu; the man whipped up his horses; they galloped through the cordon; and Madame d’Etioles was duly deposited at the Hôtel de Gesvres. The King got back to Versailles at 9 a.m.; he changed his coat and went to Mass, ‘no good sinning in every direction’; after which he slept until five o’clock. According to Court language ‘day broke in the King’s room at five’.
By now, tongues were wagging. Those who had seen the King and Madame d’Etioles leaving the Hôtel de Ville together supposed that she had gone back with him to Versailles; at Versailles itself the courtiers were wondering how long it would be before she appeared there again, and whether this was a passing attraction or a serious affair. People who knew the King well bet on the former. Never, they said, would he bring a bourgeoise to Versailles as mistress; in the annals of the kings of France such a thing was unknown, and it would create an impossible situation. The king’s mistress, after all, had an enormous position at the Court which somebody not born and bred there would never be able to carry off. Indeed, at this point the King himself seems to have hung back, probably because he was not sure of his own feelings. Madame d’Etioles was not the sort of person with whom one could play fast and loose, or treat as the little mistress of a few days, taking her from husband and family, and then casting her off again; it had to be all or nothing. She was rather middle-class in her behaviour; she spoke, and even thought, quite differently from the courtiers, and while this amused the King when they were alone together, he may have feared that it would embarrass him in front of such as the Duc de Richelieu. He was certainly anxious to establish a permanent mistress; he told the Sieur Binet that he was tired of going from one woman to another. In that case, said Binet, he could hardly do better than Madame d’Etioles, who was so madly in love that she could neither eat nor sleep. It seems that Binet had taken the affair in hand. Voltaire’s enemy, the Bishop of Mirepoix, attached to the Dauphin’s household, and leader of the extreme Catholic party at the Court, now threatened him with dismissal. Binet ran to the King, who was infuriated by this tactless step. There was no question, he said, of any dismissal at all.
Madame d’Etioles was soon to be observed flitting in and out of the palace. Nobody knew whether she slept there and if so in which room, but the King often supped alone at this time and her carriage was constantly on the road to Paris. When Binet was questioned, as he was night and day by curious courtiers, he said that she was soliciting a place as fermier général for her husband. The husband, however, was quite unaware of these goings-on. M. de Tournehem, whom Reinette could twist round her little finger, had sent him on a business journey to Provence. By the time the poor man, quite unsuspecting, came back to Paris, the affair with the King was sufficiently advanced for Tournehem to break the news to him that he had lost his wife for ever. D’Etioles fainted away, was stricken with terrible grief and wrote a pathetic letter, imploring her to come back to him. Madame d’Etioles, who had an extremely frank and open nature and never could keep anything to herself – out it all came, with her, it was part of her charm – immediately showed this letter to the King, at first sight not a very clever move. Ever since the Marquis de Montespan had driven to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in a coach draped in black, with a pair of stag’s antlers wobbling about on its roof, the royal family had had a healthy respect for husbands and their possible reprisals. Louis XV would never have got over such an incident. He thought it very indelicate of Madame d’Etioles to show the letter, bad form, exactly what one would expect of somebody with her upbringing, and handed it to her saying, coldly, ‘Your husband seems to be a very decent sort of man, Madame.’
However, the letter, indicating that d’Etioles knew all, gave the King food for thought. The moment had clearly come when he must decide whether he was going to install the lady as his titular mistress, or allow her to go back to a husband who was still ready to receive her, but would not be so indefinitely. The King was in love; he had seen enough of her by now to feel certain that she would never bore him, and she could soon be taught not to embarrass him. ‘It will amuse me,’ he said, ‘to undertake her education.’ Besides, she worshipped the ground he trod on, a fact to which no man can ever be quite indifferent. The upshot was that Madame d’Etioles remained at Versailles, lodging in a little flat which had once belonged to Madame de Mailly, and which was connected with the King’s room by a secret staircase. The first time she was publicly seen at Court was on 3 April, when she appeared at the Italian comedy in the palace theatre.
The King and Queen were there in two boxes, one above the other; Madame d’Etioles was in a box on the opposite side of the stage, clearly visible to both. Naturally all eyes were upon her, and the Duc de Luynes, in attendance on the Queen, was obliged to admit that she was wonderfully pretty and well-dressed. After the play the King supped with his two great friends, the Duc d’Ayen and the Comte de Coigny, Madame d’Etioles making the fourth. She began to appear at small supper parties given by the King to his intimates; surprisingly little adverse comment seems to have been made on her at this time – all agreed that they were passionately in love with each other.
An adulatory letter arrived from Voltaire who obviously hoped great things of his friend in her new position. Her parents were in the seventh heaven and so was Uncle Tournehem; only the husband was distracted with grief, but nobody seems to have given him another thought. Louis XV was quite right when he said that Le Normant d’Etioles was a very decent fellow; he sought no advantage from his wife’s position and answered any communications she chose to make him with perfect dignity. The rest of his family remained on excellent terms with her; his sister, Madame de Baschi, was always one of her greatest friends. She took her husband’s cousin, Madame d’Estrades, with her to Versailles as a sort of unofficial lady-in-waiting; nothing was ever too much for her to do for any member of the Le Normant family. When Le Normant d’Etioles’ father died, she went into mourning for him as a daughter-in-law, and cancelled a party to which she had invited the whole Court. D’Etioles and Abel Poisson remained lifelong friends and were constantly to be seen about Paris together. But he never spoke to his wife again.
4
Fontenoy
THE WAR OF the Austrian Succession was now in its fifth year. The Emperor had died in 1740 leaving an only daughter, Maria Theresa; during his lifetime the princes of the Empire and the sovereigns of Europe had agreed to respect her rights, but as soon as he was dead the temptation to fish in troubled waters became too strong for them. The Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, the Kings of Spain and Sardinia put forward claims to the Imperial Crown, in the name either of their wives or of female Hapsburg ancestors. The King of Prussia did not bother to put forward a claim at all; he acted. In December 1740 he invaded Silesia. A general war broke out in which France ought never to have joined; it was neither praiseworthy nor politic of her to have done so; many sacrifices and few advantages accrued, and the expense led to a fatal neglect of her navy. Louis XV, who, much as he personally enjoyed battles, was an extremely pacific man, had always been against it, and so had Cardinal Fleury; but the Cardinal was old and the King was overruled by Maréchal de Belle-Isle. Belle-Isle was the grandson of Fouquet – a brilliant soldier whose dream was for France to take the place of Austria in Europe. To this end he went round the German courts canvassing votes to elect Charles-Albert of Bavaria instead of Maria Theresa’s husband.
Cardinal Fleury died in 1743, aged ninety. He had been to Louis XV what Cardinal Richelieu was to Louis XIII. An exceedingly clever man and able ruler, in whom the King had perfect confidence, he had directed the policy of France without fear of being dislodged by the intrigues either of Court or of Church. This situation was never repeated in the life of Louis XV; he never found another Fleury.
In 1745 the French army, led by Maurice de Saxe, was enjoying a period of victories. The King had recently created him Marshal of France, and had promised his new Marshal that he and the Dauphin would go campaigning with him in the spring; the time had nearly come for them to be off. The Dauphin must be dragged from the arms of his bride, and he himself from those of his lovely mistress. He had no intention of taking her with him to risk the scenes of Metz all over again. Besides, he had a plan for her. She was to retire to Etioles in the company of two courtiers, chosen by himself, who would teach her the customs, manners and usage of Versailles. Some such education was quite necessary, if she was not to make a series of appalling solecisms, and to become the laughing stock of a society on the look out for any excuse to mock and be disagreeable.
The Court was always referred to, by those who belonged to it, as ce pays-ci, this country, and indeed it had a climate, a language, a moral code and customs all its own. It was not unlike a public school and just as, at Eton, a boy cannot feel comfortable, and is, indeed, liable to sanctions, until he knows the names of the cricket eleven; various house colours; who may, or may not, carry an umbrella; or on which side of the street he may or may not walk; so, at Versailles, there were hundreds of facts and apparently meaningless rules which it would be most unwise to ignore. People sometimes broke them on purpose, hoping thereby to gain a little more privilege for their families; a Princess of the Blood would arrive in the Chapel followed by a lady-in-waiting with her purse on a cushion, or a duchess be carried to the royal rooms in an armchair – thin end of the wedge for a sedan chair – but somebody always reported it, and a sharp message from the monarch would bring the culprit to heel. To break the rules from sheer ignorance would be thought barbarous.
Madame d’Etioles would have to learn the relationships of all the various families, who was born what, married to whom and ennobled when. The two different sorts of nobility, the noblesse de robe and the old feudal aristocracy, must be clearly distinguished and their connexions known. This was becoming complicated because the old nobility, unable to resist the enormous fortunes of the new, had swallowed its pride and married wholesale into plebeian families. Very important it was to know who had done so. There were not a few in the same case as M. de Maurepas, who, with a mother born La Rochefoucauld and a bourgeois father, was, like the mule, more ready to remember his mother the mare than his father the ass. So others had to remember for him. There was a special salute for every woman at the Court, according to her own and her husband’s birth; the excellence of her housekeeping, the quality of her suppers, also entered into the matter. Variations of esteem were expressed in the curtsey. A movement of the shoulder practically amounting to an insult was a suitable greeting for the woman of moderate birth, badly married and with a bad cook, while the well-born duchess with a good cook received a deeply respectful obeisance. Few women, even when brought up to it, managed this low curtsey with any degree of grace. The most ordinary movements, the very look and expression, were studied as though on a stage; there was a particular way of sitting down and getting up, of holding knife, fork and glass, and above all of walking. Everybody could tell a Court lady from a Parisian by her walk, a sort of gliding run, with very fast, tiny steps so that she looked like a mechanical doll, wheels instead of feet under her panniers.
The look and general demeanour must be happy. Cheerfulness was not only a virtue, but a politeness, to be cultivated if it did not come naturally. If people felt sad or ill or anxious they kept it to themselves and showed a smiling face in public; nor did they dwell on the grief of others after the first expression of sympathy. It was estimated that each human being has about two hundred friends; out of this number at least two must be in some sort of trouble every day, but it would be wrong to keep worrying about them because others also had to be considered.
As in all closed societies certain words and phrases were thought impossible. Cadeau, which should be présent; je vous salue; aller au français instead of à la Comédie-Française; champagne instead of vin de champagne; louis d’or for louis en or. Sac was pronounced sa, tabac, taba (as it still is), chez moi, chev moi, avant-hier, avant-z-hier, and so on. It was all quite meaningless, and so was much of the Court etiquette which had come down through various dynasties and whose origins were long since forgotten. An usher opening a door stood inside it when certain people passed through, and outside for others. When the Court was campaigning the Maréchal des Logis allotted rooms. On certain doors he would write: pour le Duc de X whereas others would merely get: le Duc de X; people would do anything to have the pour. The occupant of a sedan chair must stop and get out when meeting a member of the royal family. The occupant of a carriage, however, must stop the horses and not get out; people who got out of their carriages showed ignorance of Court customs. The dukes were allowed to take a carré – the word coussin was tabu – to sit or kneel on in the chapel, but they must put it down crooked; only Princes of the Blood might have it straight. The dukes would edge it round more and more nearly straight until a royal reprimand got it back to the proper angle. There was a running feud between the French dukes and the princely families of the Empire, who, their estates having at one time or another, by conquest or marriage, passed to France, were now French subjects. (Prince, unless of royal blood, is no more a French title than it is an English one.) The most pretentious of these princely families were the Rohans and the La Tour d’Auvergnes, but they were all considered by the native French as rather too big for their boots; while they themselves were never happy until they received French dukedoms.
Another feud was that between the ambassadors and Princes of the Blood. The former regarding themselves as representatives of the person of their sovereigns, claimed equal rights with the Princes who, of course, resisted the claim and would not give way one inch. The Comte de Charolais, brother of M. le Duc, and a man of violent rages, seized a whip and himself chased the Spanish ambassador’s coachman out of the cul-de-sac, a parking place near the Louvre, to which the Princes considered that they had the sole rights. Then there was the burning question of the cadenas. At State banquets the Princes were each given a silver gilt casket, with lock and key, containing their knives, forks and goblets; the ambassadors were not, and considered this omission extremely insulting to their sovereigns. They appealed to the Master of the Household, the Prince de Condé, who was only eig
ht. A Prince of the Blood himself, he was entirely against giving cadenas to the ambassadors. Further to complicate everything, etiquette was different in the different palaces. Somebody who was only supposed to sit on a folding stool at Versailles might easily get a proper stool at Marly, and a chair with a back to it at Compiègne.
The four months of the King’s absence would not be too long for Madame d’Etioles to learn the hundreds of details of which these are a very few examples. Her teachers, and she could not have had better, were the Abbé de Bernis and the Marquis de Gontaut. Bernis was one of those men whom every pretty woman ought to have in her life; a perfect dear, smiling, dimpling, clever, cultivated, with nothing whatever to do all day but sit about and chat. He was just enough in love with his beautiful pupil to add a flavour to the relationship. At the age of twenty-nine he was already a member of the Académie française, to which, however, he had been elected more for his agreeable company than for his literary talent; his verses were excessively flowery. Voltaire always called him ‘Babet la Bouquetière’. Like everybody who knew the little Abbé he could not but be fond of him but he was furiously jealous over the Académie; he longed to be of it as much as he affected to despise it.
Bernis was a real abbé de cour, that is to say a courtier first and a priest second; cadet of a good old country family, he was so poor that his greatest ambition was to be given a small attic in the Tuileries palace. As he was a friend of Pâris-Duverney, he had already met the Poisson mother and daughter, but had decided not to frequent them. He rather liked Madame Poisson; he said that as well as being perfectly lovely she had wit, ambition and a great deal of courage; but he could see at once that she was not and never would be in society, and accordingly she did not interest him. But Madame d’Etioles in her new situation was nothing if not interesting and when somebody approached him, on the King’s behalf, and asked whether he would consent to see a good deal of her during the next few weeks, he really could not resist. He did go through the motions of hesitating and asking advice; his friends strongly urged him to accept, he had so much more to gain than to lose, they said, thinking perhaps of the longed-for attic in the Tuileries. When he spoke of his cloth, they pointed out that the affair between Madame d’Etioles and the King had been none of his making, and nobody, not even the Almighty himself, could pretend that it was in any way his fault. It was now an accomplished fact, and the plain duty of one and all was to make the best of it.