When the time came to leave Fontainebleau the Queen was asked to choose a day that would suit her, and she was invited to break her journey at Choisy. The King always did this but the Queen had never done so before. As a result there was such a large party, with her followers as well as his, that card tables overflowed even into the bathroom. The King and Madame de Pompadour were most attentive to her and played cavagnole at her table for a while. She talked a great deal to Madame de Pompadour, whose manner was perfect, neither too familiar nor too respectful. The Queen, in a very good temper, kept saying she would not go away until she was chased, and it was past midnight when she got back to Versailles. Here she found, to her delight, that her room had been done up during her absence, the panelling re-gilded and her bed, which had become very shabby, covered with a new tapestry of a religious design. As time went on, and the King felt less guilty about her, he became much nicer to her and altogether she had cause to bless Madame de Pompadour. ‘If there has to be a mistress,’ she would say over and over again, ‘better this one than any other.’
But in spite of her charm, good nature and desire to please, Madame de Pompadour had and always would have enemies. To the aristocrats she was the incarnation of Parisian bourgeoisie. While the nobles, living in a delightful insouciance at Versailles, neglecting their estates, gambling all of every night for enormous sums, spending far more than they could afford on horses, carriages and clothes in order to impress each other, were getting steadily poorer and more obscure, the bourgeoisie was getting richer and more powerful. They hated it, and hated her for belonging to it. Except Richelieu, those who knew her well seem to have loved her, some of them quite against their will; but the ordinary courtiers would have done anything to bring about her downfall. However, if they wanted to wage war Madame de Pompadour had big guns on her side, not counting the biggest gun of all. The Pâris brothers and their colleagues were her firm supporters, and after five years of expensive warfare, with the country in a state of near-bankruptcy, financiers counted for very much. There was trouble at this time between the Pâris and Orry, who as Controller General was in charge of the nation’s finances as well as of most of the internal administration: for some months there had been talk of replacing him and in December 1745 he was dismissed. Rightly or wrongly this dismissal was put down to the Marquise; it was the first hint, at Court, that her influence was extending beyond the domain of party-giving, and many felt it as a chill wind.
6
Mourning
SOON AFTER HER arrival at Versailles, one of the two great sorrows of her life fell upon Madame de Pompadour; she was in Chapel on Christmas Eve 1745, when they came and told her that her mother was dying. She hurried out of church and left immediately for Paris. It was said that Madame Poisson, clever as four devils, occupied her last hours advising Madame de Pompadour how to behave in her new, her glorious and her undoubtedly difficult position. Of course her position must really have been made much easier by the removal of this masterful beauty, in her early forties, but Madame de Pompadour did not think so; she was thrown into fearful grief, and so were the two widowers, Poisson and Tournehem. They sobbed in each other’s arms; and for the rest of their lives were inseparable. The King, who generally shunned the grief of other people in an agony of embarrassment, was extremely kind to Madame de Pompadour on this occasion; he supped night after night alone with her and Frérot and presently took her off to Choisy, where he invited a small party, to try and cheer her up. Thinking that a projected voyage to Marly might be too much for her, he suggested putting it off; but this she wisely would not allow. The women had already bought their dresses, she said. Meanwhile the Queen had been made very happy; for the first time since many a day the King gave her a New Year’s present, a beautiful gold snuff box with a jewelled watch set in the lid. Everybody at Court knew perfectly well that it had been ordered, originally, for Madame Poisson.
In the spring of 1764 Louis XV once more went off to his army, but only for a few weeks. The Dauphine was expecting a baby and he intended to be back in time for this great event; the Dauphin remained with his wife, whom he loved more than ever. While the king was away Madame de Pompadour stayed at Choisy. She seems to have been pregnant, or perhaps simply over-tired, not very well. She was to rest and live quietly, only going to Versailles to pay her court to the Queen twice a week. She was occupied just now with the first of her many houses, Crécy, near Dreux. By an arrangement with the Pâris brothers she appeared to have bought it herself, but it was really a present from the King. The house, which already existed, was altered and greatly enlarged by the architect Lassurance; Falconet, Coustou and Pigalle worked on the decorations and the gardens were laid out by d’Isle, under the close supervision of the Marquise herself. M. de Tournehem and Marigny also helped her with it.
The Dauphine seemed very well, and in July her baby was born. The lady-in-waiting who carried it off to be dressed made a face which plainly told the crowd in the ante-room that it was only a girl. Nobody was very much put out by this; next year there would surely be a Duc de Bourgogne. But four days later the Dauphine suddenly died, to the utter despair of her husband; the King had to drag him forcibly from her bedside. Versailles was now plunged into all the ceremonial gloom with which a royal death was attended in those days: the black hangings over everything, even the furniture, and the courtyard outside; the professional weepers, the chanting of monks and nuns, the opening of the body (obligatory in the case of a royal person; the doctors said they found a great deal of milk in her brain) and the removal of its heart, handed on a salver to a lady-in-waiting; the lying in state, the struggling crowds and fainting courtiers, ceremonial visits to the baby, who had been given the title of Madame, the endless, torchlit journey by night to the royal mausoleum of St Denis. Worst of all, what the French call figures de circonstance, suitable but fictitious expressions of grief on every face. On every face but the Dauphin’s. The little girl, so shy that some people thought her half-witted, had made no impression whatever on those around her, and this must have aggravated his misery, poor fellow; he had nobody with whom he could talk about her. By way of consolation people pointed out her defects, both physical and mental, to him, and began talking of his second wife; the first was not even buried before rooms were being allocated to Madame la future Dauphine. He knew quite well that his father’s friends were waiting impatiently for the period of mourning to be over so that they could start amusing themselves again.
According to custom, the royal family prepared to leave Versailles while the Dauphine still lay there in state. But where could they go at such short notice? Choisy was full of workmen, Meudon had no furniture, the big palaces, Fontainebleau and Compiègne, could not be got ready in a hurry, Trianon was too near. Marly was out of the question, since it was to Marly that the Court had repaired after the death of the King’s mother, and there that his father and elder brother had died, less than a week later. So Choisy it had to be. It was very uncomfortable and Madame de Pompadour was obliged to give up her room to one of the Queen’s ladies.
The boredom which assailed them all during this visit was remembered long afterwards. No hunting, no gambling, and the King, as always when thoroughly out of humour, turned a bad colour – ‘That yellow colour which isn’t good for him’, Madame de Pompadour used to call it – which meant that he was bored and liverish. The party was only kept going at all by the affair of the holy water. The princely families of Rohan and La Tour d’Auvergne, whose prétensions chimériques had never for one moment been allowed by Louis XIV, claimed the right to throw holy water over the Dauphine before the dukes. The King having gone away without leaving any very precise orders on the subject, a violent dispute broke out at Versailles. Messengers hurried to and from Choisy, and the King tried to regulate the affair as tactfully as possible by laying it down that no men were to throw holy water, only women. He had forgotten the various duchesses who had the privilege of going into the death chamber in attendance on Princesses of
the Blood. A horrible scene over the Dauphine’s dead body, between these ladies and the Princesse de Turenne (La Tour d’Auvergne), was only avoided by the decency of Mesdames de Brissac and Beauvilliers who voluntarily gave up their rights. The King thanked them, afterwards. The pros and cons of this affair, hotly disputed, occupied many an idle hour at Choisy. The conclusion was that the Rohans and La Tour d’Auvergnes had won this time, by taking everybody unawares, but must never be allowed to do so again.
The King was getting yellower every day and began to talk of going back to the army. But Madame de Pompadour, who had foreseen this, and dreaded losing him again so soon, had been in touch with the Maréchal de Saxe. Saxe, very intimate with the Pâris brothers, was an old acquaintance of Madame de Pompadour. He was to become one of her greatest friends. As may be imagined, the presence of the King, while flattering in the extreme, was a continual worry and responsibility to the Marshal and he was only too glad to combine with her to keep him at home. He wrote saying that no engagement of importance was likely for the rest of that summer and that it would hardly be worth the King’s while to move again.
So the King invited himself to stay at Crécy. This was exactly what the Marquise had been hoping for; enchanted to have him as her guest for the first time, she went ahead with the women of the party, the Princesse de Conti, Mesdames du Roure and d’Estrades, to make all the necessary arrangements. The next day the King followed with two large berlines full of dukes, including d’Aumont, d’Ayen, La Vallière, Villeroy and, of course, the inevitable Richelieu. Two Princes of the Blood, Conti and Chartres, arrived under their own steam; Lassurance and Marigny were there already, supervising the work in hand. The King, interested as he always was by any sort of building or planning, soon turned a better colour. There were two new wings to the house itself, not to speak of a mountain which was rising in the park – but which, considered rather too bare, was transformed into a grassy amphitheatre – the windmill, the dairies, and the distant views leading to cascades. Plans were also under consideration for stables to hold two hundred horses, a cottage hospital for the village, the removal of some cottages which spoilt the view, and improvements in the parish church. The King sat down there and then and designed a green and gold uniform for Crécy – each of the royal houses had its own, worn by all the male guests. Benoit excelled himself at every meal and the King said he had never seen a better kept house; in short the visit was a radiant success and augured well for the future. Madame de Pompadour saw that this was an excellent way of getting her lover to herself and planned to acquire other houses, nearer Versailles.
The only fly in the ointment, as usual, was Richelieu. Under a mask of grave politeness, Son Excellence continued his guerrilla warfare against the Marquise. Every woman knows how dangerous the great friend of the beloved can be, and every clever woman uses all her powers of seduction to get him on her side. Madame de Pompadour did her very best, she was always charming to him and even supported his ambitions, most unfortunately as it was to turn out. But nothing was of any avail. In his eyes she incarnated the abominable bourgeoisie, the wrong people, with their deplorable ton, who were gradually accumulating money and power at the expense of the right people.
Until Cardinal Richelieu had put it on the map, the du Plessis family was noble, but of the very minor nobility. The Duke could hardly bear the fact that he should owe his position to the merits of his great-uncle rather than to his own birth; it irked him all his life. He was not quite sure enough of himself, in fact; and whereas d’Ayen and Gontaut, serene in the knowledge of their unassailable ancestry, could make friends with anybody they liked, Son Excellence could not. Also he was jealous of the Marquise. Hitherto he had been entertainer in chief to the King and, in his capacity of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had had all the palace amusements under his control; now he smelt a rival. So he ragged and bullied her unmercifully and no doubt had disloyal jokes about her with the King as soon as her back was turned. At last, enormously to her relief, he went off to conquer Parma for Madame Infante. This eldest and beloved daughter of Louis XV longed for an establishment of her own so that she could leave Madrid. For some time now, the swaggering form and unsmiling face of Son Excellence were no longer to be seen on Madame de Pompadour’s staircase.
7
The Staircase
‘IT ISN’T YOU he loves,’ the Maréchale de Mirepoix used to say, ‘it’s your staircase.’ And very naturally indeed the King loved the staircase at the top of which he found this delicious creature, this lively clever companion, waiting to concentrate on him and his entertainment. The rooms to which the staircase leads are on the second floor of the north wing; the visitor to Versailles, coming into the garden through the usual entrance, should turn left and count the nine top windows from the north-west corner; they were Madame de Pompadour’s at this time. We still see what she saw from her little balcony between the statues on the colonnade – the Parterre du Nord, the fountains of mermaids and cupids, the avenue of trees, cut into solid walls of leaves, which leads to the Bassin de Neptune, and, over the tree tops, the forest of Marly stretching to far horizons. We still hear the great clock on the parish church, the organ in the palace chapel – so few yards away – the birds in the park, and the frogs in the fountains quacking like ducks. But we do not hear the King’s hunt in the forest, the hounds and the horns and the King’s curious high husky voice giving the view halloo. The rooms, so empty today, so cold with their northern light, were crammed to bursting point when she lived in them; crammed with people, animals and birds, pictures, bibelots, curiosities of all sorts, furniture, stuffs, patterns without number, plans, sketches, maps, books, her embroidery, her letters, her cosmetics: all buried in flowers, smelling like a hothouse; it is a mystery how they can have held so much. The walls, which were originally lacquered by Martin in the bright delicate colours she loved, have been painted white, but the panelling is still the same and the structure of the flat unchanged. The little room where her maid, Madame du Hausset, lived is still there, with the funnel through which she listened to the King’s conversation – greatly to our advantage, as she used to write it down word for word. We can still see the lift shaft which contained a flying chair; the Marquise was hauled up in this by her servants to save the long, steep drag upstairs. On a lower level, looking out on to a dismal little courtyard, was the flat of Madame de Pompadour’s doctor and great friend, Quesnay.
Madame de Pompadour was hardly settled at Versailles before she began to direct and inspire the artists of her day. She had all the gifts of a great amateur, erudition, tireless energy in searching for perfection, and an intuitive understanding of the creative temperament, which enabled her to make an artist do better than his best, and to impose her own ideas on him, without hurting his feelings. Until the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War she also had unlimited credit, since the King, who had hitherto been regarded as rather close-fisted, never seemed to care how much she spent. Probably this was because she knew how to approach him. ‘He doesn’t mind signing for a million,’ she told her maid, ‘but he hates to part with little sums out of his purse.’ She was often herself short of cash and used to say that she had been much richer when she lived in Paris. When she died a few louis were found in a drawer. She had long since sold her diamonds and Collin had to borrow money for current expenses. But she left enough works of art to fill several museums – the sale of them took eight months – and she had lived in the middle of an intense artistic activity which was meat and drink to her. Unlike her successors, Madame du Barry and Marie-Antoinette – and vastly superior to them – she always looked after her artists and never owed them a penny. Altogether, and it was the great complaint against her, she was supposed to have cost the King 36 million livres (the Seven Years’ War cost 1350 millions), but her various houses were built on his land and all but Ménars reverted to him at her death.
These houses, and her objects of art, would have been a good investment for France had not nearly everyth
ing she created been destroyed or dispersed during the Revolution. Crécy, Bellevue, Brimborion, the Hermitage at Compiègne, utterly destroyed; the Hermitage and the Reservoirs at Versailles, the Elysée, her rooms at Versailles, Fontainebleau, Trianon and Compiègne, altered beyond recognition; her belongings scattered to the four winds, sometimes to be seen in a museum or a private collection – the little boudoir from Brimborion, the celadon fishes, a morocco binding with castles and griffins, a painted commode, an engraved jewel – ‘This was the Pompadour’s fan.’
The King was a born patron of the arts; not for nothing had he Medici blood several times over; he had perfect natural taste and a desire for knowledge; but his shyness had made it difficult for him to get in touch with artists and craftsmen. Madame de Pompadour made everything smooth and easy. Up to now his private life had been devoid of serious interests. He did not care for literature nor had he that passion for music shared by all his children. Politics occupied much of his attention, but he never talked about them outside the council chamber because he knew that everything he said would be repeated, and this applied also to gossip. His only pastime was hunting, not enough for an intelligent man. Madame de Pompadour, following her own inclinations, had found him a perfect hobby. Houses were bought, or built, altered, decorated and surrounded with beautiful gardens; at the big palaces the King’s private rooms were always being redecorated; furniture, pictures, statues, vases and bibelots were chosen and ordered; rare materials were brought from all over the world to be mounted in gold or bronze or silver; roof gardens and aviaries were filled with curious plants, birds and beasts. The King ran up her staircase knowing that, in her warm and scented rooms, he would find some fascinating new project on foot, plans and designs waiting for his approval, bibelots and stuffs for him to buy if he liked them.