Madame de Pompadour (10 page)

As soon as the King was dressed in the morning he went down to Madame de Pompadour’s rooms where he stayed until it was time for Mass; on non-hunting days he would have a bite of something, a cutlet or a wing of chicken at dinner (our luncheon time), and stay the whole afternoon, chatting, until at six he went off to work with his ministers. The Court was at Fontainebleau on purpose to hunt, and Madame de Pompadour, who rode, as she did everything else, very well, sometimes went out with Mesdames, the Princesses. The royal family was quite civil to her, except the Dauphin, and he sulked for many a long year.

Members of the Queen’s little set, even the Duc and Duchesse de Luynes, were soon forced to admit that, given the painful though not surprising circumstances, Madame de Pompadour’s behaviour was perfect. She was exceedingly polite, never said horrid things about people or allowed them to be said in her presence; at the same time she had high spirits and was excellent company, gay and amusing. Whenever she could do a good turn to anybody she did
it
and she put herself out to any extent to please the Queen. The Queen was fond of flowers, so was she. They were one of her passions in life, and very soon the hothouses of all the royal gardens were reorganized under her supervision. As soon as flowers in profusion filled her rooms they filled the Queen’s rooms too. The poor lady had never received so much as a bunch of daisies before. The Duc de Luynes says it was a pity Madame de Pompadour made it so obvious that they came from her, and that this rather took away from the Queen’s pleasure. Unfortunately both women were but human. The Queen had no desire whatever to be a real wife to her husband, but she was jealous of Madame de Pompadour, who, on her side, though infinitely good natured, was not always very delicate; she was too open and straightforward to include tact among her virtues.

While she was at Fontainebleau she found out that the Queen was tormented by her gambling debts which were enormous; she was not very good, it seemed, at cavagnole. If she did have a little win she spent it all on charity. Madame de Pompadour made the King pay up, a thing he had never yet done for his wife. He really could afford to. He had been winning such enormous sums at piquet, that the men who had lost to him had to be given until January to pay. The Marquise seemed to take a genuine interest in the Queen’s affairs, listening with breathless attention when a lady-in-waiting expounded upon some detail of the royal health. When she was herself not well and unable to go to a tedious charity bazaar organized by Her Majesty, she sent her deepest apologies, with a
louis
for the cause, saying over and over again how dreadfully disappointed she had been. Nobody else ever bothered about the Queen’s feelings in this way; she had no influence whatever with her husband and therefore the courtiers neglected her.

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.

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.