Madame de Pompadour (12 page)

‘Of all the mistresses so far she is the most lovable, and he loves her more than any of the others.’ The Prince de Croÿ, who saw a great deal of them in these early days of their attachment, was a serious, pious young widower. At first he was shocked by this adultery, but rather cynically paid his court to Madame de Pompadour because he wanted to get on in the world. He wanted a great deal, and it is easy to guess, reading between the lines of his invaluable memoirs, that he must have been the Court bore. He could not be in a room with anybody at all influential without buttonholing him and trying to further some
affaire
of his own. There were the
affaires
of the grandeeship of Spain; of the Saint Esprit (or Cordon Bleu, so called because of its blue riband, the equivalent of our Garter); of the
passe droit
, the Prince de Beauvau having been allotted higher precedence, which literally made poor Croÿ ill with rage and humiliation; of the
entrée
to the King’s private rooms; of various embassies he would have liked; of military commands and governorships which seemed to be his due; of the marriages of his children. Last but not least he wanted to be made a French duke. We can see only too well how dreadfully tedious he must have been when prosecuting these
affaires
, many of which went on for years, most of which he gained in the end by wearing everybody down. Madame de Pompadour is often very cold with him; the King gallops off when he comes face to face with him out hunting; Choiseul, who when Minister of State kept open table at Versailles, quickly sits between his own wife and sister when
Croÿ
presents himself and they chatter away so that the Prince cannot get in a word. Croÿ notes all these facts with ingenuous surprise. He was fond of writing memoranda, and pestered the ministers with screeds on every current subject. He could not even have a chat with Richard, the Irish gardener at Trianon, without sending him a memorandum on evergreens.

All the same, we cannot help loving him for the precious details with which he acquaints us and for his affectionate nature; he is truly devoted to the King. This priggish young man was soon under the spell of King and Marquise, and indeed they must have been a very attractive pair. Impossible, he says, to be nicer, prettier or more amusing than she, while the King, when at his ease with close friends, was an excellent talker, gay, funny and ready to be amused. Sometimes his shyness closed in on him; if one of his friends had been away for only a few weeks he could hardly say a word and had to begin, as it were, from the beginning. ‘How old are you? How old is your son?’ and so on. Then Madame de Pompadour would come forward and smooth everything over and make it easy for him. They teased each other the whole time, nobody could have had a moment’s doubt as to their relationship; but she was always respectful, there was never a word out of place.

The King’s supper parties were given for the men who had been out hunting with him that day; anybody who had could apply for an invitation, the King was given the list and chose whom he wanted. The would-be guests must then present themselves at the door of his apartment and an usher read out the names of those who were invited. It was rather a lowering occasion for those who were not. Croÿ applied regularly and was by no means always accepted; once when he was not he says that it was particularly disappointing for him because two friends of his up from the country were standing by as sightseers, and it would have been so agreeable to have gone in while they were watching. Every time he did go, he describes the evening and gives a list of his fellow guests – between eight and twenty in number and always far more men than women.

We were eighteen, squashed round the table, beginning at my right: Monsieur de Livry, Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, the King, the Comtesse d’Estrades, the Duc d’Ayen, the tall Madame de Brancas, the Comte de Noailles [governor of Versailles], M. de la Suze, le Comte de Coigny, the Comtesse d’Egmont [the Duc de Richelieu’s daughter], M. de Croix, the Marquis de Renel, the Duc de FitzJames, the Duc de Broglie, the Prince de Turenne, M. de Crillon, M. de Voyer d’Argenson. The Maréchal de Saxe was there, but he never has supper so he walked about tasting bits of food, for he is very greedy. The King, who still calls him Comte de Saxe, is very fond of him and he seemed quite at home; Madame de Pompadour is devoted to him.

We were two hours at supper, free and easy but without any excess. Then the King went into the little
salon
, where he made the coffee and poured it out; there were no servants and we helped ourselves. He made up a table of Comète with Madame de Pompadour, Coigny, Madame de Brancas and the Comte de Noailles, the King rather enjoyed that sort of little game, but Madame de Pompadour seemed to hate gambling and to be trying to put him off it. The rest of the company, also playing a small game, was at two tables. The King told everybody to sit down, even if they were not playing – I stood leaning on a screen and watching his game. Madame de Pompadour was very sleepy and kept begging him to break up the party; finally, at two o’clock, he got up and said, half under his breath to her, I thought, and very gaily – ‘come on then, let’s go to bed’. The women curtseyed and went out, he bowed and went into his little rooms. The rest of us left by Madame de Pompadour’s staircase and came round through the state rooms to his public
coucher
which took place at once.

Croÿ adds that he had a strong impression that beyond these private rooms and this semi-intimacy there were other, smaller, rooms to which only very great friends indeed were admitted.

VERSAILLES, IN THE
eighteenth century, presented the unedifying but cheerful spectacle of several thousand people living for pleasure and very much enjoying themselves. Pleasure, indeed, had an almost political significance since the nobles, removed from their estates and drugged with useless privilege, had to be kept contented and amused. A state department,
Les Menus Plaisirs
, was devoted to its promotion, drew upon unlimited funds and was sought after as a profession by promising young men. People in those days approved of pleasure. When the Duc de Nivernais left on his important, difficult mission to London after the Seven Years’ War, he was described as going ‘like Anacreon, crowned with roses and singing of pleasure.’ This was by way of being high praise.

Nineteenth-century historians, shocked by the contemplation of such a merry, pointless life, have been at great pains to emphasize the boredom from which, they say, the whole Court, and the King himself, suffered. No doubt a life devoted to pleasure must sometimes show the reverse side of the medal, and it is quite true that boredom was the enemy, to be vanquished by fair means or foul. But the memoirs of the day and the accounts of those courtiers who lived through the Revolution and remembered the
Ancien Régime
, do not suggest that it often got the upper hand; on the contrary they speak, one and all, of a life without worries and without remorse, of a perfectly serene laziness of the spirit, of perpetual youth, of happy days out of doors and happy evenings chatting and gambling in the great wonderful palace, its windows opening wide on the fountains, the forest and the Western sky. If ever a house radiated cheerfulness,
that
house is Versailles; no other building in the world is such a felicitous combination of palace and country home.

The four main pastimes were love, gambling, hunting and the official entertainments. Love was played like a game, or like a comedy by Marivaux; it had, of course, nothing to do with marriage. Children, in those days, were married off in their teens, and these little husbands and wives usually grew up to be very fond of each other, sharing the same interests, absorbed in the family and its fortunes. Even if they did not like each other, which was rare, they could generally manage to get on, since good manners demanded that they should; it was quite unusual for a woman to go back to her father or into a convent because she could not bear to live with her husband. She had a lover, he had a mistress; everything was most friendly.

‘I allow you every latitude,’ the courtiers used to say to their wives, ‘except footmen and Princes of the Blood.’

A husband, finding his wife in bed with her lover: ‘Madame! Is this prudent? Supposing somebody else had seen you!’

Mademoiselle de Richelieu and the Comte de Gisors played together when they were very small, and fell in love. When they were of marriageable age they so desperately wanted to marry each other that various sentimental relations tried to help them; it was a perfectly suitable match. But Gisors, though one of the paragons of that age, enormously rich and son of the powerful Maréchal de Belle-Isle, had bourgeois blood; he was the great-grandson of Fouquet. The Duc de Richelieu would not hear of such a connexion. He refused his consent to the marriage, saying coldly: ‘If they are in love they can find each other in society.’

The bourgeoisie of Paris did not see things with the same eye. The financier La Popelinière discovered a revolving fireplace in his wife’s bedroom, by which the Duc de Richelieu used to come from the next-door house and visit her. Though she was as brilliant as she was lovely, an ornament to his house and adored by his friends, La Popelinière turned her into the street there and then. She went straight off to the army manœuvres which were going on near Paris, found Maréchaux de Saxe and Lowendal, and persuaded them to take her home and use their influence with her husband. They had just come back from Fontenoy and were
at
the very height of their glory. But La Popelinière was adamant, his door remained shut. Richelieu gave her a house and an income; she very soon died of cancer. At Versailles such tragedies were unheard of; good manners –
bon ton
– prevailed in love as in everything else; the game must be played according to the rules.

Gambling was a more savage pursuit; enormous fortunes were won and lost at the tables and, as in eighteenth-century England, everything was the subject of a bet. At the Queen’s table, where they played the dowdy cavagnole with dice, it was possible to lose 200
louis
in an evening; at the King’s table, where piquet and whist were played, 1,000
louis
and more often changed hands, a huge sum in those days.

As for the hunting, this existence would hardly have been possible without it. The men were properly exercised and properly fed; since man is, after all, an animal, he can rather easily be happy under these circumstances. It is the fashion now, among those who have never hunted, to regard it as a dull and cruel sport. Dull it is not, and for cruelty cannot compare with the long, awful journey to the gruesome slaughterhouse, against which no voice is ever raised. A day on horseback in the immeasurable forest, with its rides starring out, each ending in a blue distance, and its varying carpet of leaves and flowers; the smell of earth and horses, the cold rain on a warm face, the distant horn when the hunt seemed lost; the kill by a lake, with wild swans circling overhead; the tunes, unchanged in those woods since Charlemagne, which the hunters play over the dead beast; the gathering cold and darkness of the ride home; the lighted warmth of the arrival, the relaxed nerves and physical well-being – these things once enjoyed can never be forgotten. Louis XV, so delicate as a child that they hardly expected to rear him, grew up with iron health; he never felt tired. During the thirty years of his prime he killed the enormous average of 210 stags a year, without counting wolves and wild boars. His huntsman, Lasmartre, was a privileged being who could say what he liked to the King. ‘The King treats me well,’ said the Maréchal de Saxe, ‘but he doesn’t talk more to me than to Lasmartre.’ After killing two stags one day the King said:

‘Lasmartre, are the horses tired?’

‘Yes, Sire, they’re just about finished.’

‘And the hounds?’

‘Tired? I should say they were.’

‘All right, Lasmartre. I’ll be hunting again the day after tomorrow.’ Silence. ‘Did you hear me, Lasmartre? The day after tomorrow.’

‘Yes, Sire, I heard you the first time.’ Loud aside: ‘It’s always the same thing, he asks if the animals are tired, he never thinks of the men.’

One of his keepers calculated that in a single year he covered 8100 miles on horseback, on foot, or in a calèche. If the hunting had to be put off, because of hard frost, he would go for a three-hour gallop, regardless of the horse’s legs. He was also fond of partridge shooting, and was an excellent shot.

The palace entertainments were organized by the Duc de Richelieu who, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had
Les Menus Plaisirs
under his direct control; they were always the same and had hardly varied for fifty years. Twice a week theatre, the
Comédie-Italienne
and the
Comédie-Française
, and on special occasions, such as a royal wedding, or birth, or the celebration of a victory, there were ballets, balls and fireworks. They were all well done, but there was no originality and no surprise; except for the balls the King did not enjoy them very much. He was a restless man who loved change and novelty.

Soon after her arrival at Versailles Madame de Pompadour, always thinking how best to amuse him and keep off the yellow colour which meant that he was bored, decided to get up private theatricals among their little set of close friends. She herself had been taught to sing by Jéliotte of the
Comédie-Française
and to speak alexandrines by Crébillon the old dramatist; and she was certainly not averse from showing off her talent to the King. The idea was received with enthusiasm by all her friends, and was indeed a brainwave.

Everybody enjoys private theatricals. Choosing the play, distributing the parts, the rehearsals, the dressing up, the gossip, the jokes and even the quarrels involved give rise to all sorts of diversions. They were a favourite amusement of the age; when people were exiled from Versailles, or ruined, or for some other sad reason obliged to go and live on their estates, the first thing they always did, even before adding a modicum of comfort to some old, derelict château which had not been lived in for years, was to build
a
theatre. King Stanislas had a famous theatre at Lunéville, so had Voltaire at Cirey, Maréchal de Saxe at Chambord and so later on, after his disgrace, the Duc de Choiseul at Chanteloup. Almost every educated person could act, or play a musical instrument; even in the depth of the provinces enough neighbours could usually be found to form an orchestra capable of playing light opera. When Madame de Pompadour began looking for talent among courtiers of the King’s little set, she found that they could nearly all act or dance, some could also sing and play some instrument, and many of them had musical servants.