Madame de Pompadour (29 page)

Bernis, who succeeded Rouillé as Minister of Foreign Affairs, saw eye to eye on every subject with Stainville. They both loved Madame de Pompadour, both thought her influence on the King entirely good and were both, whatever Bernis may say in his memoirs, entirely in favour of the Austrian alliance, at this time. When Stainville left for Vienna they promised to write to each other constantly.

With the most important trial for years about to take place, the members of the
Enquêtes
and
Requêtes
were of course most anxious to go back to the
Palais de Justice
and participate in it; while the King had no intention whatever of allowing them to do so. A distinguished Magistrate, the Président de Meinières, obtained, through Gontaut and Madame du Roure, an interview with the Marquise which took place at the end of January. M. de Meinières had two objects in view. His son, excluded from high position in the army by his bourgeois birth, was now also excluded from any legal employment by express order of the King. Many of the
remontrances
with which the
Parlement
bored and annoyed the King so continually, were known to have been composed by Meinières with the help of his enormous library of legal documents. He was one of the cleverest and most intransigent of the Parliamentarians and the King had decided to use such sanctions as he could against him. The President was beginning to realize that the precipitate action of the two Chambers, in leaving their duties, had put them in a false position; his son’s career too was being adversely affected by their quarrel with the King. He came to treat on their and on his own behalf. In the end he saw the Marquise twice; he wrote an account of these interviews, which shows the impression she made on an elderly man, very important in his own sphere, who was, if anything, republican in feeling.

‘Madame de Pompadour was alone, standing by the fire; she looked me up and down with a haughty air that will be graven on my memory as long as I live. No curtsey, no sort of greeting as she took stock of me; it was very imposing. When I came up to her she said, furiously, to her servant, to bring me a chair. He put it so near hers that our knees were almost touching.

‘When we were both seated, and the servant had gone, I said to Madame la Marquise, in very uncertain and trembling tones: “Madame, I have never wanted anything so much as the favour you are good enough to grant me today, I hope to have the honour to convince you of my deep respect, so that you can see for yourself that I am incapable of the cabals and intrigues of which I am accused. I hope, Madame, that when you have at last realized the injustice of such imputations, of which my poor son is the victim, your goodness, your humanity, and that natural inclination, which everybody knows you to have, to protect the innocent and help the unlucky, will induce you to give me your powerful patronage, and to speak for me to the King in favour of giving a commission in a cavalry regiment to my son …” ’ And so on. The President says that during the whole of this speech, which was quite long for somebody dying of fright, as he was when he began it, the Marquise sat bolt upright in her chair with her eyes fixed on him most disconcertingly. When at last he finished, saying he had no idea what his crime was supposed to be, Madame de Pompadour spoke.

‘
Comment, Monsieur
, you pretend not to know what you have done, what is your crime?’

‘I have absolutely no idea, Madame.’

‘Really! Have you then no friend?’

‘You can see that I have, Madame, because it is entirely owing to my friends that I have the honour to pay my court to you today, but none of them has ever told me that he knew the reason for the way I am being treated.’

‘Ah! You don’t know in what consideration you are held?’

The President gave an uneasy laugh and said it was hardly a crime if he had acquired consideration while pursuing his trade. The consideration, observed the Marquise, came from the fact that he had been most useful to the other Magistrates, with his books and his manuscripts, finding precedents and quotations in them on which the various
remontrances
had been based. The result was that His Majesty had a prejudice against him which it would be very difficult to remove. The President admitted that he had an un usually profound knowledge of law, but said that, although he had put
various
facts at the disposal of his colleagues, the use they chose to make of them was nothing to do with him. In any case, he said, it was very unfair, and not like the King, to visit all this on his son.

‘The King uses whatever weapon comes to hand,’ she replied, ‘and in your case it happens to be convenient to punish you through your son.’ She then suggested that he should write to the King and offer his entire submission; several members of the
Enquêtes
and
Requêtes
had already done this privately, and the King was quite willing to make allowances for them. The President said at great length that he would not think it honourable to do so.

Madame de Pompadour laughed and said: ‘I am always amazed when people begin putting forward their so-called honour as a reason for disobeying the King. They seem to forget that honour consists in doing their duty and trying to remedy the disorder which reigns in every public department, now that justice itself has gone bankrupt. Shall I tell you what honour dictates? You should admit the silliness and the wickedness of a move which is neither legal nor public spirited, and try, by a different line of conduct, to efface the bad impression you have made on the King and his subjects. Everybody knows my deep respect for the magistrature, and I only wish I had no reason to reproach this august tribunal, this first
Parlement
of the Kingdom, this French court of justice, which always praises itself so pompously in its writings and
remontrances
. In a quarter of an hour this wise body, which is always trying to set the government to rights, falls into a rage of blind, furious resentment, and abandons its duties. You yourself left with these other irresponsible people and now you refuse to cast them off? You would prefer to see the kingdom, the Treasury and the whole State collapse, that is what you call honour? Ah! Monsieur de Meinières, that is not the honour of a man who loves his King and country.’

The President was amazed, he says, by her eloquence; it was a pleasure to listen to her. He defended himself as best he could, and presently came back to the word honour, upon which she said very sharply: ‘Don’t talk to me like that, M. de Meinières, how can it be dishonourable to do something which is the plain duty of a citizen?’

After this outburst they seem to have been on rather better terms. They discussed the whole affair of the
Enquêtes
and
Requêtes
, and the Marquise reminded the President of various political events in the reign of Louis XIV. She knew her facts and talked, he said, extraordinarily well. They went on for five quarters of an hour; finally she went with him to the door while he protested his great, tender and respectful attachment to the King. ‘She made an inclination of her head, and shot like an arrow towards her bedroom which was full of people. As she went she never took her eyes off me until I had shut the door, and I left her filled with amazement and admiration.’

The second interview was much shorter. They came to the point at once, and M. de Meinières told her that, like Louis XV, Henri IV had tried to reduce the
Parlement
to a single
chambre
, that Chancelier Séguier had explained that this was against the constitution and the King had given way. Now he, Meinières, had a solution in mind.

The Marquise: ‘Have you got it in writing?’

The President: ‘I have given it to M. de Bernis.’

The Marquise: ‘It comes to the same. Let me have the opportunity to be useful to you. I wish it with all my heart.’ She got up, curtseyed, and retired.

Madame de Pompadour and Bernis both worked during the next few months for a reconciliation between the King and the Parliament; the following September this took place and the
Enquêtes
and
Requêtes
resumed their functions.

Damiens was tried by sixty judges – five Princes of the Blood, twenty
Pairs de France
and members of the
Grand’ Chambre
of the
Parlement
. He was a native of Artois, with a little property there, and had been a superior servant – between a butler and secretary – in bourgeois houses. His masters were for ever grumbling about the state of public affairs, he had taken their words seriously, supposed that the country was in danger, and thought he could draw attention to this danger by wounding the King. He said he never meant to kill him. He certainly wished to draw attention to himself; he was always saying that everybody would talk about him,
and
seemed quite to look forward to the terrible end which he knew was in store for him.

He was found guilty of an attempt to murder his sovereign and was tortured to death outside the Hôtel de Ville. As the Duc de Luynes says, his last hour does not make agreeable reading. Thousands of Parisians and quite a few courtiers went to watch his agonies, and amateurs of torture came over from England for the show. But most educated people were rather shocked, not at the idea of the punishment, but at its being treated as an entertainment. Dufort de Cheverny says that he and his wife and a few friends, not caring for that sort of thing, made up a party and went to Sceaux for the day. Nobody could talk about anything else and it revolted them; they knew quite well that their servants had all been to see it and they gave out that they did not wish to hear any details. When the King was told that a certain woman of his acquaintance had been to the Hôtel de Ville, he put his hands over his eyes and said: ‘
Fi! La vilaine
.’ He never spoke of Damiens by name, it was always ‘
ce monsieur
who wanted to kill me’. It seems rather curious that a humane man like the King, who had already said, ‘arrest him but don’t hurt him’, and had forgiven him, on what he thought was his death bed, should have allowed these fearful tortures. But justice was the prerogative of the
Parlement
and he was legally obliged to abide by their decision; Damiens’ punishment was the same as that suffered by Ravaillac, assassin of Henri IV. Paradoxical as it may sound, human life was valued high in those days; crimes of violence were rare and thought extremely shocking. There were astonishingly few murders, mass murder did not exist in Europe, and a sharp push administered to an Electress by Prussian soldiers constituted a German atrocity. No doubt people were more startled by the attempt than they would be today. Luynes got a letter from a friend saying: ‘Is it possible that the age of assassinations is returning to this earth?’ Voltaire said: ‘How could such a thing happen in these enlightened times? One’s blood freezes.’ And after Damiens’ death: ‘So Damiens died with his secret – which was really nothing but the insanity of an abominable soul.’

The King was so accessible that it would be easy to kill him at any time, inside as well as outside his palace, and this made it
necessary
to deter would-be assassins; torture was supposed to be a deterrent. Pain was regarded with a different eye from ours. Everybody, sooner or later, was obliged to endure horrid pain. There were no anæsthetics, the doctors applied their brutal remedies and conducted their primitive operations on fully conscious patients. Cardinal Dubois, for instance, must have suffered quite as much during the operation of which he died the next day, as Damiens on the scaffold; and they did not put him out of his misery when it was over. Women suffered dreadfully in childbirth; people with cancer had to bear it unalleviated until it killed them. Of all the highly civilized men who tell of this affair in their memoirs only Dufort de Cheverny seems to have wondered whether such an execution was necessary, and he only because the King survived. Damiens is never spoken of in pity, no term of opprobrium is too strong,
le monstre, le scélérat, le détestable assassin, le parricide, ce misérable
and so on; even Voltaire, who hated torture, considered that his end was quite natural and inevitable.

The Dauphine’s next baby was called le Comte d’Artois to console that province for having spawned the reptile Damiens.

THE SEVEN YEARS’
War, which ravaged so much of Europe, never touched the sacred soil of France. But it cost her her colonial empire. Canada and large tracts of India were taken by the English while the French army was pinned down in Europe and the French navy neglected for lack of funds. As for the Prussians, when they came back to earth after seven years on their favourite planet, they noticed that their ally had been acquiring world-wide dominion at the cost of a few hundred English lives, while they had ruined themselves, lost the flower of their manhood, suffered from famine and Russian atrocities, made themselves loathed throughout the Empire, and all, it seemed, for the sake of a sandy plain.

In the nineteenth century the French could not forgive Louis XV for the loss of their colonies, but while it was happening they hardly noticed it. Public opinion was entirely against any form of colonization. The
philosophes
, two hundred years before their time, thought then as we think now on the subject and most of their fellow countrymen entirely agreed with them.

‘What of the noble savage?’ cried Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘has he no rights?’

‘An empire is like a tree,’ said Montesquieu, ‘if the branches spread too far they drain the sap from the trunk. Men should stay where they are; transplanted to another climate their health will suffer.’

Voltaire denounced the horrible crimes committed in America by the Europeans and said: ‘France can be happy without Quebec.’

The
Encyclopédie
devoted twelve lines to Canada, ‘a country inhabited by bears, beavers and barbarians, and covered, eight months of the year, with snow’.

This line of thought was not unknown in England. Arthur Young speaks of ‘richer fields to fatten Nabobs – what difference to me when I pay the malt and beer duty to be told … that it produced the acquisition of Canada?’