Madame de Pompadour (3 page)

Madame de Châteauroux was an intelligent, ambitious beauty who wanted to make her mark in French history. She made the King work harder with his ministers than he had ever done before. Seeing that he was still rather fond of her sister she forced him to exile her from the Court; Madame de Mailly went off in floods of tears and was thereafter known as The Widow. The King missed her, and corresponded with her surreptitiously; but Madame de Châteauroux soon found out and put a stop to that. ‘Madame, you are killing me’, he would say as she insisted that he should give his attention more and more to the dull details of public affairs. ‘So much the better, Sire; a king should continually die and be resuscitated.’ She was odious to the Queen and made a breach between her and the King which was never repaired; husband and wife never felt easy in each other’s company again.

Madame de Châteauroux was the central figure in the ‘Metz incident’ which made a deep impression on the King; to the end of his days he could not speak of the scenes of Metz without horror. Fond of campaigning, as he was fond of hunting, he went, in 1744, to join his army on the Eastern frontier and took with
him
an enormous train, including Madame de Châteauroux and yet another Mailly sister, the Duchesse de Lauraguais. At Metz he fell seriously ill, with pains in the head and a high fever; the usual bleedings and purges had no effect and the doctor announced that his life was in danger. There was talk of the Last Sacrament, which would, of course, entail confession and the departure of the mistress. She, meanwhile, mounted guard over him, with her great friend the Duc de Richelieu, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Nobody else was allowed to see him alone and they pretended to him that his illness was nothing at all. It could not be kept up. He knew that he was very ill, and getting worse all the time; at last he kissed her and said: ‘Princess’ (his pet name for her), ‘I think we shall have to part.’ He gave orders that she and Madame de Lauraguais should go at once, and that the Queen should be sent for; then he confessed.

The Bishops of Metz and Soissons, about to bring the Holy Sacrament from the cathedral to the King’s bedside, heard that Madame de Châteauroux and her sister were still in Richelieu’s house in the town; they sent a message to the effect that Our Lord was awaiting the departure of the Duchesses; who then had no choice but to leave for Paris. Before communicating, the King was induced by the Bishops to make a public statement of repentance; all those who were in his ante-room, that is to say the officers of state and the high bourgeoisie of Metz, were brought in to his bedside to hear him do so. He was very weak and hardly spoke as if he wanted to recover; he said that perhaps it was God’s will to give his people a better king. When the Queen arrived, he received her affectionately and begged her pardon. He was very civil to the Dauphin, never a pleasant apparition to a possibly dying young king, and seemed in fact to be in a repentant state of mind and to have every intention, should he live, of changing his ways.

But the French clergy, who had taken the affair in hand, made blunder after blunder. To an intensely shy, reserved and proud man, the thought of his public confession was humiliating enough as he came back to his normal state of health; now it was printed and distributed to every parish in France so that each priest could make a sermon on it, embellished with his own views on the sin of
adultery.
This proceeding shocked many sensible and God-fearing citizens, who felt that the King should have been allowed to repent in private, and that all the women of the Court should have been sent away together, so that the affair with Madame de Châteauroux could have ended without publicity. As soon as the King was better, a lady-in-waiting, prompted by his confessor, put a second pillow into the Queen’s bed. Rumour had it that the Queen had taken to rouge again. At the most frivolous Court in the world, where everything was treated as a joke, all this provoked gales of laughter, and M. de Richelieu, who held a watching brief for Madame de Châteauroux, certainly did not shelter the King from these gales. The country, however, felt very differently about the whole matter. The handsome young King was enormously popular and the French had worked themselves up to a state of despair when they believed him to be dying. The reaction to better news caused a mafficking such as has rarely been seen in Paris – people embracing each other in the streets and embracing the horses which had brought the messengers. It was at this time that Louis XV received the name of Well Beloved. But in their transports of joy his subjects did not omit to underline their detestation of his mistress; and, whenever she appeared in public, she was booed, hissed, pelted with eggs and almost lynched. She retired to bed with a complete breakdown.

With his courtiers giggling in his ante-room and his clergy and people moralizing to his face, the King forgot all his good resolutions. He was determined to show that he was not going to be bullied into a new life, to show who was the master; besides he longed very much for Madame de Châteauroux. As soon as he got home to Versailles he sent for her. She was in her house in the rue du Bac, feverish and furious. When the King’s message came, not wishing to delay their reunion, she got up, had a bath, and prepared to leave. The effort was too much for her; she became very ill indeed and a few days later she died of pneumonia.

The King was now thirty-four years old.

VERY LITTLE OF
Paris as we know it today existed in the 1720’s; no Place de la Concorde, Madeleine, or rue de Rivoli, the Louvre half its present size, no Ecole Militaire or Panthéon, no bridge between the Pont Royal and the Pont de Sèvres, no big thoroughfares or
boulevards
. The layout was that of an overgrown village; narrow streets surrounded the houses of rich merchants and of the ennobled lawyers known as the
noblesse de robe
, very much despised by the
noblesse d’épée
, the old feudal families. The streets were noisier, the traffic blocks even more terrible than they are today. They were filthy dirty and it was impossible to walk in them when there had been rain without getting mud up to the knees. On the outskirts of this town, rich nobles and merchants were building a garden city, the
faubourgs
whose wide streets led out to the country. Each house, of a pale honey colour, stood in its own big garden, full, in summer, of orange trees and oleanders. Every house of any size had an orangery. The quays did not exist; gardens went down to the river where the boats and barges of their owners were moored. Many of these houses are still in existence, but, too often, squashed between nineteenth- or twentieth-century blocks of flats, they would be unrecognizable to their former owners. A few
Hôtels
, Matignon, Biron, Charost (the present British Embassy) and the Elysée, for instance, have kept their gardens, and from them we can judge how the others must have looked. The forest was at their door; la Muette, in the Bois de Boulogne, was still one of the King’s hunts.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the future Marquise de Pompadour,
was
not born in one of these splendid new mansions, but in the rue Cléry, then, as now, situated in the heart of the town. Her mother was a beauty, so she has been accorded various fathers by various biographers, but it is probable that her mother’s husband, M. Poisson, was the real one. He certainly thought so. Poisson was a jolly bourgeois, steward to the Pâris brothers, who ran the economy of France. The Pâris were nearly as important in the life of Mlle Poisson as her own family – indeed Pâris-Duverney is one of the possible fathers – and they were deeply attached to her. Pâris de Monmartel, the little girl’s godfather, was Court banker; Pâris-Duverney supplied the army; their power was almost unlimited. They could support or starve out the generals at the front, make or ruin politicians; the King himself was dependent on them when he wanted to realize large sums of money for any reason; and he used them in all his financial transactions. They were responsible to no government department and always refused the various ministries which were offered them. Their own riches were said to be fabulous, but when Pâris-Duverney died he left so little money that, in the nineteenth century, his coffin was opened to see if he had not, by any chance, been buried in gold. Of course they have been called rogues and worse, but on the whole the verdict of their contemporaries was favourable. Maréchal de Saxe thought the world of them, and said that they were entirely public spirited; they always supported him up to the hilt, partly, no doubt, because they saw he was worth supporting. But whether these mysterious brothers – there were four of them, but only two come into this story – were good or bad, or like most people, a mixture of both, it was clearly a wrong principle for the country’s finances to be in the hands of one family concern. In private life they were patrons of art, great collectors, and frequented the cultivated society of other rich bourgeois; their clever, reassuring, genial faces, above a broad expanse of embroidered waistcoat, look out from several canvases of the day; they must have been delightful fellow guests.

François Poisson was doing well. He had moved from the rue Cléry to a big house in the rue de Richelieu, with
boiseries
and modern comfort, sumptous, up to date. But in 1725, when his little girl was four years old, there broke some sort of black-market scandal
to
do with corn supplied to the population by the Pâris brothers. Owing to a succession of cold, wet summers, there was a famine in the capital, tempers were running high, and Poisson seems to have been made a scapegoat. He got over the German frontier only just in time to avoid arrest, leaving Madame Poisson to cope with his affairs, and saying, rather sadly perhaps, that as she was so very pretty she would surely fall on her feet. He was quite right, she did; but not before she had suffered trials and humiliations; the house in the rue de Richelieu, with all its contents, was seized and sold over her head. She was rescued from her misfortunes by M. Le Normant de Tournehem, one-time ambassador to Sweden, now a director of the
Compagnie des Indes
, and a
fermier général
, or collector of indirect taxes. The
fermiers généraux
were always respected bourgeois of the financial world; and he was a great friend of the Pâris. (Tournehem is often credited with the paternity of Mlle Poisson, but this does not seem very likely. Had he already been Madame Poisson’s lover, he would hardly have left her for months in horrid embarrassment after the flight of her husband.)

This jolly, rich fellow cherished Madame Poisson and took charge of the whole family. He saw to the education of the children, Jeanne-Antoinette and her brother Abel; he finally made it possible for François Poisson to come back to Paris, after an exile of eight years. He was completely cleared of the charges against him and was given an important job to do with army supplies. From now on, Tournehem and the Poissons all lived cheerfully together.

Little is known of Jeanne-Antoinette’s childhood; the lives of children were not carefully documented in those days. At the age of nine she went to a fortune-teller who told her that she would reign over the heart of a king – in her accounts twenty years later, there is an item of six hundred
livres
to this woman, ‘for having predicted, when I was nine, that I would be the King’s mistress’ – after this she was called ‘Reinette’ by her family. At her father’s wish, she spent a year in a convent at Poissy, where his two sisters were nuns. They wrote to him, in Germany, saying that when he sent money he had better let them have it direct, and not through Madame Poisson. Reinette was very delicate and spent much of
her
time in bed, with whooping cough and sore throats. Whatever else the good nuns may have taught the little girl, they certainly failed to give her any understanding of the Roman Catholic religion. After leaving the convent she was educated at home, under the eye of Tournehem and of her mother, and this worldly education left nothing to be desired; a more accomplished woman has seldom lived.

She could act and dance and sing, having been taught by Jéliotte of the
Comédie-Française
; she could recite whole plays by heart, her master of elocution was Crébillon, the dramatist; she played the clavichord to perfection, a valuable gift in those days, when tunes could not be summoned by turning a knob. She was an enthusiastic gardener and botanist, and knew all about the wonderful shrubs which were pouring into France from every quarter of the globe; she loved natural history, and collected rare and exotic birds. Her handwriting, curiously modern, was both beautiful and legible. She painted, drew and engraved precious stones. Last, but not least, she was a superlative housekeeper. Abel, too, was taught everything considered necessary to a rich young man of the day. More important perhaps than lessons, the Poisson children were brought up among people of excellent taste, who had knowledge of and a respect for art in all its forms; honest bourgeois who, when they patronized an artist, paid for what they ordered. Both the children profited in later life from this example.

From the earliest days Reinette was a charmer. She charmed her ‘stepfather’ Tournehem; she charmed the nuns at the convent, who loved her tenderly, and took an interest in her long after she had left them; her father, mother and brother worshipped the ground she trod on. She grew up endowed with every gift a woman could desire but one, her health was never good. Without being a regular beauty, she was the very acme of prettiness, though her looks, which depended on dazzle and expression rather than on the bone structure, were never successfully recorded by painters. Her brother always said that not one of her many portraits was really like her; they are certainly not very much like each other. We recognize the pose, the elegance, but hardly the face. More informative are the descriptions by various contemporaries, written
in
private journals and memoirs, which did not see the light for many years after her death.