Madame de Pompadour (6 page)

At last, the door leading to the Œil-de-Bœuf, ante-chamber to the King’s apartment, was opened; everybody pressed forward. A very curious procession lurched blindly into the ballroom; eight yew trees, clipped like those in the garden outside, in the shape of pillars with vases on them. The King had made up his mind that, for once, he would be unrecognizable. In the print by Cochin of the scene in the great gallery, lit by eight thousand candles, many fancy dresses can clearly be made out and the yew trees are mingling with the crowd. Presently one of them went off with pretty Présidente Portail to a dark and solitary corner of the palace. She thought he was the King, and nestled happily among the twigs; but when she returned to the ballroom what was her fury to see that the real King, who had taken off his headdress, was engaged in a laughing conversation with Madame d’Etioles, dressed as Diana and also unmasked. ‘The handkerchief is thrown,’ said the courtiers. It was now clear to them that a love affair was beginning. Before they parted the King had arranged to meet her the following Sunday at the ball in Paris.

Next morning at eight o’clock the last carriage still had not left Versailles.

The Paris municipality now put its best foot forward. The Spanish marriage was popular; it was supposed to have eliminated the Pyrenees and turned them into a
temple d’amour
– such rubbish, said the courtiers – thus lessening the chances of war with Spain. The Dauphin was known to be in love and this was considered romantic; and then the King, the adored, the idol, was in such an interesting situation. The mood of the capital was one of benevolent jollity. The festivities on this Sunday evening must have been very much like those of a modern fourteenth of July, only far more elaborate, with free food and wine galore. As it was winter and therefore impossible to dance in the streets, seven ballrooms were built – at the Hôtel de Ville, which had its courtyard roofed in, at the Place Dauphine, two in the Place Louis le Grand (Vendôme), at the Place du Carrousel, in the rue de Sèvres and the Place de la Bastille. These ballrooms were designed with an attention to detail which has hardly been bestowed, since the eighteenth century,
on
something only intended to last one evening. They were like large summer-houses, Chinese in feeling, their walls were of pink marble and trellis work filled with vine leaves, bunches of grapes and flowers. Real palm trees, whose stems were garlanded with roses, and draperies of pink velvet fringed with gold, outlined the buffets which groaned with turkeys, boar’s heads and other delicacies. The chandeliers hung from garlands of flowers, and, outside, the walls and roofs were covered with candles. Everywhere there were pictures and statues of the royal family; marble fountains flowed with wine. Except for the Hôtel de Ville, all these ballrooms were open to the public; the poorest of the poor came with their wives, their families and even their dogs to eat, and drink, and dance, and amuse themselves all night. There was also a subscription ball at the Opéra.

The Dauphin was to attend the masked ball at the Hôtel de Ville without his father, and there to thank the Parisians for their good wishes. It was expected that the King would look in later, in disguise. This ball was by invitation, but there had been considerable mismanagement, twice too many cards had been sent out and the crowd was so immense as to be almost dangerous. In spite of a second ballroom in the courtyard the guests could hardly move, it took hours to get up or down the stairs, and the women’s dresses were torn to pieces by the crush. The whole thing was a scandal, said the Parisians, who grumbled about it for weeks afterwards; the food had given out by three in the morning, and it was alleged that several people had died, of heat, or cold, or fatigue or asphyxiation.

The King and the Duc d’ Ayen, his boon companion, left Versailles immediately after the King’s
coucher
, at about midnight; they were in black dominoes. First they went to while away an hour or two at a public ball in the town; then they started off for Paris, a drive which, with the King’s special horses, known as
les enragés
, took about an hour and a quarter. At Sèvres they met the Dauphin going home to his darling new wife; he had thanked the Parisians very charmingly for their kind enthusiasm, after which it had been almost impossible for him to get through the crowd at the Hôtel de Ville, even with a guard clearing the way. The two
carriages
stopped, and the Dauphin crossed the road to tell his father what it had been like at the ball; he heartily advised him not to go on. Himself lazy, religious and home-loving, he always disapproved of his father’s passion for gay society; no doubt he thought him far too old to go dancing all night. The King, however, had a tryst which he fully intended to keep.

When he arrived in Paris he went to the Opéra; here he trod a measure or two and then, sending away his own carriage, he took a cab to the Hôtel de Ville. He soon found Madame d’Etioles, very much dishevelled, as were all the women by then, but none the less pretty for that. They got somehow into a private room and had a little supper, after which even the King decided that the crowd was too much for enjoyment; he asked if he could take her home. D’ Ayen went for a cab and the three of them got into it. The streets were almost as crowded as the ball, and at one moment the cab was held up by the city police. The King, rather nervous by now, said, ‘Give them a
louis
.’ ‘No, no, Sire,’ said d’Ayen, ‘if we do that we shall be recognized at once and your escapade will be in the police reports tomorrow.’ The King, who greatly enjoyed reading about other people’s escapades in the police reports, but had no wish for his own to be all round the town, sat as far back as he could while d’Ayen handed the cab driver an
écu
; the man whipped up his horses; they galloped through the cordon; and Madame d’Etioles was duly deposited at the Hôtel de Gesvres. The King got back to Versailles at 9 a.m.; he changed his coat and went to Mass, ‘no good sinning in every direction’; after which he slept until five o’clock. According to Court language ‘day broke in the King’s room at five’.

By now, tongues were wagging. Those who had seen the King and Madame d’Etioles leaving the Hôtel de Ville together supposed that she had gone back with him to Versailles; at Versailles itself the courtiers were wondering how long it would be before she appeared there again, and whether this was a passing attraction or a serious affair. People who knew the King well bet on the former. Never, they said, would he bring a bourgeoise to Versailles as mistress; in the annals of the kings of France such a thing was unknown, and it would create an impossible situation. The king’s mistress, after
all,
had an enormous position at the Court which somebody not born and bred there would never be able to carry off. Indeed, at this point the King himself seems to have hung back, probably because he was not sure of his own feelings. Madame d’Etioles was not the sort of person with whom one could play fast and loose, or treat as the little mistress of a few days, taking her from husband and family, and then casting her off again; it had to be all or nothing. She was rather middle-class in her behaviour; she spoke, and even thought, quite differently from the courtiers, and while this amused the King when they were alone together, he may have feared that it would embarrass him in front of such as the Duc de Richelieu. He was certainly anxious to establish a permanent mistress; he told the Sieur Binet that he was tired of going from one woman to another. In that case, said Binet, he could hardly do better than Madame d’Etioles, who was so madly in love that she could neither eat nor sleep. It seems that Binet had taken the affair in hand. Voltaire’s enemy, the Bishop of Mirepoix, attached to the Dauphin’s household, and leader of the extreme Catholic party at the Court, now threatened him with dismissal. Binet ran to the King, who was infuriated by this tactless step. There was no question, he said, of any dismissal at all.

Madame d’Etioles was soon to be observed flitting in and out of the palace. Nobody knew whether she slept there and if so in which room, but the King often supped alone at this time and her carriage was constantly on the road to Paris. When Binet was questioned, as he was night and day by curious courtiers, he said that she was soliciting a place as
fermier général
for her husband. The husband, however, was quite unaware of these goings-on. M. de Tournehem, whom Reinette could twist round her little finger, had sent him on a business journey to Provence. By the time the poor man, quite unsuspecting, came back to Paris, the affair with the King was sufficiently advanced for Tournehem to break the news to him that he had lost his wife for ever. D’Etioles fainted away, was stricken with terrible grief and wrote a pathetic letter, imploring her to come back to him. Madame d’Etioles, who had an extremely frank and open nature and never could keep anything to herself – out it all came, with her, it was part of her charm – immediately
showed
this letter to the King, at first sight not a very clever move. Ever since the Marquis de Montespan had driven to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in a coach draped in black, with a pair of stag’s antlers wobbling about on its roof, the royal family had had a healthy respect for husbands and their possible reprisals. Louis XV would never have got over such an incident. He thought it very indelicate of Madame d’Etioles to show the letter, bad form, exactly what one would expect of somebody with her upbringing, and handed it to her saying, coldly, ‘Your husband seems to be a very decent sort of man, Madame.’

However, the letter, indicating that d’Etioles knew all, gave the King food for thought. The moment had clearly come when he must decide whether he was going to install the lady as his titular mistress, or allow her to go back to a husband who was still ready to receive her, but would not be so indefinitely. The King was in love; he had seen enough of her by now to feel certain that she would never bore him, and she could soon be taught not to embarrass him. ‘It will amuse me,’ he said, ‘to undertake her education.’ Besides, she worshipped the ground he trod on, a fact to which no man can ever be quite indifferent. The upshot was that Madame d’Etioles remained at Versailles, lodging in a little flat which had once belonged to Madame de Mailly, and which was connected with the King’s room by a secret staircase. The first time she was publicly seen at Court was on 3 April, when she appeared at the Italian comedy in the palace theatre.

The King and Queen were there in two boxes, one above the other; Madame d’Etioles was in a box on the opposite side of the stage, clearly visible to both. Naturally all eyes were upon her, and the Duc de Luynes, in attendance on the Queen, was obliged to admit that she was wonderfully pretty and well-dressed. After the play the King supped with his two great friends, the Duc d’Ayen and the Comte de Coigny, Madame d’Etioles making the fourth. She began to appear at small supper parties given by the King to his intimates; surprisingly little adverse comment seems to have been made on her at this time – all agreed that they were passionately in love with each other.

An adulatory letter arrived from Voltaire who obviously hoped
great
things of his friend in her new position. Her parents were in the seventh heaven and so was Uncle Tournehem; only the husband was distracted with grief, but nobody seems to have given him another thought. Louis XV was quite right when he said that Le Normant d’Etioles was a very decent fellow; he sought no advantage from his wife’s position and answered any communications she chose to make him with perfect dignity. The rest of his family remained on excellent terms with her; his sister, Madame de Baschi, was always one of her greatest friends. She took her husband’s cousin, Madame d’Estrades, with her to Versailles as a sort of unofficial lady-in-waiting; nothing was ever too much for her to do for any member of the Le Normant family. When Le Normant d’Etioles’ father died, she went into mourning for him as a daughter-in-law, and cancelled a party to which she had invited the whole Court. D’Etioles and Abel Poisson remained lifelong friends and were constantly to be seen about Paris together. But he never spoke to his wife again.

THE WAR OF
the Austrian Succession was now in its fifth year. The Emperor had died in 1740 leaving an only daughter, Maria Theresa; during his lifetime the princes of the Empire and the sovereigns of Europe had agreed to respect her rights, but as soon as he was dead the temptation to fish in troubled waters became too strong for them. The Electors of Bavaria and Saxony, the Kings of Spain and Sardinia put forward claims to the Imperial Crown, in the name either of their wives or of female Hapsburg ancestors. The King of Prussia did not bother to put forward a claim at all; he acted. In December 1740 he invaded Silesia. A general war broke out in which France ought never to have joined; it was neither praiseworthy nor politic of her to have done so; many sacrifices and few advantages accrued, and the expense led to a fatal neglect of her navy. Louis XV, who, much as he personally enjoyed battles, was an extremely pacific man, had always been against it, and so had Cardinal Fleury; but the Cardinal was old and the King was overruled by Maréchal de Belle-Isle. Belle-Isle was the grandson of Fouquet – a brilliant soldier whose dream was for France to take the place of Austria in Europe. To this end he went round the German courts canvassing votes to elect Charles-Albert of Bavaria instead of Maria Theresa’s husband.

Cardinal Fleury died in 1743, aged ninety. He had been to Louis XV what Cardinal Richelieu was to Louis XIII. An exceedingly clever man and able ruler, in whom the King had perfect confidence, he had directed the policy of France without fear of being dislodged by the intrigues either of Court or of Church. This
situation
was never repeated in the life of Louis XV; he never found another Fleury.

In 1745 the French army, led by Maurice de Saxe, was enjoying a period of victories. The King had recently created him Marshal of France, and had promised his new Marshal that he and the Dauphin would go campaigning with him in the spring; the time had nearly come for them to be off. The Dauphin must be dragged from the arms of his bride, and he himself from those of his lovely mistress. He had no intention of taking her with him to risk the scenes of Metz all over again. Besides, he had a plan for her. She was to retire to Etioles in the company of two courtiers, chosen by himself, who would teach her the customs, manners and usage of Versailles. Some such education was quite necessary, if she was not to make a series of appalling solecisms, and to become the laughing stock of a society on the look out for any excuse to mock and be disagreeable.