Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (26 page)

Understandably, the marquise became stressed out by the disastrous situation in central Europe. She was plagued with health issues: headaches, sore eyes, coughs and colds, and innumerable sleepless nights. For a brief period after Damiens’ attack, Louis had tried to tamp down his overactive libido, as his multiple liaisons with pubescent girls repelled his subjects even more than his long-term affair
with the elegant marquise, but his effort didn’t last long. Soon he was turning ever more frequently to his adolescent concubines from the Parc-aux-Cerfs. In the aftermath of Damiens’ gruesome execution on March 28, 1757, the king had grown even gloomier than usual, and the marquise used the occasion as a teachable moment to enlighten him on the climate that produced the would-be assassin.

In 1759, the king became smitten by a raven-haired, statuesque twenty-year-old named Anne Coupier, who went by the name Mademoiselle de Romans. That year, Louis also impregnated Marguerite Sainte-Hainault, one of the girls from the town house in the rue Saint-Médéric. She bore the king a daughter in 1760, the same year the king got seventeen-year-old Lucie d’Estaing with child. Madame de Pompadour, now pushing forty, took more than a passing interest in these fertile royal paramours, but there was never a question that the king’s by-blows would be legitimized or even be taken to reside in the palace. In 1761, Mademoiselle de Romans became pregnant, and Louis began to flaunt his luscious brunette everywhere. The son she bore him on January 13, 1762, was baptized Louis-Aimé de Bourbon, and for the first time, Pompadour worried. Would the king legitimize him? He obviously recognized the boy as his own.

Unable to suppress her curiosity, one day the marquise and the mistress of her household rode out to the Bois de Boulogne, aware that the new mother had a habit of brazenly breast-feeding her bastard in the park. To disguise her features, Madame de Pompadour held a handkerchief to her face and pretended to have a toothache in order to get close to the nursing mother and glimpse her longtime lover’s child—the infant she would have dearly loved to have given him herself.

Louis’ liaison with the bourgeois Mademoiselle de Romans made Pompadour appreciate all the more the precariousness of her position after so many years. Perhaps being the king’s most trusted confidante was no longer enough. More than anything, she wished to stay at court, but what remained between her and Louis seemed a mere shadow of their former romance.

Luckily for the marquise, motherhood had transformed Mademoiselle de Romans into a transparent gold digger, and Louis soon tired
of her. He moved on to a less demanding chit, enjoying an even briefer flirtation with a woman from an even lower class.

The maréchale de Mirepoix, one of Pompadour’s friends at court, summed up the king’s attraction to the marquise long after the passion waned and Louis had turned to younger, nubile, and more willing girls to warm his bed. These adolescents could never know his mind. “He’s used to you, he doesn’t have to explain himself when he’s with you. If you disappeared and somebody younger and more beautiful were suddenly to be found in your place I dare say he wouldn’t give you another thought, but he’ll never be bothered to make a change himself. Princes, above all people, are creatures of habit.”

In the spring of 1761, plagued with migraines, fevers, and failing eyesight, the marquise de Pompadour began to retire from society. By the time the Seven Years’ War was concluded in 1763, she rarely ventured upstairs to visit Louis, who now entertained his young conquests in his
petits appartements
above the state rooms, despite the specially constructed “flying chair” that servants drew up the stairs on pulleys because she frequently grew too winded to climb them. It was almost as painful to acknowledge that she was no longer a part of that milieu.

Although she was only forty-two years old, by the summer of 1763, Madame de Pompadour had been ailing for some time. She was in constant pain; her legs were swollen and her limbs ached, she suffered from shortness of breath, and she had no appetite. Years of micromanaging her royal lover had worn the marquise out, physically as well as emotionally. Her unique role, with its demands of state, of courtesanry, and of intrigue, was all-encompassing and debilitating. Over the year, her condition steadily worsened.

The marquise de La Ferté-Imbault, a frenemy who had disdained to socialize with Jeanne-Antoinette even before the start of her illustrious royal liaison, described their meeting at the beginning of 1764, when she deigned to call on the favorite of two decades:

“I found her beautiful and grave. She seemed in good health, though she complained of insomnia, bad digestion and shortness of breath whenever she had to climb stairs…. She then went on to tell me, with the warmth and feeling of an actress who is good at playing her part, how distressed she was by the deplorable state of
the kingdom, the parlement’s rebellion and the things going on up there (pointing to the King’s apartment, with tears in her eyes). She assured me that her staying with the King was a great token of her affection for him; that she would have been a thousand times happier living alone and quietly at Ménars, but that the King would not know what to do if she left him; and in opening her heart to me—which, she said, she could open to no one—she depicted her torments for me with an eloquence and energy that I had never seen in her before…. In sum, she seemed demented and raving, and I never heard a more convincing sermon proving the misfortunes tied to ambition; and at the same time, I saw her in turn so miserable, so insolent, so violently agitated and so uncomfortable with her supreme power that I came away from her, after an hour of conversation, struck by the thought that she had no refuge left but death.”

On February 29, 1764, while the marquise was at Choisy with Louis, she was felled by an excruciating headache. Louis wrote to his son-in-law, “I am as much worried as ever; I must tell you that I am not very hopeful of a real cure, and even feel that the end may be near. A debt of nearly twenty years, and an unshakable friendship!” Seven days later she rallied, but then she developed a putrid fever and pneumonia. The king rarely quit her bedside. “At Court, Mme. de Pompadour’s illness stopped everything,” observed the duc de Croÿ.

She was at death’s door on March 10. The very fact that she remained at Versailles in such a condition was a huge violation of etiquette, as only monarchs and members of the immediate royal family could die in a royal palace. Yet the marquise held on to life for several more weeks. On Wednesday, April 11, she asked to receive last rites. Louis delayed as long as possible, aware that she was dying; he knew that once she was shriven, they would never be allowed to see each other again. On Friday the thirteenth the marquise couldn’t breathe. Yet in her final hours, the pious, self-righteous dauphin who had never liked her found a kind word to spare for the woman he had called
Maman Putain
. “She is dying with a courage rare in either sex,” he told the bishop of Verdun. “Every time she breathes, she believes it to be for the last time. It is one of the most painful ways to die and one of the cruelest one can imagine….”

Madame de Pompadour received extreme unction in the middle of
the night on April 14. On Palm Sunday, April 15, after adding a codicil to her 1757 will and refusing any assistance from her ladies-in-waiting, insisting that she didn’t have long to live, she noticed the
curé
of the Madeleine, who until then had not quit her bedside, about to quietly depart.

“
Un moment, monsieur le curé
; we will go together,” she murmured. And scarcely a few breaths later, at seven p.m., Madame de Pompadour expired, age forty-two and four months.

Her servants discreetly covered her body with a sheet and quickly conveyed it to the Hôtel des Réservoirs, as it was already a gross violation of court etiquette for her corpse to remain within Versailles. Although he received the story secondhand, Jean-Nicolas Dufort, the comte de Cheverny, one of the king’s minor household officials, described the scene: “The duchesse de Praslin told me: ‘I saw two men pass by carrying a stretcher. When they came closer (they passed right under my window) I saw that it was the body of a woman covered only with so thin a sheet that the shapes of the head, the breasts, the belly and the legs were clearly visible. I sent to ask: it was the body of that poor woman who, according to the strict rule that no dead person can remain in the Palace, was being carried to her house.”

Most poignant of all was that the man who was first her lover and then her closest friend and confidant for two decades was not permitted to attend her funeral or openly mourn her, because their liaison had been illicit and adulterous. According to Dufort, who witnessed the king observing the departure of the marquise’s funeral cortege on April 17, “It was six o’clock at night…and a dreadful storm was raging. The king took [his valet] Champlost by the arm; when he arrived at the mirrored door of the
cabinet intime
which gives out onto the balcony facing the avenue, he told him to close the entrance door and went with him out onto the balcony. He kept absolutely silent, saw the carriage drive into the avenue and, in spite of the bad weather and the rain, which he appeared not to feel, he kept looking at it until it went out of sight. He then came back into the room. Two large tears were still running down his cheeks, and he said to Champlost only these few words: ‘These are the only respects I can pay her.’”

Madame de Pompadour’s hearse was drawn by twelve horses
caparisoned in black-and-silver silk. Following them on foot were a hundred priests, two dozen children, forty-two liveried servants, and seventy-two beggars (the last group wearing respectable garments, which they were expected to return after the funeral). But the wind whipped their hats from their heads, blowing them irretrievably into the ditches along the sides of the road. “The Marquise has bad weather for her journey,” her royal lover was said to have murmured sadly.

It was the dead of night before the cortege reached the Convent of the Capucines, where Madame de Pompadour was laid beside the body of her daughter.

At Versailles, the woman who had for nearly twenty years influenced France’s art, culture, and politics, as well as its most powerful and illustrious resident, was either genuinely mourned or not given a second thought, depending on whom one asked. “No one talks anymore of the person who has just died, as though she had never existed,” wrote the queen to a friend only five days after Pompadour’s death.

The words of the duc de Croÿ, always a Pompadour devotee, contradict those of Her Majesty. “In general she was missed, being a good person and doing only good to most who came to her…and she had never done any harm, except when forced, but so many misfortunes had befallen France during her life, and so many extravagances!”

The nasty epigrams that made the rounds of the Paris coffeehouses were predictably cruel.

Here lies one who was twenty years a virgin,

Eight years a whore and ten years a pimp.

And then it was the philosophers’ turn to weigh in. Denis Diderot asked, “[W]hat remains of that woman who exhausted us of men and money, left us without honor and without energy and who has overturned the political system of Europe? The Treaty of Versailles, which will last while it is possible. The Cupid of Bouchardon which one will admire forever, some stones engraved by Guay which will astonish the antique dealers to come, a good little painting by Van
Loo which one will regard from time to time, and a handful of ashes.”

It’s a portrait of a remarkably influential woman for any era, however unflattering Diderot intended it to be, and an unvarnished view of one of the most powerful royal mistresses who ever lived. Madame de Pompadour’s extravagances were said to have cost Louis XV 36 million livres (in comparison, the Seven Years’ War cost the crown 1,350 million livres), but each of the marquise’s houses was constructed on royal property, and all of them reverted to the crown upon her death. Tragically, most of these châteaux and the priceless treasures they contained were destroyed during the Revolution.

Madame de Pompadour carefully cultivated the image of a woman of refinement and discernment, a tastemaker whose personal sensibilities influenced art, culture, architecture, and interior design for two decades. This most influential of royal mistresses paired with the most libidinous of lovers was physically and emotionally cool and did not enjoy sex. Yet remarkably, she held him for twenty years, in some measure because she remained trustworthy and discreet. Despite some close calls in his bed, no one else supplanted Madame de Pompadour in Louis’ affections.

From his self-imposed exile in Switzerland, Voltaire eulogized, “It is indeed ridiculous that an old scribbler is still alive, and that a beautiful woman should die at forty while in the midst of the most dazzling career in the world…. I believe…that the king is experiencing a great loss; he was loved for himself by a soul born sincere who had
justesse dans son esprit et de la justice dans son coeur
[sound judgment and sure instinct]. One does not meet with this every day….”

L
OUIS
XV
AND
J
EANNE
B
ÉCU
,
COMTESSE
DU
B
ARRY
(1743–1793)

Madame de Pompadour died on April 15, 1764, and although she went to her grave as Louis’
maîtresse en titre
, she had not warmed his bed for a decade. He was a man of large appetites, and he was lonely. Not only was he unsatisfied sexually, but after her death he missed
the Pompadour’s vivacious companionship. Escorted to him by his faithful valet and sometime-pimp Lebel, the beauties from the Parc-aux-Cerfs scratched the temporary itch, but the king was craving a more permanent relationship, and none of the girls had the talents to keep him amused. It takes a certain amount of cultivation and skill to be more than just a professional courtesan and to become a beloved mistress. A woman must understand how to stimulate far more than a man’s nether regions, particularly when her client is a king.