There are names which are the abridgment of an entire society. Such is that gay name which rhymes so well with “amour,” which seems made expressly for a grande dame after the manner of Lancret or Watteau, which would fit so well a comic opera or a pastoral, which is worthy to figure in the Temple of Cnidos and to be celebrated by the pretty little verses of the Abbé de Bernis, which evokes so many souvenirs of immoral elegance and factitious sentimentality of boudoirs and alcoves, comedies and gewgaws, pleasures and intrigues: the Marquise de Pompadour. Woman, name, title, all are alike gracious, pretty, sprightly; but nothing is simple, nothing true. The character is that of a comedienne perpetually on the stage. The beauty owes a great part of its prestige to the refinements of luxury and the artifices of the toilette. The marquisate is a contraband one.
The future favorite seems predestined almost from the cradle to her part. She is a little marvel, an infant prodigy. She is only nine years old when a fortune-teller by cards predicts to her that she will be the mistress of Louis XV. This prediction delights her family; they believe in it as if it were written in the Gospels, and they decide to do all in their power to realize it. Aid yourself, and hell will aid you. She who was one day to call herself Madame the Marquise de Pompadour was then named Jeanne Antoinette Poisson. Born in Paris, December 29, 1721, she had a father who was vulgar even to indecency, François Poisson, former clerk of the Paris brothers, who was condemned to be hanged in 1726 for malversations, but rehabilitated in 1741 after several years of exile. Her mother was a Demoiselle de la Motte, daughter of the provision contractor of the Hôtel des Invalides, a very pretty woman, guilty of many infidelities to her husband, and very richly subsidized by a gallant farmer-general, M. Lenormand de Tournehem. The financier imagines, possibly with good reason, that he is the father of little Antoinette. Hence he gives her the most careful education. She is taught everything except virtue. Jéliotte teaches her singing and the harpsichord, Guibaudet dancing, Crébillon declamation. She is an actress, a musician, an accomplished singer. She imitates la Gaussin and la Clairon marvellously. She rides admirably. She dresses ravishingly. She is as pretty as Cupid. Nobody tells a story so well as she. She is pleasing, amusing, delightful. Her mother, enthusiastic over such charms, exclaims: “She is a morsel for a king!”
But how to justify the prediction of the sorceress? The place of king’s mistress is occupied by none but very great ladies: a Countess de Mailly, a Countess de Vintimille, a Duchess de Châteauroux. Can little Poisson aspire to the same rôle? If she persists in such schemes, will not people say that the keg always smells of the herring? Will the Duke de Richelieu permit a bourgeoise to supplant the nobility in this fashion? Mademoiselle Poisson does not allow herself to be discouraged. She has her fixed idea. She believes in what she calls her star. Her marriage is the first rung of the ambitious ladder. March 9, 1741, she marries a rich young man, M. Lenormand d’Étioles, deputy farmer-general, nephew of M. Lenormand de Tournehem, Madame Poisson’s lover. The bride is nineteen, the husband twenty-four years old; he is madly in love, and as his wife tells him she will never betray him unless for the King, he mutters: “Then I can be very easy.”
The young wife is presently the fashion. She is the gem of that financial society which has made such headway since the latter years of Louis XIV. President Hénault writes to Madame du Deffand, July, 1742: “At Madame de Montigny’s I met one of the prettiest women I have ever seen, Madame d’Étioles. She understands music perfectly, sings with all possible gaiety and taste, knows a hundred ballads, and plays comedy at Étioles on a stage as fine as that of the Opera, with machinery and changes of scenes.”
She prepares her success skilfully. The trumpets of fame are at her disposal. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, the Abbé de Bernis, are her friends. At Paris, in her house in rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and at Étioles in her château near Corbeil, she leads a life of luxury and pleasures. She is an enchantress, a siren. But she has only one desire,—to make the King the objective point of all this magic. She would scorn any other conquest.
The man she must have is Louis XV. To arrive at this conquest she will exhaust the resources of feminine coquetry. Never were manœuvres more persevering, artifices more sagacious. She has to play the enamoured woman, the passionate woman, to pursue the King when he hunts in the forest of Sénart, to pass and repass, like a graceful apparition, like the goddess of the forests, through the midst of the escort with their dogs and horses, sometimes robed in azure in a rose-colored phaeton, sometimes in rose in a phaeton of blue. One day she is on horseback; another day she drives herself, in an elegant conch shell of rock crystal, two chestnut horses swift as lightning. The King inquires the name of this elegant and pretty woman. Then he sends her some of his game. Madame d’Étioles has good hopes. The Duchess de Châteauroux is dead; she is sure of replacing her.
The masked balls given at the time of the Dauphin’s marriage are excellent opportunities to display one’s self. At the Hôtel de Ville ball the prettiest women of the bourgeoisie are grouped together on a platform hung with velvet, silk, and gold. Madame d’Étioles appears as Diana the huntress, powdered, the quiver on her shoulder, the silver arrow in her hand. For an instant she takes off her mask and pretends to let fly an arrow at the King. “Beautiful huntress,” cries the King, “the darts you discharge are fatal.” Then she resumes her mask and slips into the crowd, but dropping her lace handkerchief as she goes. Louis XV. picks it up and, sultan-like, launches it with a gallant hand at the beautiful unknown. “The handkerchief is thrown,” people mutter on all sides.
Madame d’Étioles is about, then, to reach her goal. She has no reproach to make against her husband, by whom she has had two children: a son born in 1741, who only lived six months, and a daughter, Alexandrine, born in 1743, who will live until 1754. This husband is an excellent man, gentle, affectionate, easy to live with, much in love with his wife, not at all jealous, happy and proud to be the husband of the prettiest woman in Paris. But what would you have? Madame d’Étioles has taken it into her head to be the King’s mistress. ’Tis a fantasy of a coquettish woman which she must absolutely realize.
Taking advantage of her husband’s stay in the country, and protected by one of her relatives, Bivet, valet de chambre to the Dauphin, she makes her way into the palace of Versailles and parades a romantic passion for Louis XV. She says she is menaced by M. d’Étioles’ vengeance and begs the King to shelter her. The monarch is affected and installs her mysteriously in the chamber formerly occupied by Madame de Mailly. Poor M. d’Étioles, on his return to Paris, learns what has befallen him. He faints away at the fatal tidings, and afterwards writes his wife a letter so touching that Louis XV., after reading it, cannot avoid saying: “Madame, you have a very honest husband.” In despair at first, the betrayed husband at last resigns himself. He does not try to contend with a king, and repairs philosophically to the south of France, to make an inspection into finances which is part of his official duties as deputy farmer-general.
At court there is great commotion. It seems impossible to imagine that a woman of the middle classes, une robine, as D’Argenson says, can replace a great lady like the Duchess de Châteauroux. The Duke de Luynes writes in his Memoirs, March 11, 1745: “All the masked balls have given occasion for talk concerning the King’s new amours, and principally of a Madame d’Étioles, who is young and pretty. It is said that for some time she is nearly always here, and that she is the King’s choice. If such is the fact, it can hardly be anything more than a case of gallantry, and not of mistress.”
Louis XV., who is fond of mystery, amuses himself at first by being discreet. He conceals his new favorite. “It is not known where she is lodged,” writes the Duke de Luynes, April 23, 1745, “but, nevertheless, I think it is in a little apartment that Madame de Mailly had, and which adjoins the little cabinets; she does not live here all the time, but comes and goes to Paris.”
A few days later, May 5, 1745, the King sets off for the army with the Dauphin. But Madame d’Étioles has the good sense not to rejoin him there. Nor does she remain at Versailles, but withdraws to her château of Étioles, near Corbeil, where Voltaire and the Abbé de Bernis keep her company. Louis XV., much more occupied with his new mistress than with the war, writes her letter upon letter. The Abbé de Bernis counsels the favorite who, with such a secretary, cannot fail to reply to her royal lover in the most charming and gallantly turned epistles. We read in the Memoirs of the Duke de Luynes (June 19, 1745): “Madame d’Étioles is still in the country, near Paris, and has never wanted to go to Flanders. The King is more in love than ever; he writes and sends couriers to her at every moment.”
All France uttered a cry of enthusiasm on learning the victory of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). But could one believe it? The person first felicitated by Voltaire on account of that glorious day was neither Louis XV. nor Marshal de Saxe, but Madame d’Étioles. Before writing his poem on Fontenoy, the obsequious poet addressed the favorite in these stanzas:—
France, always maddened by success, is in a real delirium. The Parliament of Paris sends a deputation to Lille to felicitate the King on his victory and entreat him “so far as may be, not to expose in future his sacred person, on which the welfare and safety of the State depend.” All the supreme courts of the kingdom imitate that of Paris, and the first president of the court of taxes exclaims in his address to the King: “Your Majesty’s conquests are so rapid that the point is how to safeguard the faith of our descendants and lessen the wonder of miracles, lest heroes should dispense themselves from following, and people from believing, in them.” But the conquest which chiefly preoccupies Louis XV. is that of his new mistress.
In July, 1745, she proudly displays eighty amorous epistles from the gallant sovereign; the motto on the seal is: Discreet and faithful; one of them is addressed: À la Marquise de Pompadour, and contains the brevet conferring this title. The new marquise instantly discards the name of Étioles, leaves off her husband’s arms, substitutes three towers in their place, and puts her servants in grand livery. This marquisate enchants Voltaire; he has become the official poet, courtier, and familiar of the favorite, and his complaisant muse thus celebrates the official accession of the new royal mistress:—
The democrats, perhaps, are in a trifle too much of a hurry to erect a statue to Voltaire.