Louis XV. had made his mistress what one might call a vice-queen. She had the power, luxury, riches, and adulations of royalty; everything, in fact, except its moral prestige. Surrounded by a court of ministers, prelates, and nobles, she throned it in the midst of pomp and opulence. She was the type of the woman à la mode, elegant, coquettish, absolute, always on show, insatiable for praise and success, thirsting for dignities, pleasures, and money; playing not merely the great lady, but the sovereign, having her courtiers, her creatures, her poets, reigning alike over the King and the kingdom.

M. Arsène Houssaye has said with justice: “Louis XV. had three prime ministers: Cardinal Fleury, the Duke de Choiseul, the Marquise de Pompadour.” But the Marquise was not an ordinary prime minister; she was a prime minister doubled with a mistress. To a woman invested with this exaggerated rôle, a display of power was necessary. The favorite set herself to create around her a sort of decorum, etiquette, and factitious grandeur. Like little women who wear enormously high heels, she made herself a pedestal. Madame d’Étioles had disappeared; nothing remained but the Marquise de Pompadour. To be a marchioness did not satisfy her, and she demanded and obtained the tabouret and the honors of a duchess. She had a box at the court theatre with a grating behind which she shut herself up tête-à-tête with the King. In the chapel a gallery in the grand tribune was reserved for her and her suite. People waited on her stairway at the hour of her toilette just as they await a ministerial audience in an ante-chamber. She used to say to the ministers: “Continue; I am satisfied with you,” and to the foreign ambassadors: “Observe that on Tuesdays the King cannot see you, gentlemen, for I think you will hardly follow us to Compiègne.”

One of the cabinets in her apartment was full of petitions. Solicitors approached her with respectful fear. The ducal mantle and velvet cap figured on the panels of her carriages. A nobleman carried her mantle and awaited her coming in the ante-chamber. A man of illustrious birth, a Chevalier d’Hénen, of the family of the Princes de Chimay, rode at her carriage door as equerry. She was served at table by a Chevalier of Saint Louis, her steward Colin, a napkin under his arm. Her chambermaid was a woman of quality, Madame du Hausset, who has left such curious Memoirs. The all-powerful favorite had not forgotten her family. Her father was ennobled in 1747. Her brother, Abel Poisson, became successively Marquis de Vandières, Marquis de Marigny, Marquis de Ménars. The marquisate not contenting him, he obtained a place created for Colbert, that of superintendent of crown buildings. He was as a patron of artists a Mecænas, an arbiter elegantiarum. The King, who treated him as his brother-in-law, gave him the blue ribbon and put him on an equality with the greatest nobles of the realm. Young Alexandrine, the daughter of Madame de Pompadour and M. de Étioles, was brought up at Paris in the convent of the Assumption.

The nuns showed her the greatest attention. She was addressed by her baptismal name, as was then the custom for princesses of the blood, and she was expected to make one of the most brilliant marriages in France. Madame de Pompadour desired pomp even in death. She bought a splendid sepulchre in the Capuchin convent in the Place Vendôme, Paris, from the Trémoille family. There she built a magnificent mausoleum, where her mother was interred and where she reserved a place for herself.[35]

The favorite had not simply power, but beauty; beauty, that supreme weapon. A veritable magician, she transformed herself at will. As mobile as the clouds, as changeful as the wave, she renewed and metamorphosed herself incessantly. No actress knew better than she how to compose an attitude or a countenance. In her whole person there was an exquisite grace, an exceptional charm, a taste, an elegance which amounted to subtlety. La Tour, the pastel painter, is he who has best reproduced her animated, spirituelle, triumphant physiognomy, the eyes full of intelligence and audacity, the satin skin, the supple figure, the general harmony, the charming and coquettish whole.

All the splendors of luxury were like a frame to the picture. A new Danaë, the Marquise disappeared under a shower of gold. It is known exactly what she cost France from September 9, 1745, the time when her favor began, until April 15, 1764, the day of her death. M. Le Roy has discovered an authentic document,[36] containing an account of the favorite’s expenses during this period of nearly twenty years. The total is 35,924,140 livres. In this list of expenses is found the pension granted to Madame Lebon for having predicted to the Marquise, then only nine years old, that she would one day be the mistress of Louis XV.

Nothing seemed fine enough for Madame de Pompadour, either in dress, lodgings, or furniture. At Versailles she secured for herself on the ground floor, on the terrace looking toward the parterre on the north, the magnificent apartments occupied by the Duke and Duchess de Penthièvre.[37] (Part of the ministry of foreign affairs is established there at present. The minister’s study is the same as that of Madame de Pompadour. Her bedchamber is now the thirteenth hall of the marshals, her ante-chamber the hall of famous warriors.)

The favorite bought a superb house in the city communicating by a passage with the apartments of the palace (it is now the hôtel des Réservoirs). In 1748 she acquired the château of Ciécy and the estate of Aunay, and in 1749 the château of La Celle, near Versailles. In 1750 she inaugurated, on the hill commanding the Seine, between Sèvres and Meudon, that enchanting abode of Bellevue, where all the arts rivalled each other to create a magic entity. The ante-chamber with statues by Adam and Falconnet; the dining-room with paintings of game and fish by Oudry; the salon decorated by Vanloo; the apartment of the Marquise, hung with Boucher’s glowing pictures; the park with its parterres of rare flowers, its fine trees, grottos, and fountains, its statues by Pigalle and Coustou, its varied perspectives, its immense horizons,—all made of Bellevue a real palace of Armida. At Versailles, the Marquise obtained from the King a portion of the little park wherein to construct a gem of architecture, which she called the Hermitage; it cloaked extreme elegance under an appearance of simplicity. It had fine Persian hangings, panelled wainscotings decorated by the most skilful painters, thickets of myrtles, lilacs, and roses. This habitation is no longer in existence; a part of its site is occupied by the rue de l’Ermitage at Versailles. The Marquise had a house at Compiègne and a lodge at Fontainebleau. At Paris she bought, for seven hundred and thirty thousand livres, the hôtel d’Evreux, which is now the Élysée.

At the Trianon her apartment was on the same floor with that of Louis XV. At Clécy she received as if in a royal château. The King’s visits to this splendid residence used to last three or four days, and cost about one hundred thousand livres.

A woman so influential could not fail to have a swarm of flatterers. The resources of fawning and hyperbole were exhausted in her favor. The most exaggerated of her sycophants was Voltaire—Voltaire to whom the republicans are nowadays raising statues. He treated the Marquise as a superior being, a goddess, and pushed his flattery to absurdity, to platitude. In 1745, the moment when the reign of the favorite began, he sent her this compliment:—

In 1746, when Marshal de Lowendal had just taken Berg-Op-Zoom, it was Madame de Pompadour whom Voltaire felicitated on the victory, in strains like these:—

The Marquise rewarded Voltaire at the end of the same year by producing the Enfant prodigue in the theatre of the little cabinets, and taking the part of Lise herself. It was then that the poet, beside himself with joy, addressed the beautiful actress the following lines, which exasperated the daughters of Louis XV. and dissatisfied the King himself:—

So many madrigals were not enough. Both verse and prose were needed. In addressing to the Marquise a copy of the Précis du siècle de Louis XV. Voltaire inserted in it a passage, gravely congratulating her upon that treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle which had so grievously offended the national sentiment:—

“It must be owned that Europe may date its felicity from the day of this peace. People will learn with surprise that it was the result of the urgent counsels of a young lady of high rank, celebrated for her charms, her singular talents, her wit, and an envied position. It was the destiny of Europe in this long quarrel that a woman began it and a woman ended it. The second has bestowed as many benefits as the first caused harm.”

Can one be surprised, after this, that Madame de Pompadour should have been persuaded of her own merit, wit, and even genius; that she cherished strange illusions concerning her rôle and her character; that she took herself seriously, even tragically; that she regarded any adverse criticism of her as high treason against beauty and majesty?

With such an array of luxury and power, such a mass of riches, jewels, objects of art, such a court of ingenious and amiable courtiers, with all that could soothe her vanity, coquetry, and pride, with the ability to realize all her fancies and caprices, one might perhaps think the favorite was happy. Well! no.