“I pity you much, Madame, while all the world envies you.” The person who addressed this just remark to the Marquise de Pompadour was her inseparable confidant, her lady’s maid, Madame du Hausset, the woman to whom she told everything, whom she always kept near her, and to whom she said: “The King and I rely on you so fully that we pay no more attention to you than to a cat or dog, but go right on talking.” The Marquise recognized the truth of her confidant’s melancholy words: “Ah!” she answered, “my life is like that of a Christian: a perpetual combat.” Strange comparison! Most inexact comparison! for the Christian combats for God, while the favorite was combating for the devil. This, in fact, was the cause of her sadness. The love of God consoles one for all sacrifices; but woe to the woman who makes herself the slave of a man! Madame de Pompadour placed no confidence in Louis XV., and she was right. The Maréchale de Mirepoix said to her one day: “It is your staircase that the King likes; he is used to going up and down it. But if he found another woman to whom he could talk about his hunting and his affairs, it would be all the same to him at the end of three days.”
Listen to Madame du Hausset. She says in her Memoirs: “Madame experienced many tribulations amidst all her grandeurs. Anonymous letters were often written her containing threats to poison or assassinate her; but what affected her most was the dread of being supplanted by a rival. I never saw her in greater vexation than one evening on her return from the salon of Marly. On entering, she spitefully threw down her muff and mantle, and undressed with extreme haste; then, sending away her other women, she said to me after they went out: ‘I don’t believe anything can be more insolent than that Madame de Coaslin. I had to play brelan at the same table with her this evening, and you cannot imagine what I suffered. The men and women seemed to take turns in coming to examine us. Two or three times Madame de Coaslin said, looking at me: “Va tout,” in the most insulting manner, and I thought I should be ill when she said in a triumphant tone: “I have played kings!” I wish you had seen her courtesy on quitting me!’” Thereupon Madame du Hausset inquired what the master’s attitude had been. “You don’t know him, my dear,” replied the Marquise; “if he were going to put her in my apartment this evening he would treat her coldly before people, and me with the greatest affection.” The favorite was in constant alarm and anxiety. She believed in neither the loyalty, the love, nor the friendship of the King. Thus, as has been wittily said by M. Paul de Saint-Victor: “She spent her life in the attitude of Scheherezade, sitting beside the bed where the caliph slept, his sabre at hand. Like the head of the sultana, her favor depended on a caprice of the master, on the gay or tiresome story which she was about to tell him. And what happens in the thousand and one nights of the harem from which she is excluded? Who knows whether a firman scrawled by a grisette may not exile her to-morrow to the depths of a province?” In spite of her knowledge of frivolous trifles and her array of seductions, the Marquise could not succeed in diverting Louis XV. It is again Madame du Hausset who tells us as much: “The King was habitually very dismal and liked everything which recalled the thought of death, even though he feared it very much.” This melancholy humor of the monarch distressed his mistress. “What a singular pleasure,” said she, “to occupy one’s self with things the very notion of which ought to be banished, especially when one leads such a happy life!” Madame de Pompadour did not reflect when she talked like this. She forgot that a debauchee can never be happy long. The sovereign and his favorite were both suffering from the same malady; their consciences were not at rest. To both of them might be applied the verses addressed by Lucretius to the Epicurean youth of Rome, which we translate as follows: “They inhale sweet perfumes; they deck themselves with wreaths and garlands; but from the middle of the fount of pleasures rises bitterness, and sharp thorns pierce through the flowers; remorse rebukes them from the depths of their soul and reproaches them with days lost in idleness.”
Of what use then were luxury and splendor to her? The Marquise was greeted by adulations in all her châteaux, all her houses. Nowhere did she find esteem. To tell the truth, all this array of factitious grandeur, all this pretence at decorum, was but a parody. Do what she might, the mistress of Louis XV. was in reality nothing but the first kept woman in the kingdom. Loaded and overwhelmed with proofs of royal munificence, she never called herself satisfied; ambition, like sensual pleasure, is insatiable. The love of money and the love of flattery never say: “It is enough!”
The sumptuous abodes the favorite found means to acquire were, after all, but monuments of her shame. Her house at Paris (now the Élysée) was styled the palace of the queen of courtesans, ædes reginæ meretricum. When the equestrian statue of Louis XV., with its four allegorical figures sculptured by Pigalle, was set up in the Place Louis XV., the crowd pointing out to each other these emblems of Force, Prudence, Justice, Love of Peace, said they were the four most famous mistresses of the monarch: Mesdames de Mailly, de Vintimille, de Châteauroux, and de Pompadour, and a paper containing these verses was posted on the statue itself:—
The honors heaped on her family by the all-powerful Marquise were not taken seriously. When her mother, Farmer-General Lenormand de Tournehem’s mistress, died, this quatrain was circulated:—
When her brother, Abel Poisson, metamorphosed into Marquis de Marigny and superintendent of the crown buildings, had received the blue ribbon of the Holy Spirit, people said the fish was turning blue.
In 1754 Madame de Pompadour had the misfortune of losing her only daughter, Alexandrine d’Étioles, who was only eleven years old. She would have liked to marry her to young De Vintimille, who passed as the son of Louis XV. One day she brought the two children together, as if accidentally, at Bellevue, and showing them to the King, said to him: “That would be a fine couple.” Louis XV. received this overture more than coldly. Madame de Pompadour said afterwards to Madame du Hausset: “If he were a Louis XIV., he would make a Duke du Maine of the child, but I do not ask so much as that; a position and a ducal title is very little for his son, and it is because he is his son that I prefer him, my dear, to all the little dukes of the court. My grandchildren would share a resemblance to both grandfather and grandmother, and this blending which I expect to see will one day be my happiness.”—“Tears came to her eyes in saying these words,” adds Madame du Hausset.
Sainte-Beuve has poured witty contempt on this adulterous dream. “It seems to me,” says the prince of critics, “that one lights unexpectedly on the perverted but persistent bourgeois vein in this wish of Madame de Pompadour; she brings ideas of affection and family arrangements even into her adulterous combinations. She has sentiments; she thinks of herself already as a most affectionate grandmother. A picture, which I would call a Greuze-Pompadour, might be made of this scene, the Marquise tearfully pointing out the two children to the King.”
The favorite found it hard to renounce her cherished project of this alliance. Afterwards she thought of the young Duke de Fronsac, Richelieu’s son, as a husband for her daughter. She caused overtures to be made to the celebrated courtier. He answered by a disguised refusal. “My son,” said he, “has the honor of belonging, on his mother’s side, to the house of Lorraine; hence I cannot dispose of him without the consent of that family, but I shall proceed to demand it urgently if the Marquise still persists in her intentions.”
Madame de Pompadour understood, and insisted no further. She planned another marriage for her daughter, who was promised to the young Duke de Pecquigny, son of the Duke de Chaulnes of the De Luynes family. But Mademoiselle d’Étioles died prematurely at the very time when the marriage was about to be contracted. She was buried in the sepulchre her mother had bought from an illustrious family. “The bones of the La Trémoille,” said the Princess de Talmond, “must have been must astonished at finding fish bones (les arêtes des Poisson) near them.”
We have seen the disgusting flatteries of which the Marquise was the object. These hyperboles of interested praise had a terrible counterpart. While the court was obsequious, Paris remained implacable. There was an incessant succession of sneers, satires, and invectives. There had been mazarinades of old; now there were poissonades. Minister Maurepas was the instigator and often the author of these violent rhymed diatribes, which made people say France was an absolute monarchy tempered by ballads. The masses avenged themselves by refrains of more than Gallic animation. We cite one among a thousand. It was sung to the air Trembleurs d’Isis:—
Nor did people content themselves with ballads. They likewise produced long pieces of emphatic verse, distilling venom and hatred. More or less skilful imitators of Juvenal composed satires full of gall and bitterness. What specially excited the indignation of the authors of these diatribes were the representations at the theatre of the little cabinets. One of them, addressing himself to Madame de Pompadour, exclaimed:—
Another thus expressed himself:—
A pamphlet entitled “The School of Man, or parallel between contemporary portraits and those of Holy Writ,” contained attacks of this sort against Louis XV.: “Too much incommoded by his greatness to take a girl from the green room, Lindor satisfied himself in true princely style: he had a large house with a theatre in it built expressly for him, where his mistress became a danseuse by title and office; men infatuated by the vanity of dancing women, insensate imitators of Candaules, do not fancy that the last Gyges died in Lydia.”
One should read the Memoirs of the Marquis d’Argenson and those of Barbier the advocate in order to get a just notion of the hatred felt for the Marquise by both the aristocracy and the middle classes. The people despised her quite as much, and held her solely responsible for all wretchedness and every disaster. The luxury of this parvenu irritated them, and they detested her profoundly. The following quatrain expressed the popular sentiment:—
For those who knew how to listen, the Revolutionary storm was already rumbling in the distance.
Madame de Pompadour could not rely on her flatterers themselves. Voltaire, who had burned so much incense at the adored feet of the Marquise, who at Versailles had been her most zealous, ardent, enthusiastic courtier, forgot all that in his retreat at Ferney. He chaffed at his former idol and drew a most malicious portrait of her in his poem La Pucelle.
Thoroughly acquainted with the tone of public opinion, since she had her own police and an arrangement with the director of the post-office, who violated the secret of letters for her, Madame de Pompadour was in despair at so many attacks. Uneasy, feverish, dissatisfied with the King and the kingdom, considering herself as a victim of destiny, a woman unjustly dealt with by fortune, spitefully angry at Frederick the Great, who scoffed at her; at Louis XV., who neglected her for the young girls of the Deer Park; at the clergy, who regarded her as a tool of hell; at the Parliaments, which disdained her; at the nobility, who saw nothing in her but an ambitious bourgeoise; at the middle classes, who reproached her for being immoral; at all France, which scorned her,—she suffered as much in her vanity as in her pride, and said to her confidant, Madame du Hausset: “The sorceress told me I should have time to repent before dying; I believe it, for I shall die of nothing but chagrin.”