Madame de Pompadour was destined to “live in the midst of alarms.” For nearly a year she had been congratulating herself on the cleverness with which she had carried by assault the post of lady of the Queen’s palace, and had dismissed the confessors, of whom she thought she had no more need, when an unforeseen event was very near making her lose all the ground she had so painfully acquired.

Toward six o’clock in the evening of January 5, 1757, Louis XV. had just come down the little staircase leading from his apartments to a vestibule facing the marble court, and was about to enter a carriage, when he was struck by a penknife in the hand of a person named Damiens, who, either through folly or fanaticism, wished not to kill him, but to give him a warning. The King thought himself mortally wounded. He belonged to that category of Christians who are never pious but when they are sick. When in good health they say: “There is always time to repent.” But if danger threatens them, they tremble, they go to confession, they become saints for the time being, reserving the privilege of resuming their vicious habits as soon as their health returns. When he thought death was facing him, Louis XV. expressed himself in terms worthy of the Most Christian King. At Metz he had been sublime. He was not less eloquent at Versailles. The noblest maxims were on his lips, the most beautiful sentiments in his heart. He named his son lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and said to him with emotion: “I leave you a very disturbed realm; I hope that you may govern it better than I have done.” He melted into tears of edification and admiration all those who came near him. This was no longer the man of the Deer Park; it was the son of Saint Louis.

One of his first words after being struck was a cry for a priest. His Jesuit confessor, Père Desmarets, was not just then at Versailles. A priest of the Grand-Commun was summoned (the ecclesiastics who acted as chaplains to those persons in the King’s service who were lodged in the apartments called Grand-Commun). Louis XV. made his confession first to this priest, and again to Père Desmarets, who arrived in great haste from Paris.

Louis XV. had received only a trifling wound. Damiens, who might have killed him, had not wished to do so. He had two blades on one handle, a large one and a small one, and had used only the latter. The doctor said that if the wounded man were not a king, he might go about his affairs the next day. But the imagination of Louis XV. was easily excited. When the wound had been probed, and he was assured that it was not very deep, he exclaimed: “It is deeper than you think, for it goes clear to the heart.” Baron de Besenval relates in his Memoirs that when the doctors had no longer the least anxiety, that of the King was such that, believing himself dying, he made the Abbé de Rochecour, the chaplain of the neighborhood, give him absolution every moment.

Louis the Well-Beloved was not as yet Louis the Well-Hated. Barbier says there was general consternation at Paris; everybody lamented. The archbishop commanded the devotions of the forty hours in all the churches. The priests and monks, suffocated by emotion, could hardly intone the Domine salvum fac regem.

What was happening to Madame de Pompadour all this time? She remained in her apartment in the palace of Versailles, but she had not even dared solicit the favor of seeing the royal sufferer. She knew that Louis XV. was no longer the same man when he was ill, and that it took him only a moment to become once more a devotee. Remembering what had happened at Metz at the time of the ignominious banishment of the Duchess de Châteauroux, she was convinced that she was about to go into exile, and nearly everybody believed the same.

“The people,” says Madame du Hausset, “received the news of the assault on the King with furious cries and the utmost despair; one could hear them crying under the windows from Madame’s apartment. They came in crowds, and Madame dreaded the fate of Madame de Châteauroux. Her friends came constantly with tidings. For that matter, her apartment was like a church, which everybody thought he had a right to enter. They came to see how she took it, under pretence of interest, and Madame did nothing but weep and faint away. Doctor Quesnay never left her, nor I either.”

What was at this moment the attitude of the three principal ministers, Count d’Argenson (brother of the author of the Memoirs), Minister of War, M. de Machault, Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, and Abbé de Bernis, who had been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs three days before the assault? The first was the sworn enemy of the Marquise. He caught at the chance for vengeance. The second was under obligations to the Marquise, but, believing she would henceforth be powerless, he declared against her in order to salute the Dauphin’s rising sun. The third did not abandon the woman to whom he owed the portfolio he had just obtained. He wrote to M. de Choiseul this singular letter, in which the words “honor” and “virtue” are employed strangely enough: “The King has been assassinated, and all that the court has seen in this frightful event is a favorable moment for driving away our friend. Every intrigue has been brought to play on the confessor. There is a tribe at court who are always awaiting the Extreme Unction in order to try to augment their importance. Why should devotion be separated so from virtue? Our friend can no longer scandalize any one but fools and knaves. It is of public notoriety that friendship has supplanted gallantry these five years back. It is pure bigotry to go back into the past to impugn the innocence of the actual connection. This is founded upon his need of being able to open his heart to a proved and trusty friend who is, in the divisions of the Ministry, the sole point of reunion. What ingrates I have seen, my dear Count, and how corrupt our time is! Perhaps there have never been more virtues in the world, but there has been more honor.”

Count d’Argenson and M. de Machault did not like each other, but they were in agreement respecting the Marquise. If Madame de Pompadour was in nowise astonished by the conduct of the first, whose detestation of her she had long been aware of, the defection of the second, who had been her creature, put her beside herself, “Is that a friend?” she exclaimed in amazement.

On being left alone with M. de Machault, after the dressing of his wound, Louis XV. charged him, as a friend of his favorite, not to send her an order to depart, but to personally advise her to do so. The Keeper of the Seals called therefore on the Marquise. The interview lasted half an hour. The result was anxiously awaited, and the Abbé de Bernis had returned to learn what passed. But Madame du Hausset shall tell the story. Nobody is so interesting as ear and eye witnesses.

“Madame rang; I entered, followed by the Abbé. She was in tears. ‘I have got to go away, my dear Abbé,’ said she. I made her take some orange flower water in a silver goblet, because her teeth were chattering. Afterwards she told me to call her equerry, and she gave him her orders tranquilly enough to have her house at Paris prepared for her, and to tell all her people to be ready to start, and her coachmen not to absent themselves. A few minutes later the Maréchale Mirepoix came in: ‘What are all these trunks for?’ she exclaimed. ‘Your people say you are going away?’ ‘Alas! my dear friend, the master wills it, according to what M. de Machault has told me.’—‘And what is his own opinion?’ said the Maréchale. ‘That I should go without delay.’ During this time I was undressing Madame unaided, she wishing to be more at ease on her sofa. ‘He wants to be master, your keeper of the seals,’ said the Maréchale, ‘and he is betraying you; who gives up the game loses it.’” This language made the clever Marquise thoughtful. Quesnay came in afterwards, “and with his monkey-like air, having heard what had been said, he recited the fable of a fox who, dining with some other animals, persuaded one of them that his enemies were hunting for him, so as to snatch his part in his absence. I did not see Madame again until very late, at the hour of her couchee. She was calmer.”

However, it was not yet known whether the favorite would not end by being disgraced. Her enemy, Count d’Argenson, seemed to possess the intimate confidence of the sovereign. The King had given him his keys that he might look for the secret papers at Trianon, and the Count’s brother, the Marquis d’Argenson, wrote in his Memoirs, January 15, 1757, ten days after the assault: “It is true that since the assassination of the King, the Marquise has not seen His Majesty for a single instant. She endures her disgrace by concealing it; but little by little she will be abandoned. She has neither seen nor received a billet from His Majesty, who no longer seems to think of her. Meanwhile the King sees his confessor, Père Desmarets, every day, and has made declarations of friendship and good conduct to the Queen. All this smacks of a change at court. M. the Dauphin has entered the Council and is gaining credit there.’ The former Minister of Foreign Affairs was deluding himself. On the very day when he wrote these lines, the Marquise saw Louis XV. again and resumed her former domination, as the Minister of War was presently to become aware. “The great talent at court,” says the Baron de Besenval, “is to be a good judge of circumstances and know how to profit by them. M. d’Argenson deceived himself in this; he should have reflected that the ill-grounded terror of the King might pass as quickly as it came, and that he would seek to resume power as promptly as he had abandoned it. This is the way with all feeble souls. The minister forgot this truth. In the first council held after the attempt on the King, M. d’Argenson proposed, in presence of M. the Dauphin, who presided, that the ministers should hold their deliberations in the apartments of this prince, as lieutenant-general of the kingdom, until the complete recovery of the King. It resulted from this fault that M. the Dauphin, who was not very susceptible of ambition, was not at all grateful to the minister for his proposal, and that the King, hardly convalescent as yet, found his heart again replenished with that displeasure which his son had always inspired in him; that he withdrew him from affairs and never forgave M. d’Argenson for the mark of devotion he had given him on this occasion. When one dares to be ungrateful, he ought at least to be more adroit about it.”

As Baron de Besenval again remarks, “a mistress removed is not yet to be despised, and love has its caprices and returns as prompt as those of fortune.” Madame de Pompadour stayed where she was. The Minister of War and the Keeper of the Seals were sacrificed to her. The favorite made a tearful scene in presence of Louis XV. One would have thought she was going to faint. Madame du Hausset went to fetch her some of Hoffman’s drops. The King himself arranged the dose with sugar and presented it to the Marquise in the most gracious manner. She ended by smiling and kissed the hand of the gallant monarch, who consoled her.

Two days later, Count d’Argenson received the following letter from the King: “Your service is no longer necessary to me. I order you to send me your resignation as Secretary of State for War and all which concerns the employments thereunto adjoined, and to retire to your estate of Ormes.”

Things resumed their customary course. At the end of January, 1757, the advocate Barbier wrote in his journal: “The King is perfectly well. Madame the Marquise de Pompadour has not quitted Versailles. A few days after his recovery the King paid her a visit of a quarter of an hour, but since he holds his councils as usual he has resumed his own occupations; he has hunted several times, and the little suppers have begun again.” The chronicler, often cynical, concludes as follows: “Notwithstanding the criticisms of evil-minded persons, the best thing that could happen to both him and us, that is to all good citizens, would be for him to banish from his mind a misfortune which ought not to affect one, and continue his ordinary dissipations.”

Baron de Besenval’s conclusion must also be quoted: “Thus in the whole of this affair, M. d’Argenson had been willing to sacrifice the King to the Dauphin in order to prolong his own power. The King had been willing to sacrifice his mistress to public opinion and the terrors which disturbed his mind. M. de Machault consented to sacrifice Madame de Pompadour, his friend, by giving her advice which might please the monarch. And in the end everything was sacrificed to love, which is what happens and will happen always.” Here the word “love” is not accurate; “habit” is what he should have said.

Once more the favorite had triumphed; but in her victory she bore a mortal grudge against the Jesuits who had nearly succeeded in banishing her. She began that underhand but violent struggle against them which, a few years later, was to result in the suppression of their order. She had the audacity to forward secretly to the Pope a note which was a censure on their conduct and, if one can believe it, a defence of her own. This note, a copy of which has been discovered in the papers of the Duke de Choiseul, is a veritable monument of cynicism or else of a perverted conscience. It proves in the woman who conceived it an entire lack of moral sense, a forgetfulness of the most elementary decorum, and of the respect which unbelievers themselves owe to religion.

This curious document opens as follows:—

“At the beginning of 1752, determined by motives which it is useless to give an account of, to no longer preserve for the King any sentiments but those of gratitude and the purest attachment, I declared as much to His Majesty, supplicating him to cause the doctors of the Sorbonne to be consulted, and to write to his confessor that he might consult with others, in order that I might be left near his person, since he desired it, without being exposed to the suspicion of a weakness which I no longer had.”

So then, to credit Madame de Pompadour, she had become a type of modesty and Christian renunciation. She adds: “Things remained in appearance just as they had been until 1755. Then, prolonged reflections on the evils which had pursued me, even amidst the greatest good fortune; the certainty of never arriving at happiness by worldly goods, since none had ever been lacking to me, and yet I had never attained to happiness; detachment from the things which had most amused me,—all induced me to believe that the only happiness is in God. I addressed myself to Père de Sacy as to a man fully penetrated with this verity; I bared my soul completely to him; he tried me in secret from September to the end of January, 1756. During this time he proposed that I should write a letter to my husband, the rough draft of which, drawn up by himself, I still have. My husband refused ever to see me.”

The Marquise then complained to the Sovereign Pontiff of Père de Sacy, who, according to her, was the victim of intrigues of every sort, and guilty of having told her that he would refuse her the sacraments so long as she did not leave the court. She added, in speaking of Damiens’s crime: “The abominable 5th January, 1757, arrived, and was followed by the same intrigues as in the previous year. The King did all in his power to bring Père Desmarets to the verity of religion. The same motives being at work, the response was not different; and the King, who earnestly desired to fulfil his duties as a Christian, was prevented from doing so, and soon after relapsed into the same errors, from which he would certainly have been extricated had they acted in good faith.”

Perhaps all is not hypocrisy in this note. I incline to believe that in spite of her idolatry for the court, the favorite recognized its miseries and nothingness. How many persons remain vicious while knowing well that vice produces their unhappiness! How many passionate people own to themselves that their passions are killing them! O Ambition! cries Saint Bernard, by what spell does it happen that, being the torment of a heart where thou hast taken birth, and where thou dost exert thine empire, yet there is no person whom thou dost not please, and who does not allow himself to be taken by surprise by the flattering attraction thou dost offer him. O ambitio, quo modo omnes torquens omnibus places?

It would have been easy to reply to the Marquise de Pompadour that if the grandeurs of this world gave her so little satisfaction, all she had to do was to withdraw from the court. Hence the Pope remained untouched by all this display of Christian philosophy. He could not make up his mind to consider the mistress of Louis XV. as a repentant Magdalen; and, far from blaming the Jesuits who had refused her absolution, he approved them. The haughty favorite did not admit that she was beaten. She kept silence, swearing, however, that she would be avenged.