Madame de Pompadour (2 page)

As for the courtiers, they lived and prayed and hunted and danced and ate to iron rules, and a time-table which made the days slip by and gave them the illusion of being always busy. The functions which they were obliged to attend were so near together in time, and so far distant in space, that they spent much of their lives running from one end of the palace to the other. They were like a huge family whose head was the King. They could do nothing, not even go to Paris for the day, or be inoculated against smallpox, certainly not arrange marriages for their children, without his express permission. Their privileges were enormous, and their power non-existent.

French historians have always been inclined to explain the trend of events in the eighteenth century by dwelling on the characters of their princes. Much ink is expended on the various heirs to the throne killed off by Fagon and his successors. The father and the son of Louis XV are regretted. Perhaps if the Duc de Bourgogne, eldest son of the Dauphin of Louis XV, had lived to reign instead of Louis XVI, things would have been different; he seems to have been superior to the three sad kings, his brothers. But he died at the age often. To an English reader all this is rather surprising since we are inclined to think that unless a monarch has genius, or is mad or wicked, his personality is of small account. In those days any dull German could make as good a king of England as the bonniest of native princes. But in France the situation was quite different. There the king was Lord High everything; all was directed by him and he alone could provide the inspiration which made the wheels of government go round. The French loved their kings as the English never have, with an unreasoning love which was later to turn to an unreasoning hatred. The personality of the king of France was therefore of great importance.

Now Louis XV was by very far the most considerable of Louis XIV’s descendants. As a child he was full of promise, religious, pretty, clever, brave and shy, with a shyness that had nothing gauche about it and on the contrary engendered a regal formality of manner, thought quite perfect by all who saw him. He grew up to be a charming man and an intelligent ruler with a high sense
of
duty, loving and, for many years, loved by his people. But the machinery by which he was expected to govern was worn out, and for a long time neither he nor his ministers, among whom there was no first-class brain, could devise anything better. At the end of his life he and Chancellor Maupeou were about to make radical reforms; he died before they could be implemented. The idiotic Louis XVI put all his grandfather’s schemes into reverse; and the monarchy was caught again in the terrible web spun by the terrible ancestor.

Perhaps the fate of the French monarchy was sealed when, in 1722, the Regent took the Court back to Versailles. Kings always live in a cage, but if the cage is in the capital city some echo of public opinion may penetrate its bars. No king has ever been more cut off from his people than Louis XV. Cardinal Dubois, the Regent’s adviser, insisted on the step, hoping thereby to prolong the life of his master, and thinking that he might be induced to live more temperately away from the Palais-Royal. The move seems to have been effected with no trouble or fuss, everybody fell back into the little miseries of etiquette as if they had never been away. The twelve-year-old King, who had not seen Versailles since he was five, rushed all over the gardens and the house at top speed, ending up in the Galerie des Glaces where he lay on the floor the better to examine the ceiling. He was enchanted to be back.

A few months later Cardinal Dubois died. The King came of age officially the following year and the Regent continued to govern. But the excesses of that strange man had undermined his health. One day, in a mood of black depression, he sent for the little Duchesse de Falaris to gossip with him, before he went upstairs to work with the King. Sitting in front of the fire, he asked her whether she believed in a future life; she replied that she did, and he said in that case he found her conduct on this earth incomprehensible. ‘Well now,’ he said, after a silence, ‘tell the news.’ As she opened her pretty little mouth to recount the latest piece of scandal, Philippe d’Orléans rolled on the floor and died.

The King, stunned, shaken and intensely sad, raised no objection when the Duc de Bourbon came to him and proposed taking over
the
government of France. He nodded his head without a word. ‘M. le Duc’, an appellation reserved at Court for the head of the Bourbon Condé family, was a grandson of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, and the great-grandson of the Grand Condé. He was not very brilliant, no match for Cardinal Fleury, the King’s tutor; Fleury was determined himself to rule the country and immediately set on foot a series of intrigues to that end. In three years’ time he stepped into the shoes of M. le Duc, who found himself exiled to his estates at Chantilly. Nobody regretted this most unattractive individual, though his mistress, Madame de Prie, was lovely and fascinating. She, poor woman, killed herself when she realized the full horror of life in the country. Their rule had not been without results. Before he went, M. le Duc had taught the King to love hunting and was responsible for his marriage.

At fifteen the King was a big strong boy, forward for his age. His fiancée, who lived in the palace, was still only five; a golden-haired darling, she appeared with him at all the State functions, trotted round after him like a little pet, and was considered absolutely sweet. But boys of fifteen loathe sweet little girls and he felt humiliated at having such a small fiancée. He sulked whenever he saw her. The marriage was to be consummated in ten years’ time, and meanwhile what? The King was obviously quite ready to consummate something at once; the sooner this last descendant of a royal line, this ‘conjugation of the blood of Henri IV’, five of whose children were his ancestors, was given a chance to breed, the better. M. le Duc was very much of this opinion because the next heir to the throne was the Duc d’Orléans, and the Orléans and Condé branches of the Bourbon family were at daggers drawn. (The feud between them was fanned by the Dowager Duchesses who were sisters, daughters of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan.) Furthermore, if the King were not married soon, one of two things could be expected to happen. Either he would take a mistress, who, at his age, would certainly acquire a dangerous influence over him, or he would turn to the boys. Pederasty was by no means unknown among the Bourbon; Louis XIII had certainly preferred men to women, while many of the courtiers could remember the egregious Monsieur, with his bracelets, and
high-heeled
shoes, and high-pitched squabbles. He was a direct ancestor of Louis XV. There had recently been a homosexual scandal among young dukes, attached to the King and very little older than him. The Regent had taken measures at once, and they had received the heavy punishment of exile to their estates, accompanied by wives who had quickly been found for them. When the King asked what they had done he was told that they had torn up railings in the park; he made no comment, but he must have known that they would not have been sent away for that. Thereafter they were always called ‘
les arracheurs de palissades
’. The First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, the Duc de La Trémoïlle, agreeable, amusing, was seen to have the tastes of a young lady; he spent his time eating sweets and doing embroidery. He too was married off and sent home, so furious that for seven years he turned his back on his unlucky wife. After much hesitation, pushed to it finally by a serious illness of the King, M. le Duc made up his mind that the Infanta must return to Spain and the King be married to somebody of an age to have children; the risk of offending the Spaniards was less grave than that of waiting.

In fact, Philipe V was exceedingly angry. ‘Ah! the traitor!’ he cried, and the courtiers in his ante-room were filled with a terrified curiosity to know whom the traitor might be. However the Queen, Elizabeth Farnese, who ruled the King, remained calm and merely said: ‘We must send at once to meet the Infanta.’

The hurdle of the Infanta’s return having been cleared without mishap, M. le Duc began to study lists of princesses to take her place. There were nearly forty in all, but they boiled down to very few suitable ones. French and Lorrainer princesses were ruled out at once because they had Orléans or Bourbon Condé blood and neither family would consent to such an elevation of the other. Princess Anne of England was a Lutheran and the English would not allow her to change her religion; the daughter of Peter the Great, the future Tzarina Elizabeth, was too parvenue and was also said to show signs of incipient madness, as did the King of Portugal, who had an otherwise eligible daughter. The Princess of Hesse-Rhinevelt would have done very well if her mother had not been in the habit of giving birth alternately to daughters and hares (according to Mathieu
Marais
who does not enlarge upon this curious statement). M. le Duc, thinking, perhaps, that there was room for any amount of hares at Chantilly, finally married her himself.

Enormous bets were placed on these various ladies, odds lengthening and shortening according to the day’s rumours; the Court seemed to be living on the eve of some important race. At last the choice fell upon a very dark horse indeed; Marie Leczinska, daughter of the penniless, exiled Stanislas Leczinski, King of Poland. A princess who knew no cosmetics but water and snow and who spent her time embroidering altar cloths was not at first sight a very suitable person to reign at Versailles. No doubt M. le Duc and Madame de Prie thought that, since she would owe everything to them, she would help them to keep their position. In fact, the marriage, regarded as a final proof of their incompetence, greatly facilitated Fleury’s efforts to get rid of them. It was a poor marriage for the King of France, this lady, ‘
dont le nom est en ski
’, being endowed with neither worldly goods, nor powerful family connexions, nor beauty, nor even youth, since she was seven years older than the King. But she had a sweet nature and regal manner, as even the most disagreeable of her subjects were obliged to admit, when they knew her; above all she was very healthy.

When Stanislas received a letter asking for her hand he could not believe his luck. He rushed to his daughter’s room crying: ‘Kneel, kneel and give thanks to God Almighty!’

‘What has happened – are you going back, as King, to Poland?’

‘Far better than that, you are going, as Queen, to France.’

As soon as she arrived at Versailles the King fell in love with her and fell into bed with her; on their wedding night he gave her proof of his love seven times. The courtiers were delighted, and Maréchal de Villars said that none of his cadets could have done better. Nine months later she produced twin daughters, Madame Première and Madame Henriette; by the time the King was twenty-seven they had ten children, of whom six daughters and a son reached maturity. He thought, and continually said, that his wife was the most beautiful woman at Versailles, and for years this marriage went very well. They might have been happy ever after, that is to say, Marie Leczinska might have played the part of
mistress
as well as that of wife, if she had had more character. Louis XV was a man of habit, a faithful man at heart, so shy, too, that he found it very difficult to make advances to any woman; he disliked new faces, and beautiful faces intimidated him. His little love affairs with girls of easy virtue, found for him by his valets, meant nothing at all to him, and his family meant a great deal. Unfortunately the Queen, though a good woman, was dowdy and a bore; she was incapable of forming a society that would attract a gay young husband, and she surrounded herself with the dullest, stuffiest element at the Court. After the birth of her children she settled comfortably, and rather selfishly, into middle age; she made no effort to remain attractive to her young husband, to share his interests or to entertain his friends; fashion and fun meant nothing to her. She had no temperament at all, complaining that she was for ever ‘in bed, or pregnant, or brought to bed’, and any excuse was good enough to keep the King out of her bed. As she was extremely pious, he had never been allowed there on the days of the major saints. By degrees the saints for whom he was excluded became more numerous and less important; finally, he was kept out by one so utterly unknown that he flew into a temper. He told Lebel, the palace
concierge
, to bring him a woman. Lebel went off and found a pretty housemaid, and the result was ‘Dorigny le Dauphin’, who became an art dealer of some distinction.

Nobody quite knows when the liaison between Louis XV and the Comtesse de Mailly began, but the King himself cannot have thought it very serious until 1739. That year he refused to go to his Easter duties. Asked by the Bishop whether he would touch for the King’s Evil as usual on Easter Day, he said no, since this ceremony could only take place after communion and he did not intend to communicate. His Jesuit confessor, Père de Lignières, wishing to avoid a scandal, suggested that Cardinal de Rohan might say a low mass in the King’s cabinet, after which nobody would know for certain whether he had or had not confessed. The King absolutely refused to lend himself to such a fraud. He was living in adultery and had no intention, for the present, of mending his ways; but at the same time he was not going to make a mockery of his religion.

Madame de Mailly was a daughter of the Marquis de Nesle, whose family name was Mailly; she had married her first cousin. Madame de Nesle, her mother, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and the King had always known the Mailly sisters. She was not a beauty, or in any way very romantic, but a jolly, downright, sporting woman with whom he felt at ease. She never asked for anything, neither for power nor for money; she loved him. But in 1740 he fell in love with her sister, whom she had unwisely invited to all her suppers and parties; the Marquise de Vintimille was even less of a beauty and much less nice than Madame de Mailly, and behaved with the greatest unkindness to her. The affair did not last very long; Madame de Vintimille died giving birth to the King’s baby, the Comte du Luc. The King was heart-broken; he went back to Madame de Mailly and she adopted the baby, who was exactly like him to look at, and always known as ‘le demi-Louis’. But this lady’s troubles were not yet over. Very soon the King fell desperately in love, much more than he had been with Madame de Vintimille, with yet another sister, the Duchesse de Châteauroux.