Madame de Pompadour (20 page)

By order of the King, Bellevue had only nine windows on the front overlooking the river; marble busts decorated its otherwise simple façade. Inside were sculptures and vases by Pigalle, Falconet and Adam, the panelling was by Verberckt, and painted decorations by van Loo and Boucher. While the works were in progress, Madame de Pompadour wrote to d’Argenson. ‘I have an enormous favour to ask. Boucher has been deprived of his
entrées
at the Opéra. Now it happens that he is engaged on the paintings at Bellevue, so he must be kept in a good temper – I’m sure you would hate to find a crippled or cock-eyed nymph in your pretty room …’ The favour was granted and Boucher’s
entrées
were restored to him. Boucher was, as it were, official painter to Madame de Pompadour, a position which, he said, he greatly preferred to that of van Loo who was official painter to the Court.

The gallery at Bellevue was entirely designed by Madame de Pompadour herself; here Boucher’s paintings were linked together with garlands of carved wood by Verberckt. The walls of all her rooms were either bluish-white and gold, or painted in bright pastel colours by members of the Martin family. The horrible
gris Trianon
, a dreary, yellowish grey, which now spoils so many French houses, was invented by Louis-Philippe; nobody in the eighteenth century would have thought of using such a depressing colour to
paint
their rooms. As always, at her houses, the garden was a dream of beauty, terraces, bosquets, avenues of Judas trees, lilac and poplars, leading to cascades and statues. It was at Bellevue that she filled the garden with china flowers from Vincennes, which smelt like real ones, and quite took in the King with them.

The party to inaugurate her new house was a fiasco, though not because of the King’s bad temper or lack of interest. She had worn herself out over every tiny detail, but it was one of those occasions on which nothing seems to go quite right. The uniforms for the guests were a present from her to them, purple velvet coats and off-white satin waistcoats, and the women’s dresses of satin to match. They merely had to have them embroidered at their own expense. Unfortunately they clashed with the green liveries of her servants. She had arranged a fireworks display in the garden, but a message came from Paris that a hostile crowd was gathering on the Plaine de Grenelle, the other side of the river, so she hastily cancelled that. The November weather was bad, with a high wind; it got worse towards the evening, and the fires began to smoke. In the end the food had to be transported to a cottage she had built in the garden, variously called the ‘Taudis’, ‘Babiole’ or ‘Brimborion’. When this disastrous evening was over, the Marquise retired to bed with a temperature, bitterly disappointed that a party so carefully prepared should have ended so badly. But it did not prove to have been a bad omen for the house and she was always very happy there.

Her next acquisition, in 1753, was the Hôtel d’Evreux which we know as the Elysée. When Madame de Pompadour bought it from the Comte d’Evreux, Pineau was already engaged upon the panelling; she let him go on with what he was doing, and occupied herself with the garden and furniture. There were the usual complaints of her extravagance – the curtains for each window were supposed to have cost five thousand
louis
. She took a big bite into the Champs Elysées for her kitchen garden, and would have taken a bigger had there not been a public outcry; then she made Marigny cut down all the trees between her garden and the Invalides of which she thus had an uninterrupted view. Probably it amused her to decorate a really grand town house; it was a palace
by
the time she had finished with it, with the royal coat of arms and enlaced L’s everywhere. But she hardly ever slept there.

In 1757 she sold Bellevue to the King and took Champs from the Duc de La Vallière. She spent thousands on it, although it did not belong to her. It has recently been given to the French State by its owners and is used as a country house for visiting statesmen; it has been spoilt by restoration after suffering damage from the Germans in 1870, but a great deal of the original decoration remains, including a room painted by Huet, his last work before he died. The King disliked Champs and they used it very little. She also took a house from the Duc de Gesvres, St Ouen, and made alterations to that. Finally she bought Ménars, on the Loire, but she only went there twice, at the end of her life; she left it to her brother and it became his home.

‘The Palace of Ménars,’ writes Mr Joseph Jekyll to his sister-in-law, after a visit there in 1775,

built by the late Marchioness of Pompadour on the banks of the Loire, at the distance of two leagues from here, and now in the possession of her brother, is one of the first in point of splendour in this kingdom, as you may conceive from its foundress, who, as the favourite of a great king, had the means, and joined to an exterior the most exquisite, that constitutional love of beauty which produces taste and order.

There had been a prohibition of seeing the apartments in consequence of some impertinences similar to those committed in the Queen’s Palace at London. Mr Rockliff and myself were informed of this by the
suisses
at the gate. Sap was impossible, and I changed the manœuvre to an assault. I inquired for the Marquis, and announced some English gentlemen of Blois who begged to kiss his hand. We found him in the gout and a nightgown, the latter sparkling with the Cross of the Holy Ghost. I blundered out, ‘How fortunate we were in having an occasion of paying our court to M. le Marquis de Marigny, on begging permission to see the most elegant château in France, which was the
universal topic
of travellers in
London
.’ The reply to this was in an excess of politeness; and had I not urged the gout he
would
have stumped about the house with us. ‘This, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘is my library. Here is an edition of Terence, printed and given me by Walpole of Strawberry Hill. These chairs are English. How beautiful is your manufacture of horsehair for the bottoms! This is the Hall of Kings. There are the portraits of Louis XV, Christian of Denmark, and Gustave of Sweden, given me by their own hands.’ I observed that ‘there was a panel vacant for George III, and that if Monsieur would honour London with a winter’s residence he would not fail of filling it.’ ‘I do not despair of seeing London,’ replied Monsieur. ‘I was once so near paying you a visit that my house was hired there, and the wine even laid into my cellars, when my sister, the late Marchioness of Pompadour, sent for me abruptly to Versailles. “Monsieur, my brother,” said she, “sell your house at London, and all your affairs there. In less than three months we shall have their Hawke and Boscawen thundering on our coasts.” Amongst the infinity of fine objects you will see at Ménars, don’t overlook the hydraulique machine I have lately constructed on an improved plan of your affair at Chelsea. The first agent in mine is water, and it is a masterpiece of mechanics that would do honour even to an English artist.’

All these houses were furnished and embellished with a perfection of taste and attention to detail which can be realized by a perusal of her account with Lazare Duvaux, the retailer who found the necessary objects, or had them made, or re-mounted, and then sold them to her. On 11 December 1751, he sent her, at the Hermitage:

A little ormolu lantern, with lacquer trellis, decorated with flowers of Vincennes china. 336
livres
.

Two screens of massive amaranthus wood. 48
livres
.

Two small Dresden candlesticks. 48
livres
.

Two
pots pourris
of India work, decorated with ormolu. 72
livres
.

A figure in white Vincennes. A Chinese sunshade. 9
livres
.

A dove cote on a column, with pigeons on the roof and a terrace with two figures and other pigeons. 168
livres
.

And a whole farmyard of china animals, which she was forever ordering; her rooms must have been full of them. At least once a week, and during some months, almost every other day, such an assortment was dispatched by Duvaux to one or other of her residences.

Not only did she do up houses for herself, she was continually suggesting alterations and improvements to the King’s; Choisy and la Muette were always being pulled about by workmen, not to speak of Versailles.

The Marquise and her brother controlled all the artists in France, and were so tactful and knowledgeable that none of this touchy breed of men seems to have objected one single moment to their rule; on the contrary, when it came to an end, they were united in deploring the anarchy which succeeded it. La Tour, the pastellist, was the only one who showed any intransigence. He was an eccentric who, when he wanted to go to St Cloud from Paris, would take off his clothes and have himself towed up the river by a passing barge. He made a great fuss before he would consent to paint the Marquise at all, but he did consent, only making a condition that nobody was to come in during the sittings. One day the King appeared. La Tour pretended not to recognize him, packed up his things and grumbled off, ‘You told me the sittings would not be interrupted.’ Later, when he was painting the King, he tried to make a little political propaganda.

‘Your Majesty realizes that we have no navy?’

The King, who would not have put up with such an impertinence from most people, merely replied: ‘Oh surely – what about those ships M. Vernet is for ever painting?’ He offered him the order of St Michel, which conferred nobility on its possessor, but La Tour refused, saying that he wanted only to have nobility of sentiment and no other pre-eminence than that of talent.

When Marigny became
Intendant des Bâtiments
, he followed the excellent example set by M. de Tournehem and took an artist as his private secretary. He inherited Coypel from him, when Coypel retired he replaced him first by Lépicie and then, almost at once, by his old friend Cochin. Le Chevalier Cochin was a delightful
man,
imbued, as was Marigny, with a positively religious love of art. Their correspondence is most satisfactory reading; it shows two good and clever men, in perfect accord with each other, absorbed in their work. They really ran the artists, found them lodgings and materials to work with, got orders for them, saw that they were paid, arranged the times of sittings, suggested subjects and were always at hand to help and encourage them. The result was that a happier community of artists has seldom existed. Cochin never says a disagreeable word about anybody. ‘Chardin, whose integrity none can doubt – Parrocel, loved and esteemed by all – Bouchardon, whose career has been so glorious – a man of real merit, such as Vernet – the rare gifts of M. Tocqué’, and so on. Neither he nor Marigny could endure the Comte de Caylus, the collector of antiques, but even in their private letters to each other they extol his enormous culture.

The most lasting of all Madame de Pompadour’s achievements and the most profitable to France, both in money and in prestige, is the factory at Sèvres. She loved china in the same way that she loved flowers, and filled her rooms with it, more and more china, holding more and more flowers. From the Far East, India, Japan, Korea and China it was brought to her and the other amateurs, as well as from Saxony. She saw that much foreign currency was expended in this way and was careful to patronize the French factories at St Cloud and Chantilly, and particularly that at Vincennes.

In 1754, Croÿ, supping with the King, arrived late and sat down at a little table in the window with M. de Lameth; the King was very kind to him, sent him various titbits and generally looked after him. When the meal was over the King made all his guests unpack a beautiful white, blue and gold dinner service from Vincennes, one of the first masterpieces of the china which was to surpass that of Dresden. Croÿ then heard that the King had given Madame de Pompadour the whole village of Sèvres, just below her house at Bellevue, where she was going to install the china factory, transferred from Vincennes, so that she would have it under her own eye. Here it prospered greatly, many artists and sculptors of the day worked for it; the wonderful colours,
rose
Pompadour,
bleu-de-roi, gros bleu
and apple green were invented; the shapes were highly original, sometimes more reminiscent of silver than of porcelain; while the
biscuit
figures, by Pajou, Pigalle, Clodion, Falconet, Caffieri and so on, have never been surpassed. To French taste, its products were superior to those of the Meissen factory. Once a year a sale of this china was held at Versailles in a room in the King’s apartments, and the courtiers knew that it pleased him enormously when they bought; he sometimes acted as salesman himself. Beautiful as they admitted it to be, they thought it too expensive – twenty-eight
louis
for a sugar bowl and cream jug, twenty-five
louis
for a flower vase. Like most other things patronized by the Marquise it would have been an excellent investment at such prices.

A curious and charming craft, much liked by Madame de Pompadour, was the engraving of precious stones. A jeweller from Marseilles called Jacques Guay exercised his great talent in this medium. For years Madame de Pompadour commissioned most of his output and she left her collection to the King; it is now at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Nearly all the outstanding events of their life together are recorded in these tiny engravings: portrait of Louis XV (onyx in three colours), victory of Fontenoy (cornelian), Apollo (the King) crowning the spirit of painting and sculpture (cornelian), Madame de Pompadour’s dog, Mimi (agate onyx), etc. There were seventy of them altogether, and Madame de Pompadour did a series of engravings from them. She was fond of engraving in
eau forte
, fonder of it than she was good at it; the famous copy of Rodogune, printed in her apartment, under her eyes, with
au Nord
on the title page, has a frontispiece engraved by her after Boucher.

Madame de Pompadour’s books were sold the year after her death; the catalogue exists, a very revealing document, and one to drive a bibliophile mad with desire. It is clear that she read her books and did not simply have them as a wallpaper to her rooms; the books of somebody who reads are an infallible guide to the owner’s mentality, and hers are a very individual assortment. In all there were 3,525 volumes, roughly divided into the following categories: