Madame de Pompadour (7 page)

The Court was always referred to, by those who belonged to it, as
ce pays-ci
, this country, and indeed it had a climate, a language, a moral code and customs all its own. It was not unlike a public school and just as, at Eton, a boy cannot feel comfortable, and is, indeed, liable to sanctions, until he knows the names of the cricket eleven; various house colours; who may, or may not, carry an umbrella; or on which side of the street he may or may not walk; so, at Versailles, there were hundreds of facts and apparently meaningless rules which it would be most unwise to ignore. People sometimes broke them on purpose, hoping thereby to gain a little more privilege for their families; a Princess of the Blood would arrive in the Chapel followed by a lady-in-waiting with her purse on a cushion, or a duchess be carried to the royal rooms in an armchair – thin end of the wedge for a sedan chair – but somebody always reported it, and a sharp message from the monarch would bring the culprit to heel. To break the rules from sheer ignorance would be thought barbarous.

Madame d’Etioles would have to learn the relationships of all the various families, who was born what, married to whom and ennobled when. The two different sorts of nobility, the
noblesse de robe
and the old feudal aristocracy, must be clearly distinguished
and
their connexions known. This was becoming complicated because the old nobility, unable to resist the enormous fortunes of the new, had swallowed its pride and married wholesale into plebeian families. Very important it was to know who had done so. There were not a few in the same case as M. de Maurepas, who, with a mother born La Rochefoucauld and a bourgeois father, was, like the mule, more ready to remember his mother the mare than his father the ass. So others had to remember for him. There was a special salute for every woman at the Court, according to her own and her husband’s birth; the excellence of her housekeeping, the quality of her suppers, also entered into the matter. Variations of esteem were expressed in the curtsey. A movement of the shoulder practically amounting to an insult was a suitable greeting for the woman of moderate birth, badly married and with a bad cook, while the well-born duchess with a good cook received a deeply respectful obeisance. Few women, even when brought up to it, managed this low curtsey with any degree of grace. The most ordinary movements, the very look and expression, were studied as though on a stage; there was a particular way of sitting down and getting up, of holding knife, fork and glass, and above all of walking. Everybody could tell a Court lady from a Parisian by her walk, a sort of gliding run, with very fast, tiny steps so that she looked like a mechanical doll, wheels instead of feet under her panniers.

The look and general demeanour must be happy. Cheerfulness was not only a virtue, but a politeness, to be cultivated if it did not come naturally. If people felt sad or ill or anxious they kept it to themselves and showed a smiling face in public; nor did they dwell on the grief of others after the first expression of sympathy. It was estimated that each human being has about two hundred friends; out of this number at least two must be in some sort of trouble every day, but it would be wrong to keep worrying about them because others also had to be considered.

As in all closed societies certain words and phrases were thought impossible.
Cadeau
, which should be
présent; je vous salue; aller au français
instead of
à la Comédie-Française; champagne
instead of
vin de champagne; louis d’or
for
louis en or. Sac
was pronounced
sa, tabac
,
taba
(as it still is),
chez moi, chev moi, avant-hier, avant-z-hier
, and so on. It was all quite meaningless, and so was much of the Court etiquette which had come down through various dynasties and whose origins were long since forgotten. An usher opening a door stood inside it when certain people passed through, and outside for others. When the Court was campaigning the
Maréchal des Logis
allotted rooms. On certain doors he would write:
pour le Duc de X
whereas others would merely get:
le Duc de X
; people would do anything to have the
pour
. The occupant of a sedan chair must stop and get out when meeting a member of the royal family. The occupant of a carriage, however, must stop the horses and not get out; people who got out of their carriages showed ignorance of Court customs. The dukes were allowed to take a
carr
é – the word
coussin
was tabu – to sit or kneel on in the chapel, but they must put it down crooked; only Princes of the Blood might have it straight. The dukes would edge it round more and more nearly straight until a royal reprimand got it back to the proper angle. There was a running feud between the French dukes and the princely families of the Empire, who, their estates having at one time or another, by conquest or marriage, passed to France, were now French subjects. (Prince, unless of royal blood, is no more a French title than it is an English one.) The most pretentious of these princely families were the Rohans and the La Tour d’Auvergnes, but they were all considered by the native French as rather too big for their boots; while they themselves were never happy until they received French dukedoms.

Another feud was that between the ambassadors and Princes of the Blood. The former regarding themselves as representatives of the person of their sovereigns, claimed equal rights with the Princes who, of course, resisted the claim and would not give way one inch. The Comte de Charolais, brother of M. le Duc, and a man of violent rages, seized a whip and himself chased the Spanish ambassador’s coachman out of the
cul-de-sac
, a parking place near the Louvre, to which the Princes considered that they had the sole rights. Then there was the burning question of the
cadenas
. At State banquets the Princes were each given a silver gilt casket, with lock and key, containing their knives, forks and goblets; the ambassadors
were
not, and considered this omission extremely insulting to their sovereigns. They appealed to the Master of the Household, the Prince de Condé, who was only eight. A Prince of the Blood himself, he was entirely against giving
cadenas
to the ambassadors. Further to complicate everything, etiquette was different in the different palaces. Somebody who was only supposed to sit on a folding stool at Versailles might easily get a proper stool at Marly, and a chair with a back to it at Compiègne.

The four months of the King’s absence would not be too long for Madame d’Etioles to learn the hundreds of details of which these are a very few examples. Her teachers, and she could not have had better, were the Abbé de Bernis and the Marquis de Gontaut. Bernis was one of those men whom every pretty woman ought to have in her life; a perfect dear, smiling, dimpling, clever, cultivated, with nothing whatever to do all day but sit about and chat. He was just enough in love with his beautiful pupil to add a flavour to the relationship. At the age of twenty-nine he was already a member of the Académie française, to which, however, he had been elected more for his agreeable company than for his literary talent; his verses were excessively flowery. Voltaire always called him ‘Babet la Bouquetière’. Like everybody who knew the little Abbé he could not but be fond of him but he was furiously jealous over the Académie; he longed to be of it as much as he affected to despise it.

Bernis was a real
abbé de cour
, that is to say a courtier first and a priest second; cadet of a good old country family, he was so poor that his greatest ambition was to be given a small attic in the Tuileries palace. As he was a friend of Pâris-Duverney, he had already met the Poisson mother and daughter, but had decided not to frequent them. He rather liked Madame Poisson; he said that as well as being perfectly lovely she had wit, ambition and a great deal of courage; but he could see at once that she was not and never would be in society, and accordingly she did not interest him. But Madame d’Etioles in her new situation was nothing if not interesting and when somebody approached him, on the King’s behalf, and asked whether he would consent to see a good deal of her during the next few weeks, he really could not resist. He
did
go through the motions of hesitating and asking advice; his friends strongly urged him to accept, he had so much more to gain than to lose, they said, thinking perhaps of the longed-for attic in the Tuileries. When he spoke of his cloth, they pointed out that the affair between Madame d’Etioles and the King had been none of his making, and nobody, not even the Almighty himself, could pretend that it was in any way his fault. It was now an accomplished fact, and the plain duty of one and all was to make the best of it.

The Marquis de Gontaut was quite a different sort of person. He belonged to the Biron family, the very highest aristocracy, and was a member of the King’s intimate circle. Nobody ever had a word to say against this charming man; he was a faithful friend to Madame d’Etioles until the day of her death.

Reinette spent a very happy last summer at Etioles. She was savouring the joys of anticipation without the possible disappointments and weariness of fulfilment. The rest was good for her after all her recent emotions; she only ever felt really well in the country, where she could keep reasonable hours and live on a milk diet. To one so devoted to her family the company was perfect; she had her parents with her as well as Abel and M. de Tournehem. Madame Poisson was ill, getting worse every day; but extremely courageous and sustained by the joy she felt at her daughter’s new position. The baby, Alexandrine, was out at nurse in a nearby village where her mother often went to see her. Another relation staying in the house was a widowed cousin of Le Normant d’Etioles, the Comtesse d’Estrades; this young woman belonged to a rather better society than the Poissons and was inclined to show off about it. She was already great friends with Babet la Bouquetière. Madame d’Etioles looked up to her, admired her and thought her in every way perfect; they were each other’s confidantes and bosom darlings.

Voltaire wrote and suggested himself. ‘I have your happiness at heart, more perhaps than you imagine, more than anybody else in Paris. I’m not speaking now as an ancient old lady-killer, but as a good citizen when I ask you if I may come to Etioles and say a word in your ear, this month of May.’ He stayed, off and on, most of the summer, in one of those good-tempered moods the charm
of
which comes to us down the ages, making it impossible not to love him. He wrote to Président Hénault, from Etioles: ‘At her age she has read more than any old lady of that country where she is going to reign and where it is so desirable that she should reign.’ The
philosophes
were naturally enchanted that their young friend and admirer should queen it at Versailles; they counted perhaps on a little more protection than they got from her. When she first arrived there she was not powerful enough to stand up to the Jesuits and later on she rather changed her views about the
philosophes
and their revolutionary ideas. All the same, without her, they would have fared much worse than they did.

This charming house party was not without various excitements as the long summer days went by. Collin, a young lawyer, said to have a dazzling career in front of him, came from Paris with a deed of separation between Le Normant d’Etioles and his wife. It had been effected, by decree of the Parlement, at six o’clock one morning; there was no publicity. D’Etioles was away, as usual, on some interminable journey to do with M. de Tournehem’s business. A few months later, Reinette asked Collin if he would give up his practice and devote himself to looking after her affairs; she told him to think it over well, as, should the King get tired of her, he would find himself out of a job. He took the risk, and never regretted having done so.

Every day a courier arrived from the Grande Armée with one or two letters from the King:
à Madame d’Etioles à Etioles
, sealed with the motto
discret et fidèle
. One night a powder magazine blew up at the nearby town of Corbeil; there was a tremendous bang and the drawing-room door was blown in. Was it an omen? The very next letter,
discret et fidèle
, was addressed
à Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, à Etioles
. It enclosed title deeds to an estate of this name and an extinct Marquisate revived in favour of Reinette. Her new coat of arms, also enclosed in the same thrilling packet, was three castles on an azure ground. Voltaire and Bernis wrote poems for the occasion in which Etioles and Etoiles were synonymous and Pompadour rhymed with Amour; everything was as merry as a marriage bell.

The King too was enjoying himself. He slept on straw, sang
ditties
with his soldiers in his curious loud cracked voice, all out of tune, and wrote his letters to Etioles on a drum. The campaign went very well; Ghent was taken and Fontenoy was a resounding victory. This battle is supposed to be the classic illustration of French and English military virtues; English doggedness and endurance, against French flexibility and powers of recuperation. It was a very close-run thing. The King and the Dauphin, covered with gold lace, their great diamond St Esprits glittering on their breasts, took up a position, at day-break, on a little mound overlooking the village of Fontenoy. They were guarded by
la Maison du Roi
, the Household cavalry. Fontenoy was held by the French, as was a nearby coppice, the Bois de Berri, and another village, Anthoin. The King was in high good humour; he remarked that never since Poitiers had a French monarch gone into battle with his Dauphin and that not since the days of St Louis had one carried off in person a victory against the English. When a cannon ball rolled towards his horse he cried, ‘Pick it up, M. le Dauphin, and throw it back to them.’

At 6 a.m. the big guns on both sides opened fire; the English, led by the Duke of Cumberland, attacked Fontenoy three times and were driven off with heavy losses. Their allies the Dutch, meanwhile, launched an attack on Anthoin, were driven off and never seen again that day. Cumberland decided to force a passage between the Bois de Berri and Fontenoy. A solid formation of about fourteen thousand English and Hanoverian troops advanced, at the slow regular pace of the parade ground; they were shot at from both sides and suffered many casualties but came steadily on until they found themselves face to face with the French guards regiments. The Englishmen halted, their officers took off their hats, the French officers acknowledged their salutation.