The Théâtre des Petits Cabinets lasted for five years, after which it became too much for Madame de Pompadour and she gave it up. During this time a total of 122 performances was given of sixty-one different plays, operas and ballets. They were rehearsed until they could not be improved, even the most acid critics of the Marquise being obliged to state that never did any performance fall below first-class professional standards, and that she herself was entire perfection in all of them. This venture had two important consequences for her. It consolidated her position at Court; so mighty a nobleman as the Duc de Richelieu was forced to realize that he had met his match, while the other courtiers had to go on their knees to her if they wanted invitations to the plays. People became perfectly hysterical in their efforts to be given the smallest walk-on part, to be allowed to play in the orchestra or to see the performances; they even bribed Madame du Hausset, her maid, who thus obtained a very good job for her nephew, with the knowledge and amused consent of the Marquise.
On the other hand the great unpopularity with the Parisians, from which she suffered for the rest of her life, began at this time. Hated by the crowd at Versailles because she was a bourgeoise, Madame de Pompadour was soon hated by the bourgeoisie because of her association with the government, in other words the tax collectors. The theatre was merely a peg on which to hang their grievances. It was said to be an unjustified extravagance; taxes were high, there was a good deal of misery, and ridiculously inflated stories of the expenditure were bandied about the capital. The temporary theatre in the staircase was supposed to have cost thousands. It must be remembered, too, that in those days plays and players were considered slightly immoral. The great Molière himself had almost been refused Christian burial because he had once been an actor, many priests would not give them the sacraments – the Comédie-Italienne had a special dispensation which made the Comédie-Française very angry – and the pious Dauphin crossed himself whenever he passed a theatre. D’Angerville says that, in imitation of the Marquise, ‘the whole of France now took a taste for the stage, princes and bourgeois alike; it penetrated even into the convents and finished by poisoning the morals of quantities of children who were brought up to this profession. In short, it carried corruption to its extreme limits.’ It was not true, the taste had existed already, but it was convenient to blame Madame de Pompadour for it. From now on she could not do right in the eyes of the general public.
9
Royal Family and Poisson Family
IT WAS OBVIOUS that the sad Dauphin must quickly marry again, and produce an heir to the throne. The baby, ‘la petite Madame,’ who had killed her mother, was useless for the succession and the Dauphin himself an only son. In the autumn of 1746 a list of princesses was hurriedly made up for the King to study, with the usual embarrassing biological details appended by the French ambassadors to their fathers’ courts. Yet another Spanish sister was offered, a little black dwarf this time, but the King rather snubbingly observed that French people abhor incest. The candidate strongly supported by Madame de Pompadour was Marie-Josèphe, fifteen-year-old daughter of Maurice de Saxe’s half-brother, the Elector Augustus III of Saxony, King of Poland. The King and the Marquise both loved Saxe, and the King was deeply indebted to him for all the victories he had won for France. He treated him like a royal cousin, though the Marshal was illegitimate; he had given him the château of Chambord and had just made him Marshal-General of the French camps and armies.
‘M. le Comte de Saxe, I create you Marshal-General of my armies.’ Saxe turned to the Comte de Clermont. ‘What did the King say?’
‘I didn’t hear, either. Sire, the Comte de Saxe did not hear what your Majesty did him the honour to say to him.’
‘M. le Comte de Saxe,’ said the King, raising his voice, ‘I create you Marshal-General of my armies, like M. de Turenne. Did you hear me this time?’
‘Yes, Sire, and it only remains for me to die like M. de Turenne.’ (Turenne was killed in action.)
It would be agreeable to welcome his niece to Versailles as Dauphine; big business, headed by the Pâris, was greatly in favour of the match; last, but not least, there were reasons to suppose that this princess would be very fecund.
Now Saxony at that time evoked but one idea in the minds of the courtiers at Versailles. It was the country of porcelain, of the factory at Meissen where, some thirty-odd years before, pâte dure had been invented and which still kept the secret of making it. But for Queen Marie Leczinska it had more lugubrious associations. Augustus the Strong had chased her father, King Stanislas, off the throne of Poland; his son sat there now in his place, and though, in fact, Stanislas was perfectly happy reigning at Lunéville, the Queen was outraged at the idea of receiving his rival’s daughter as her daughter-in-law. However, the King had made up his mind. Madame de Pompadour, whom he saw night and day, was in favour of the match and the Queen, whom he never saw alone, did not dare raise her voice against it. She merely looked cross. She knew that she had no influence with her husband, and he intimidated her dreadfully. It so happened, too, that there were fewer suitable princesses on the market than usual, Marie-Josèphe being almost the only Roman Catholic of the right age.
So Richelieu was sent off to Dresden to fetch Marie-Josèphe away. He made a great splash with his retinue, his clothes and his carriages, and gave a splendid banquet, pretending not to notice when the guests departed laden with his silver. The princess was put in charge of the Duchesse de Brancas (not the tall one), who was to be her principal lady-in-waiting, and escorted to Versailles. The King bought the first Dauphine’s jewels from ‘la petite Madame’ and gave them to Marie-Josèphe as a wedding present; her own presents to her ladies were chosen by him for her to give, all of them matching those given by her predecessor, a watch to go with an étui, and so on. The whole thing was run on nice, sensible lines.
Madame de Brancas said the new Dauphine was a great improvement on the other, whose lady-in-waiting she had also been; Marie-Josèphe bubbled over with high spirits, and was not all the time on her dignity. She was neither pretty nor elegant, very German; the old people at the Court said her curtsey put them in mind of Madame, the Regent’s mother. But she had a charming, tactful character; for such a young girl her behaviour with the Dauphin was extraordinary. She understood and fully sympathized with his grief, revived as he went through the same ceremonies, two years, almost to the day, after those which had preceded such perfect love and happiness. When they were publicly put to bed together in the same room, with the same furniture, as that which he had shared with his first wife – the rooms for Madame la future Dauphine not being ready yet – he covered his face with the bedclothes and sobbed. The good little Pépa simply said: ‘Don’t stop crying, your tears don’t offend me, on the contrary they show me what I can expect if ever I should succeed in winning your love.’ She did succeed; they were very happy and had eight children, three of whom were kings of France. They could hardly have been more united. When ‘la petite Madame’ died, at the age of two, they wept for her together; years later they were both seen to be in floods of tears at a requiem mass for the first Dauphine. But he never forgot his first wife, and left instructions that his heart was to be buried with hers.
As for the Queen, she was soon won over. She noticed that the Dauphine always wore the miniature of a man set in diamonds on a bracelet. ‘Is that your father?’ she asked one day. The Dauphine unclasped it to show her; it was a portrait of King Stanislas. The Queen and her father took the child to their hearts and she was like a daughter to both of them.
The ball which was given at Versailles, in honour of this second marriage, was less splendid and more select than the Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees, where there had been too many people who had not behaved very well. Not only had there been the incident of the Spanish cook; the King heard that most of the oranges from his buffets had re-appeared the next day on the Paris market; it really seemed to be getting too easy to hire a coach and the suitable clothes and drive down fr
om Paris. This time, therefore, people were invited, and Madame de Pompadour made out all the lists for the Parisians. The courtiers noticed that every day, in one way or another, she was becoming more powerful. Great amusement, at this ball, was caused by a certain yellow domino, who stood by the buffet, eating and drinking, hour after hour. Nobody could imagine how any human stomach could hold so much, until it was discovered that the Swiss guards were putting on this domino in turns. There was, as before, a ball in Paris. During both these evenings Madame de Pompadour watched the King closely; she knew that many pretty women counted on meeting him. At the Paris ball people only had to follow the direction of her eyes to see which domino was the King. But he seemed quite as much in love as she did; very soon they both unmasked, and he sat at her feet. They made a picture of radiant happiness.
The King adored his children, especially the daughters. Between him and the Dauphin relations were apt to be rather strained. The jealousy which monarchs often feel for their heirs came between them; besides, they were too near in age and too different in character to be great friends. The Dauphin was a prig, he disapproved of his father’s morals and mode of life, and made his disapproval felt. Like his mother, whom he tenderly loved, he was sleepy and rather a bore; he enjoyed neither the theatre, nor dancing, nor hunting, shooting only rather, and society least of all. When asked what he did like doing he replied: ‘I like vegetating.’ The King once inquired how he intended to amuse himself during the Carnival. ‘I shall go to bed at ten instead of eleven.’ Perhaps there was something wrong with his glands – fat with the unnatural fatness of his son Louis XVIII, he suddenly, at the age of thirty-six, became very thin and died.
Men with such a different view of life could hardly be expected to understand each other, or to enjoy each other’s company for long, but there was affection all the same. When the Dauphin was taken ill with smallpox in 1752, the King, though he had never had this most dreaded of all diseases – of which, years later, he died – dashed back to Versailles from Compiègne and was hardly out of his son’s room during the crisis. He sat up with him night after night. A certain Dr Pousse was brought from Paris, a specialist in smallpox, and amused them all with his way of talking. ‘I don’t know how I am supposed to address you,’ he said to the King, ‘but I’ll tell you something, you’re a good Papa and I like that. Don’t forget we’re all your children and share your grief, but don’t be downhearted, your son will be restored to you.’
To the Dauphine, not knowing who she was, in her plain cotton dress, ‘You’re the best little nurse I ever saw, what’s your name, my lass?’ When he was told he cried: ‘There’s an example for me to hold up to all those fashionable ladies who won’t go near their husbands when they have the smallpox.’ She replied that whereas it would be very easy to find another Dauphine, the Dauphin was irreplaceable. On the seventeenth day Dr Pousse took the King by the buttonhole and said: ‘Monseigneur is out of danger now. He has no more need of me, and I’m off.’ The King said: ‘Very well, but first you must dine.’ When he sat down at the table he found, in his napkin, an order giving him fifteen hundred livres a year for life. The Dauphin recovered, but the Parisians were not delighted. He was known to be governed by the Jesuits and many people dreaded his reign which was sure, they thought, to bring a period of religious intolerance; they preferred his jolly cousin Chartres whom they saw every day in Paris. The fact that the Dauphin now had a little boy was quite discounted, these royal babies died like flies, and, in fact, neither this child, his next brother nor his elder sister lived to be grown up.
The Dauphine, chosen very largely because her family had such a wonderful record of fecundity, had worried everybody very much at first by showing no signs of a baby. Every month the whole Court held its breath and every month hopes were blighted. Then she began to have miscarriages at a very early stage, a fortnight, three weeks at the most. Her doctors kept her in bed, would not let her go to Compiègne and Fontainebleau, for fear she should become pregnant and have to stay on indefinitely, and still this bouncingly healthy girl continued to miscarry. At last, in 1750, a daughter arrived, Marie-Zéphirine, as self-willed and naughty as a little dragoon; and after that, regularly every autumn, Marie-Josèphe produced an enfant de France, greatly to the delight of the King and the Marquise, whose letters are seldom without some allusion to the Dauphine’s health.
‘The Dauphine, I am thankful to say, is keeping to her chaise longue.’ ‘The Dauphine is certainly three months pregnant now, we can really begin to have hopes, if there is no accident.’ ‘Madame la Dauphine has passed four months, you can imagine my joy.’ ‘… but this is a very small misfortune, a real one is the daughter which has just been born to Madame la Dauphine, but as, at the eleventh day, she is in very good health, she will give us a prince next year. We must console ourselves with this reflexion and try not even to think of “la petite Madame”[the new baby]. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her until today.’ ‘We go to Compiègne on Friday for six weeks, leaving Madame la Dauphine here, very well, with a child that jumps about like anything. I hope to God he will arrive safely and be a boy. I can tell you, and you will believe me, that the sight of all these girls dries me up. The one we have got is quite well again now, but we should have died of fright if she had been a boy.’
The first boy was born, with one pain, in about ten minutes; very inconvenient as it was absolutely vital that there should be witnesses of the birth. The doctor, who was sleeping in the Dauphine’s room, told her she must hold everything, while the Dauphin rushed out in his nightshirt to find somebody. ‘Well then hurry up,’ she said, ‘it’s kicking me.’ A sleepy Swiss guard was very much surprised when the Dauphin seized him by the arm, said: ‘Quick, go in there and see my wife having a baby,’ and went on to look for one more witness.
The King was playing cards at Trianon: a man galloped down from Versailles: ‘A boy, a boy!’ Was he drunk? they wondered. The news was confirmed and the King, overcome with happiness, felt giddy and had to be half carried to the only coach available, that of the Prince de Conti. He cried over the little Duc de Bourgogne, who was tactful enough to look very much like him, and stayed till five in the morning talking to the Dauphine. Then he ordered a Te Deum before going to bed.
The Dauphine never knew whether these babies were boys or girls until they were brought to her with, or without, the Cordon Bleu, a little blue ribbon from which hung a tiny Saint Esprit, first made for the sons of Henri IV. Out of her first five children four were boys. The Parisians thought the younger ones received the most affected names: Duc d’Aquitaine, Duc de Berry, Comte de Provence and Comte d’Artois, instead of the customary Bretagne and d’Anjou. ‘It didn’t do d’Aquitaine much good,’ they said – he died at five months old.
Louis XV was one of those fathers who never want their daughters to marry. The eldest, Madame Infante, did so, for urgent reasons of state, when she was thirteen; neither she nor her father was really happy until she was back again at Versailles. She returned in 1749, aged twenty-two, a grown-up lady with a little Infanta of eight at her skirts; the King hardly recognized her, she was far prettier, more intelligent, more a woman of the world than her sisters, whom she found very babyish. Unfortunately she was ambitious and never stopped plaguing her father for a throne. He was so delighted to have her with him again that he would have given her anything in his power; he gave her equal honours with her mother, greatly to the latter’s displeasure, but the throne never materialized and she had to be content with Parma. Today the Parma Bourbons descend from Louis XV, and, through his son-in-law the Infante Philip, in a direct male line from Louis XIV, but they have never put forward a claim to the French throne because of the oath taken by the Duc d’Anjou when he became King of Spain. Through them, the blood of Louis XV flows in the veins of nearly all the royal families of Europe. Madame Infante was a great deal at Versailles after she became Duchess of Parma, and Madame de Pompadour used to complain that she saw very much less of the King when
she was there.
Madame Henriette, the twin of Madame Infante, was in love with the Duc de Chartres (later Duc d’Orléans) and he with her, but the King would not allow them to marry for fear of giving too much power to the house of Orléans. He made a great mistake; if Chartres had married her, horrible Philippe-Egalité would never have been born. In spite of his love for the Regent, and the fact that he always got on very well with Chartres, the King felt the traditional Bourbon distrust for the Orléans family. There is little doubt that if the Dauphin had died without an heir, he would have encouraged the Spanish Bourbons to put forward a claim to the throne of France, illegal as it would have been. Sad, and forever ill, Madame Henriette died just before the Dauphin’s smallpox in 1752; she had been the King’s favourite and his grief at her death was intense.
Then Adélaïde became the adored of her father; she lived, and always had lived, for him alone. At six years old she had refused to be parted from him, and was the only daughter not to be brought up in a convent. She was eleven when war broke out with England; they found her leaving Versailles with a few louis in a little bag. ‘I am going to make the English lords sleep with me in turns, which they will be honoured to do, and bring their heads to Papa.’ She was rather like a furious boy, very passionate and attractive, but nothing ever turned out quite right for her.
Madame de Pompadour Page 11
