Spurred on by rage, he wrote Sémiramis simply in order to make Crébillon’s Sémiramis look ridiculous. It was put on at the Comédie-Française, and Voltaire came to Paris from Lunéville for the first night. Total failure. The verses were, naturally, a hundred times better than Crébillon’s, but the crowd scenes were almost impossible to produce successfully. ‘Make way for the ghost,’ in an audible hiss from the prompter’s box, was not a happy prelude to a speech. Furthermore the theatre was full of Voltaire’s ill-wishers filling the air with loud, catching yawns. When this agony was over, the wretched man hid himself in a near-by café and listened to the remarks of the customers who, one and all, made a mock of his play. He sat up the rest of the night re-writing great chunks of it; in the end it was a success and ran for fifteen nights.
But this was not all. In those days, parodies of well-known plays were very popular; it came to his ears that a parody of Sémiramis had been written, and was about to be acted before the Court at Fontainebleau. He flew into a misery, seized his pen and wrote to, of all people, the Queen. ‘Madame, I throw myself at Your Majesty’s feet and beseech Your Majesty, by the goodness and greatness of your soul, not to deliver me to my enemies,’ etc. The Queen, who detested Voltaire and regarded him as the anti-Christ, the instigator of everything that was most horrible in France, replied, very coldly, through Madame de Luynes, that parodies were quite usual and she could see no reason whatever to stop this one. He then forgave Madame de Pompadour for Catalina and wrote to her. She, always concerned to save his feelings whenever she could, stopped the parody at Fontainebleau and, even more important, in Paris.
‘If I had not known that you were ill,’ she wrote, ‘I should have realized it from your second letter. I see that you are torturing yourself over the hateful things people have said and done to you, but really you should be used to this by now, you must remember that it is the inevitable lot of great men; they are always run down during their lives and admired when they are dead. Think of Racine and Corneille; you are no worse treated than they were. I am quite sure you have done nothing to injure Crébillon. Like you, he has a talent which I love and respect. I have taken your side against all who accuse you. I know you are not capable of such infamous behaviour. You are quite right when you say that I am pursued by libels, but I treat all these horrors with the utmost contempt … Adieu, take care of yourself, don’t go off after the King of Prussia however sublime his soul may be; now that you know the great qualities of our Master, you ought not to think of leaving him and I for one will never forgive you if you do.’
He did, however, and it might have been expected that, in the dust and fury of his encounters with that worthy antagonist, any grievances against his compatriots would have been forgotten for a time. Not at all. The more miserable he was in Germany, the more he blamed Madame de Pompadour for his self-imposed exile. She ought to have forced the King to like him, to have made him more welcome at Versailles; then he would have stayed there and none of this would ever have happened. So he vented his bad temper on the Marquise in the following terms:
Telle plutôt cette heureuse grisette
Que la nature ainsi que l’art forma
Pour la b … l ou bien pour l’Opéra.
Qu’une maman avisée et discrète
Au noble lit d’un fermier éleva
Et que l’ Amour d’une main plus alerte
Sous un monarque entre deux draps plaça.
After this there was no communication between them for some years. Even so he continued to draw his pension. Few women would have been so magnanimous, but Madame de Pompadour knew her own worth, she suffered neither from an inferiority nor a superiority complex, she saw herself as she was and on the whole approved of what she saw. So she went through life with a calm self-assurance, which increased as she grew older. Only one thing could frighten or upset her, and that was the idea that she might lose the King.
‘Here come my little cats,’ she cried, after a political discussion with the King, during which he had said, as he often did, that his magistrates were republicans at heart but that the system would last out his lifetime. ‘They wouldn’t understand such serious talk – you, Sire, have the hunting to distract you, I have them.’ The little cats were Mesdames d’Amblimont and d’Esparbés; Madame d’Amblimont was also known as ‘the little heroine’ since she had once repulsed the advances of the King. Madame de Pompadour made him reward her with a diamond necklace. The King now began to talk about Lasmartre, his huntsman, who was a character. As more people came in he would begin again for their benefit, Madame de Pompadour encouraging him to do so, and always listening with the same attention as the first time she had heard the story.
Her confidential maid, Madame du Hausset, amused herself by writing down these things she heard, while perched up in her little listening gallery or during the course of her duties. Madame de Pompadour liked her to know everything that was going on and told her to come and go as she pleased. ‘The King and I trust you completely, we go on talking as if you were a pet dog or cat.’ Uneducated, she scribbled down a jumble of facts and scenes without any sequence, but she had the gift of catching the tone of a dialogue; everything she wrote had life. She was what was called a lady of quality, that is of the minor nobility, and there are reasons to think that she and Madame de Pompadour may have known each other as children. She must have been very poor to accept such a position but it is evident that she thoroughly enjoyed it. Madame de Pompadour looked after her dependants and they loved her.
After his sister’s death Marigny was found, by a friend, burning some papers. He held up a packet and said: ‘This is the journal of a maid my sister had, a very estimable person, but it’s all rubbish.’ The friend, who had a passion for anecdotes, asked if he could take it away. Marigny gave it to him; in due course he passed it on to a Mr. Crawfurd of Kilwinnink, a Scotsman who lived in France, collected objects of art and was friendly with Madame du Deffand, Queen Marie-Antoinette and Fersen. He edited it, and published it in 1809, but the original manuscript has disappeared. Of course the authenticity of this document has been questioned; it certainly seems rather strange that Marigny should have been so offhand with something which so nearly concerned his sister. But Marigny had a curious character, not the least sentimental; he sold her most intimate souvenirs as soon as she was dead, although there is no doubt that he loved her deeply. The memoirs have the ring of truth, and if they were forged, or added to, it must have been by somebody who knew the Court from the inside, since they are often corroborated in detail by memoirs which were published many years after they were. It really seems easier to believe that Madame du Hausset herself wrote them.
Madame du Hausset was once involved in a terrifying drama, when the King appeared to be dying in Madame de Pompadour’s bed. The Marquise came for her in the middle of the night. He was panting and half unconscious with one of his attacks of indigestion. They threw water over him and gave him Hoffmann’s drops, a medicine to which the Marquise was greatly addicted, and then Madame du Hausset fetched Dr Quesnay from his lodging further down the staircase. By the time he arrived the worst was over, but he said that if the King had been sixty it would have been a serious affair. Presently he helped the King back to his own bedroom and nobody was ever the wiser.
Next morning the King sent a little note to Madame de Pompadour: ‘My dearest friend must have been very much alarmed, but let her be reassured. I am better, as the doctor will tell you [sic.].’ When the emotion was over the two women could not help saying to each other how extremely awkward it would have been if the King had died there, though they had been quite in order when they called Dr Quesnay, as he was one of the royal physicians. But still—! The same thought must have occurred to the King; he sent the maid and the doctor presents of money, and to Madame de Pompadour a beautiful clock, and a snuff-box with his portrait on the lid.
Madame du Hausset nursed the Marquise during all her many illnesses. Her bad health was a great drawback to
happiness; as she got older there was hardly a week without a day or two in bed. Whether she was really consumptive, as has so often been said, seems open to doubt; the life she led would have been enough to kill a healthy woman, and would surely have killed a consumptive before the age of forty-three. Her weak spot was her throat, she was for ever having feverish sore throats; from early childhood she was liable to colds and asthma. She kept her room very hot, which the King also liked, and had a fire during most of the summer; her favourite attitude was standing by it, one arm on the chimney piece and her hands in a muff. Like everybody who feels the cold, she often suffered from it more in the summer than in winter. She wrote once from Marly, in June, ‘frightfully hot in the salons and cold everywhere else, more coughs and sneezes than in November’. Dr Quesnay understood her constitution and while he was looking after her she kept pretty well. Apart from the fact that he thought everything should be treated by bleeding, he had sensible ideas about general health. Sometimes, however, she consulted quacks who made her do eccentric things, like lifting heavy weights, and then her health would go to pieces.
Quesnay was a friend of the philosophes and contributed to the Encyclopédie, articles on Evidence and on Farming. His political views were very pronounced; he and the Marquis de Mirabeau (father of the famous Mirabeau) were leaders of a school of economists called the Physiocrats, of which Turgot was a member. They were in favour of free trade and a ‘back to the land’ movement; deists, they believed that the laws of nature are those of God and that, since man is naturally good, he can easily be persuaded that honesty is the best policy; he should be governed as little as possible. Quesnay, who was a countryman born and bred, thought all the evils in France came from the oppression and underpayment of the agricultural classes which drove them off the land into the towns; France should and could live by exporting agricultural produce. The Physiocrats favoured a single tax. The King was very fond of Quesnay, called him le Penseur, and himself designed and bestowed on him a coat of arms with the flower pensée (pansy) as his crest. His book, Le Tableau Economique, was printed at the royal press. But Quesnay’s economic principles, summed up, as they were, by laisser faire, laisser passer, were perhaps not very useful to the King who was already too much inclined to do both.
One day Madame de Pompadour said to Quesnay: ‘Why do you seem so frightened of the King? He is a good man.’
‘Madame, I only left my village at the age of forty and it is difficult for me to get used to the world. When I’m with the King I say to myself: “This man can have my head chopped off.” It upsets me.’
‘But the King is good, don’t you think of that?’
‘Yes, reason tells me so; but I can’t help it, he frightens me.’
It has sometimes been said that the French Revolution was cooked up in Quesnay’s little entresol and he certainly entertained people who expressed very daring opinions, knowing that their words would never go beyond his four walls. All the intellectuals who went to see Madame de Pompadour stopped on their way up or down the staircase for a word with the doctor, and she herself would sometimes come there and join them for a chat; they felt more at their ease than in her room, with the King making his sudden appearances and disappearances. Marigny was there a great deal, and Madame du Hausset who, one day, heard a Magistrate utter the petrifying words: ‘This country can only be regenerated by some great interior upheaval, but woe to those who find themselves involved, the French people won’t go to it with gloves on.’ She trembled, but Marigny, who was also there, told her not to worry. ‘All these people,’ he said, ‘are perfectly well-intentioned and they are on the right lines, I’m sure. The trouble is they don’t know where to stop.’ Quesnay and his friends were quite harmless, in fact the more advanced philosophes were intensely scornful of the Physiocrats.
Dr Quesnay said about Marigny: ‘He is too little known, one never hears people speak of his wit and his knowledge, nor yet of what he has done for art – nobody has done so much since Colbert. He is an excellent man, but people only see him as the favourite’s brother, and because he is fat they quite unjustly think of him as heavy and dull.’
Quesnay introduced the Comte de Buffon, the naturalist, to Madame de Pompadour and she and the King liked him very much. They both loved animals and had a great many pets, monkeys, dogs, birds of every kind. The King had a big white angora cat and kept pigeons, hens and rabbits on the roof above his apartment at Versailles. They had a farm at Trianon and there was a menagerie, the other side of the canal, which had once been the toy of his mother, the Duchesse de Bourgogne. One day, as he came out of chapel, a time when presentations were made, M. de Maurepas presented two young lions to the King, and on another occasion some ostriches; he wanted to buy a little rhinoceros, but the man it belonged to made a good living by showing it and asked too much money. Buffon was in trouble with the Jesuits for saying that animals had souls. He said so in his article on animals in the first volume of the Encyclopédie when it appeared in 1752 and this was one reason for the Church’s objection to that work. (Another was that the miracles of Æsculapius, Greek god of medicine, should be mentioned in the same book as those of Jesus Christ.) Buffon finally severed his connexion with the Encyclopédie in order to remain on good terms with the King, whom he loved.
Madame de Pompadour supported the Encyclopédistes against the Jesuits and Archbishop de Beaumont by all the means in her power; the Queen, the Dauphin and Mesdames of course pulled in the other direction, and played upon the superstitious side of the King’s nature. When Madame Henriette died they said it was God’s vengeance on him for allowing this sacrilegious work to appear in his Kingdom; this was the sort of thing he half believed, in moments of emotional stress.
Soon after the Encyclopédie had been banned there was a supper party at Trianon. The Duc de La Vallière was saying that he wondered what gunpowder was made of. ‘It seems so funny that we spend our time killing partridges, and being killed ourselves on the frontier, and really we have no idea how it happens.’ Madame de Pompadour, seeing her opportunity, quickly went on: ‘Yes, and face powder? What is that made of? Now if you had not banned the Encyclopédie, Sire, we could have found out in a moment.’ The King sent to his library for a copy, and presently footmen staggered in under the heavy volumes; the party was kept amused for the rest of the evening looking up gunpowder, rouge and so on. After this subscribers were allowed to have their copies, though it was still not on sale in the bookshops.
The King came up her little secret staircase at all hours, to tell her the news, to have a word with her, as a modern lover would telephone, or for a long session of chat. She never went out, for fear he might come and find her not there; he appeared and vanished again without warning, to the embarrassment of her friends who would suddenly find him in their midst; upon which they would retire unless specially asked not to.
One day he came to tell how, going at an unusual hour to his bedroom, he found a strange man there. The poor fellow, terrified, threw himself at the King’s feet, begging to be searched at once, and explaining that he had lost his way in the palace. He was an honest baker, known to the household, and his story was evidently quite true. The King, as soon as all this was proved, gave him fifty louis and told him to forget about it, but Madame de Pompadour could not forget; she was appalled to think that anybody could find his way, unhindered, to the private apartments. When she told her brother the story he merely said: ‘That’s funny, I would have betted anything against the fifty louis.’
But the King was always generous to Madame de Pompadour and anybody connected with her. ‘Who was it I saw leaving your room as I came in?’ ‘A poor relation of mine, Sire.’ ‘Did she come to beg?’ ‘Oh no, only to thank me for something I had done for her.’ ‘Well, since she’s your relation I would like to give her a small annuity, as from to-morrow.’ He once gave Madame de Pompadour six louis for being brave when Dr Quesnay bled her.
The King never could bear Frederick the Great, even when the
y were allies in the field. Arriving on one occasion with an open letter in his hand he said, sarcastically, ‘The King of Prussia is a great man, he loves culture and, like Louis XIV, he wants all Europe to echo with his munificence towards learned foreigners.’ Madame de Pompadour, and Marigny, who was with her, waited for what would come next. ‘Now listen to this,’ he read from the letter. ‘“There is in Paris a man whose fortune is not equal to his talents … I hope that he will accept this pension and thus give me the pleasure of having obliged a man who not only has a beautiful nature but is also sublimely gifted.”’ At this point in came Gontaut and d’Ayen; the King began all over again, adding: ‘the Foreign Office wants to know whether I will give my permission for this sublime genius to accept the money. Now I ask you all to guess the sum which is involved.’ They variously guessed six, eight, and ten thousand livres. ‘Nobody has guessed twelve hundred livres,’ said the King, delighted. ‘Really,’ said the Duc d’Ayen, ‘it doesn’t seem very much for such sublime talents!’ The man of genius in question was d’Alembert. Madame de Pompadour very sensibly advised the King to give double the annuity himself and withhold permission for Frederick’s, but he felt that he ought not to reward somebody so irreligious as d’Alembert. He allowed the King of Prussia’s annuity, however.
Louis XV had an extremely morbid side to his nature, which some thought was the result of that terrible week when, at the age of two, he had lost father, mother and brother. The modern psychologist might say that this explanation is not so far-fetched. He was very fond of talking about death beds and horrifying medical details over which in those days no veil of decency was ever drawn; the whole Court knew when the King or Queen had taken a purge and every aspect of the health of women was openly discussed by all.
Madame de Pompadour Page 14
