Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Have you decided where you are going to be buried?’ he once asked the old Marquis de Souvré.

  ‘At your feet, Sire,’ was the tactless reply.

  When the King was in these dark and morbid moods he used to ask Madame de Pompadour not to make him laugh. One day, driving to Choisy, his coach broke down, and he got into that of the Marquise, who was alone with her little friend the Maréchale de Mirepoix. He saw some crosses against the sky, on a nearby hill, and saying that he supposed there must be a graveyard he sent one of his outriders to see if there were any new graves. The man came back saying that there were three graves, freshly dug. ‘Why, it’s enough to make one’s mouth water,’ cried the Maréchale, gaily. But the King looked sad and thoughtful.

  This little Maréchale was a great comfort to Madame de Pompadour. She and the tall Duchesse de Brancas were her closest friends; the King, too, was very fond of them. The Maréchale, born Beauvau, was first married to the Prince de Lixin, a Prince of the House of Lorraine; he was killed by Richelieu, in a duel. Then she gave up her rank, in order to marry, for love, the Marquis (later Duc) de Mirepoix. The courtiers thought that this disinterested action marked her as eccentric indeed. Mirepoix was a soldier; not even very rich. Their life was a perpetual honeymoon until, in 1757, he died suddenly on a journey to Provence. The Maréchale was the sister of the Marquise de Boufflers, one of the great charmers of the age, whom we do not meet very much at Versailles because she lived in Lorraine and was the mistress of King Stanislas. Both sisters were excessively gay and treated life as an enormous joke; their contemporaries said they never grew old, since it was for ever springtime in their hearts. But whereas Madame de Mirepoix loved nobody but the Maréchal, Madame de Boufflers was extremely unfaithful, not only to her husband but also to King Stanislas.

  The Maréchale understood the King perfectly, better, perhaps, than Madame de Pompadour, since she was not in love with him, and when he was difficult, or seemed to be attracted to other women, this practical Frenchwoman, who saw life clearly as it is, was always able to reassure her friend. ‘He’s used to you, he doesn’t have to explain himself when he’s with you. If you disappeared and somebody younger and more beautiful were suddenly to be found in your place I dare say he wouldn’t give you another thought, but he’ll never be bothered to make a change himself. Princes, above all people, are creatures of habit.’

  The King was very difficult: centre of the universe from such an early age, he could hardly have avoided being selfish and spoilt. Sometimes even the Marquise could do nothing with him. Soon after her arrival at Versailles she gave a fête champêtre for him at Montretout, a little house at St Cloud, which she embellished, called her dear Tretout and very soon abandoned for the nearby La Celle. A small number of his favourite friends were invited, the June night was hot and delicious, she looked perfectly lovely in a dark blue dress embroidered with all the stars of the milky way; everything augured well. The party began with a wonderful supper on the terrace, to the sound of music. When that was finished, the Queen of the Night sang a song in honour of her guest; then she held out a white hand to him. The King, who liked sitting on at the supper table, looked the other way; she insisted, however, and led him, preceded by the orchestra, to a little wood. The whole party, wreathed in smiles, advanced two by two as in a graceful minuet; but the King stumped along looking very cross indeed. Who is this shepherd, sitting surrounded by his flock? Why, none other than M. de la Salle! Amazed to see so great a king in so rustic a haunt the honest shepherd recited some lines in his honour; they fell flat. A troupe of villagers now appeared, and one of them handed the King a mask and domino. He did not bother to put them on, never attempted to conceal his yawns and soon went grumpily off to bed.

  Needless to say, there was a good deal of crowing over this fiasco at Versailles, among those who had not been invited. The Queen, who, like many meek and holy people, had a catty side to her nature, could not resist dotting the i’s. She pretended to be quite upset about it all and scolded her husband for not being more appreciative of Madame de Pompadour’s kind efforts to amuse him.

  Very soon, however, the Marquise knew exactly what sort of entertainment he did like, and such a distressing occurrence does not seem to have been repeated. When she gave rustic fêtes they really were rustic, and she and the King very much enjoyed wedding parties for youths and maidens who lived on her various estates. She would marry off several couples at a time, with a feast and country songs and dances; she liked to give dowries and trousseaux to poor girls who otherwise would not have been able to marry.

  But the best way to amuse the King was with any sort of building project. ‘After the King’s Mass,’ says Croÿ, ‘we went to the Marquise. The King came and fetched her to walk in the gardens, hothouses and menagerie at Trianon. As the Duc d’Ayen and I were chatting about gardens, a hobby we share, the King asked what we were saying. The Duc d’Ayen said we were talking about country places, and that I had a charming one near Condé which was becoming quite well known … The King asked me about it; I explained that I had a forest and wanted to rebuild my house in a clearing where four rides met at right angles, that I was not sure about the design for it because I wanted a salon in the middle which would look out in each direction, with nice bedrooms at the four corners … The King was very fond of building and plans. He took me to see his pretty pavilion in the garden at Trianon and observed that I ought to build something on those lines … He ordered M. Gabriel to give me two plans they had made together, then he asked for pencil and paper and I made a sketch of the site. He put down his own ideas and asked M. Gabriel to go over them with him. In the end it lasted an hour or more and I was quite embarrassed. That evening he talked of it again, and the next day … By dinner time we had visited all the hens, and collected the fresh eggs, and stifled in the hothouses, which were very interesting, then we went back to Trianon, for luncheon [déjeuner] with the King.’

  After luncheon they walked to the Hermitage, Madame de Pompadour’s little house on the edge of the park, and went over the gardens, hothouses and menageries of that pretty place. On the way they saw some partridges; the King said to d’Ayen, ‘Take the gun from that keeper and shoot a cock.’ D’Ayen took the gun and shot a hen, and this amused the King very much. After this day spent together the King would always ask Croÿ how the plans for his house were going, and even referred to himself as M. de Croÿ’s architect.

  12

  Tastes and Interests

  MADAME DE POMPADOUR WAS ONE of those people who like to acquire houses, expend energy, taste and knowledge in embellishing them, live in them for a while, and then go on to something new. Her first house of her very own was Crécy, which she always loved and in whose neighbouring village she took a particular interest; then came Montretout, quickly exchanged for the slightly larger La Celle, and then the Hermitage at Versailles. This little rustic one-storied pavilion was to her what the Petit Trianon later became to Queen Marie-Antoinette; she used it as a summer house and spent happy days there alone with the King. ‘A certain Hermitage,’ she wrote to Madame de Lutzenbourg, ‘near the Gate of the Dragon, where I pass half my life. It is sixteen yards by ten, nothing above, so you see how grand it must be; but I can be alone there, or with the King and a few others, so I am happy.’ Mademoiselle Langlois, of the Musée de Versailles, has recently discovered this little house which was supposed to have disappeared; Mesdames had it after Madame de Pompadour’s death and disguised it by adding a storey; it is now a convent. The great point of the Hermitage was its wonderful garden, all arranged for scent so that one heavenly smell led to another; it could be visited blindfold for the scent alone. Here she had fifty orange trees, lemons, oleanders single and double, myrtle, olives, yellow jasmine and lilac from Judea, and pomegranates, all in straight avenues with trellised palisades leading to a bower of roses surrounding a marble Apollo. Shrubs and flowers were brought to Madame de Pompadour from all parts of the French empire, chosen for the scent; she
specially loved myrtle, tuberoses, jasmine and gardenias. Labour was so cheap that flowers in the gardens were renewed every day, as we renew them now in a room; in the greenhouses at Trianon there were two million pots for bedding out.

  The Hermitage was very simply decorated, the hangings were all of cotton and the furniture of painted wood; it was meant to be rustic, a farm house. It was such a success that she soon built two others, one at Compiègne designed by Gabriel, which has utterly disappeared, pulled down nobody even knows when or by whose orders, and one at Fontainebleau. The Fontainebleau Hermitage belongs now to the Vicomte de Noailles and is the only habitation of Madame de Pompadour’s which she could visit today without grief. She never much liked her rooms in the palace there, and lived a great deal in this little house. The King would pretend he was going out hunting, leave the palace early in the morning booted and spurred, and spend the whole day with her, sometimes cooking their supper himself. People who liked to carp at her love of building used to say that she only had this Hermitage in order to offer the King a boiled egg from time to time. She had here one of the farmyards of which she was so fond, cows, goats and hens, and a donkey, whose milk was supposed to be particularly good for her.

  The Réservoirs at Versailles (designed by Lassurance) was only intended to be an overflow from her rooms in the palace, she never seems to have slept there. It is still called the Hôtel des Réservoirs, and still bears her coat of arms, but it has been enlarged and completely spoilt.

  The only house of any size that Madame de Pompadour built was Bellevue (1750); all her other châteaux already existed when she bought them and were altered by her. Bellevue was the finest flower, inside and out, of eighteenth-century domestic architecture; its destruction was a terrible loss to France. (The royal houses which disappeared during the Revolution were not pulled down, burnt or looted by a furious mob. The government, hard put to it for money, to keep off the invading Austrians and Prussians, sold them all to speculators who disposed of them piecemeal; Chantilly and the Bastille were used as quarries for many years. It was at this time that rich English collectors acquired the treasures of French art which so greatly embellish our museums and country houses.) Bellevue was built on that wooded bank which hangs over the Seine between Sèvres and Meudon, and a beautiful view indeed it must have had of the clean, sparkling and unspoilt city of Paris, with no blocks of flats, no Electricité de France, above all no rusty Eiffel Tower, to dwarf the domes and spires of the many churches. She employed her favourite architect, Lassurance, and, once the designs were approved, she left him to get on in his own way; when it was finished she stepped in and added her, entirely personal, touches. She had a horror of common or banal objects, or ones that were often copied, with fashionable motifs; if a piece of furniture was to please her it must be unique of its sort; the same applied to all her upholstery and hangings, always specially woven for her.

  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: