‘Madame, is this all?’ said d’Argenson, and left the room. He was so sure which way the land lay that he wrote a letter to Madame d’Estrades telling her to cheer up, she would soon be back at Versailles, and then he and she would run the gambling den together. When he had gone, Bernis came to see Madame de Pompadour and found her in a characteristic attitude, standing, by the fire, her hands in her muff: she was gazing absently out of the window. ‘You look like a pensive sheep,’ he said. ‘It’s the wolf who has made the sheep pensive,’ she replied.
And still the days went by, and still no word from the King.
He was up now, in his bedroom, his hair curled and powdered, and walking about with a little stick. He hardly spoke – when the ambassadors came to see him the interview took place in perfect silence – but he had more or less returned to normal life. It was noticed that the Dauphin never left his side and that they were friendly and affectionate together. But no chat, no gossip and no jokes with the men around him, who were beginning to feel the strain.
On the eleventh day the King was in his room with the Dauphin and the Dauphine, the tall Duchesse de Brancas, Messieurs de Croissy, Fontanieu, Champcenetz and Dufort de Cheverny. Everybody else had gone off to dine, and the palace, as always at this hour, was utterly deserted. It was rather late and they were all hungry, waiting to be dismissed, but the King did not give the signal. He was wandering about in his dressing-gown and nightcap, leaning on his stick, in the sad silence to which they were becoming accustomed. At last he gave a sign to the Dauphine, who curtseyed and went out. Madame de Brancas was going to follow when the King told her to wait. The Dauphin looked up, very much surprised. ‘Lend me your cloak, will you?’ the King said to Madame de Brancas. She took it off and gave it to him; he put it around his shoulders, walked a few steps in it, said good-bye to her and left the room. The Dauphin made a move as though to follow him and the King said: ‘No – don’t come with me.’ So the Dauphin went to join the Dauphine at dinner.
The gentlemen-in-waiting looked at each other with a wild surmise. Hungry as they were they agreed that it would be impossible to dine, it was all too interesting. They settled down to await developments. A good long time went by before the King returned, and when he did he was a different man; calm, agreeable, chatting away, laughing about his feminine cloak. He would dine now, he said, and advised the others to do the same. It was not difficult to guess that he had been to see the Marquise. In that one interview she had managed to put his mind completely at rest.
She told him, quite truly, that Damiens was mad, that he was not the instrument of any party or conspiracy, let alone of the French people as a whole, and that he had acted entirely on his own. The country was appalled by the attempt, she said, the Parisians would tear Damiens limb from limb if they could get hold of him, and nobody had been more sincerely shocked than the Magistrates. She spoke in her sensible downright way and the King believed her. Next day he got up, dressed, went out hunting and supped as usual with Madame de Pompadour. Marigny was there, treated more like a brother-in-law than ever. The good Barbier, in his diary, says: ‘The King is beginning to amuse himself again, far the best for him and for us.’
D’Argenson and Machault were dismissed. ‘Monsieur d’Argenson, your services are no longer necessary. I order you to resign your various charges and to go and live on your estate at Ormes.’ D’Argenson was in his bath when this intimation arrived. He quickly dressed and went to Paris, where a typically eighteenth-century scene took place. He found his wife, as usual, chatting to M. de Valfons. ‘Don’t go,’ he said to Valfons, ‘at such terrible moments it is better to be three.’ He told them the news. Madame d’Argenson said that she would, of course, go with him to Ormes and M. de Valfons said he would, of course, come too, but d’Argenson would not hear of such sacrifices. Madame d’Argenson was a delicate woman, country air would be very bad for her, she must stay in Paris within reach of her doctor; and Valfons must stay within reach of her. That afternoon d’Argenson set forth, alone. At the city boundary he was met by Madame d’Estrades and they drove away to exile together. They both became very thin, with the boredom of country life. Not until after the death of the Marquise was d’Argenson allowed to go back to Paris; and then he only went there to die.
Machault’s dismissal was couched in far more friendly terms. ‘Monsieur de Machault, although certain of your probity and the honesty of your motives, circumstances oblige me to ask you for my seals and for your resignation as Minister of the Marine. You can rely upon my protection and friendship. You can ask favours for your children at any time at all. You had better stay at Arnouville for the present. You will keep your salary and your honours.’ Machault, in exile, became very fat. He was nearly recalled to office by Louis XVI, but in the end was passed over, and he died in prison during the Revolution.
Were these two men sent away for crossing Madame de Pompadour or was it a matter of policy? During the days when the King lay behind his curtains he must have been pondering on public affairs, and on the war which was beginning. D’Argenson and Machault had always been publicly pro-Frederick, they disliked the renversement des alliances and were most half-hearted about the mobilization. It would have been very difficult to conduct the war efficiently with them at the head of affairs; they would have had to go sooner or later. Furthermore, Machault was at daggers drawn with the Magistrates and the King was anxious to come to a settlement with them. But the public thought they had been sacrificed to feminine spite.
The Conseil d’Etat was left a very much reduced and not very brilliant body. It consisted of the Dauphin; Paulmy, d’Argenson’s nephew; Rouillé, who was in his dotage; the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, an excellent war minister but also rather old; Bernis, and St Florentin, an authority on Court usage and procedure.
M. de Stainville, having done so well at Rome, was now promoted to the Vienna embassy; he came to Versailles to pay his court to the King and congratulate him on his escape. He had hardly been in the palace a week before giving further proof of his adroitness. He asked the Marquise if she really thought it wise to leave foreign affairs in such incompetent hands as Rouillé’s. She said she and the King were both longing to get rid of him, but they were afraid of killing M. Rouillé who seemed very near to apoplexy as it was; he slept all through every council. The King thought that the shock of a dismissal might finish him.
Stainville said: ‘Shall I get you his resignation?’ The Marquise replied that nothing would be better received but that it was impossible. Madame Rouillé loved the Court as only a bourgeoise could love it, and she would never allow her husband to resign. Stainville went straight off to see Madame Rouillé. He pointed out to her that if her husband went on working it would probably kill him and then she would have to leave Versailles. If he resigned, on the other hand, they could keep their apartment and Rouillé would be given the rich sinecure of the Surintendance des Postes. It worked like a charm. He went with Madame Rouillé to her husband’s office and came away with the resignation.
Bernis, who succeeded Rouillé as Minister of Foreign Affairs, saw eye to eye on every subject with Stainville. They both loved Madame de Pompadour, both thought her influence on the King entirely good and were both, whatever Bernis may say in his memoirs, entirely in favour of the Austrian alliance, at this time. When Stainville left for Vienna they promised to write to each other constantly.
With the most important trial for years about to take place, the members of the Enquêtes and Requêtes were of course most anxious to go back to the Palais de Justice and participate in it; while the King had no intention whatever of allowing them to do so. A distinguished Magistrate, the Président de Meinières, obtained, through Gontaut and Madame du Roure, an interview with the Marquise which took place at the end of January. M. de Meinières had two objects in view. His son, excluded from high position in the army by his bourgeois birth, was now also excluded from any legal employment by express order of the King. Many of the remontrances with which t
he Parlement bored and annoyed the King so continually, were known to have been composed by Meinières with the help of his enormous library of legal documents. He was one of the cleverest and most intransigent of the Parliamentarians and the King had decided to use such sanctions as he could against him. The President was beginning to realize that the precipitate action of the two Chambers, in leaving their duties, had put them in a false position; his son’s career too was being adversely affected by their quarrel with the King. He came to treat on their and on his own behalf. In the end he saw the Marquise twice; he wrote an account of these interviews, which shows the impression she made on an elderly man, very important in his own sphere, who was, if anything, republican in feeling.
‘Madame de Pompadour was alone, standing by the fire; she looked me up and down with a haughty air that will be graven on my memory as long as I live. No curtsey, no sort of greeting as she took stock of me; it was very imposing. When I came up to her she said, furiously, to her servant, to bring me a chair. He put it so near hers that our knees were almost touching.
‘When we were both seated, and the servant had gone, I said to Madame la Marquise, in very uncertain and trembling tones: “Madame, I have never wanted anything so much as the favour you are good enough to grant me today, I hope to have the honour to convince you of my deep respect, so that you can see for yourself that I am incapable of the cabals and intrigues of which I am accused. I hope, Madame, that when you have at last realized the injustice of such imputations, of which my poor son is the victim, your goodness, your humanity, and that natural inclination, which everybody knows you to have, to protect the innocent and help the unlucky, will induce you to give me your powerful patronage, and to speak for me to the King in favour of giving a commission in a cavalry regiment to my son …” ’ And so on. The President says that during the whole of this speech, which was quite long for somebody dying of fright, as he was when he began it, the Marquise sat bolt upright in her chair with her eyes fixed on him most disconcertingly. When at last he finished, saying he had no idea what his crime was supposed to be, Madame de Pompadour spoke.
‘Comment, Monsieur, you pretend not to know what you have done, what is your crime?’
‘I have absolutely no idea, Madame.’
‘Really! Have you then no friend?’
‘You can see that I have, Madame, because it is entirely owing to my friends that I have the honour to pay my court to you today, but none of them has ever told me that he knew the reason for the way I am being treated.’
‘Ah! You don’t know in what consideration you are held?’
The President gave an uneasy laugh and said it was hardly a crime if he had acquired consideration while pursuing his trade. The consideration, observed the Marquise, came from the fact that he had been most useful to the other Magistrates, with his books and his manuscripts, finding precedents and quotations in them on which the various remontrances had been based. The result was that His Majesty had a prejudice against him which it would be very difficult to remove. The President admitted that he had an un usually profound knowledge of law, but said that, although he had put various facts at the disposal of his colleagues, the use they chose to make of them was nothing to do with him. In any case, he said, it was very unfair, and not like the King, to visit all this on his son.
‘The King uses whatever weapon comes to hand,’ she replied, ‘and in your case it happens to be convenient to punish you through your son.’ She then suggested that he should write to the King and offer his entire submission; several members of the Enquêtes and Requêtes had already done this privately, and the King was quite willing to make allowances for them. The President said at great length that he would not think it honourable to do so.
Madame de Pompadour laughed and said: ‘I am always amazed when people begin putting forward their so-called honour as a reason for disobeying the King. They seem to forget that honour consists in doing their duty and trying to remedy the disorder which reigns in every public department, now that justice itself has gone bankrupt. Shall I tell you what honour dictates? You should admit the silliness and the wickedness of a move which is neither legal nor public spirited, and try, by a different line of conduct, to efface the bad impression you have made on the King and his subjects. Everybody knows my deep respect for the magistrature, and I only wish I had no reason to reproach this august tribunal, this first Parlement of the Kingdom, this French court of justice, which always praises itself so pompously in its writings and remontrances. In a quarter of an hour this wise body, which is always trying to set the government to rights, falls into a rage of blind, furious resentment, and abandons its duties. You yourself left with these other irresponsible people and now you refuse to cast them off? You would prefer to see the kingdom, the Treasury and the whole State collapse, that is what you call honour? Ah! Monsieur de Meinières, that is not the honour of a man who loves his King and country.’
The President was amazed, he says, by her eloquence; it was a pleasure to listen to her. He defended himself as best he could, and presently came back to the word honour, upon which she said very sharply: ‘Don’t talk to me like that, M. de Meinières, how can it be dishonourable to do something which is the plain duty of a citizen?’
After this outburst they seem to have been on rather better terms. They discussed the whole affair of the Enquêtes and Requêtes, and the Marquise reminded the President of various political events in the reign of Louis XIV. She knew her facts and talked, he said, extraordinarily well. They went on for five quarters of an hour; finally she went with him to the door while he protested his great, tender and respectful attachment to the King. ‘She made an inclination of her head, and shot like an arrow towards her bedroom which was full of people. As she went she never took her eyes off me until I had shut the door, and I left her filled with amazement and admiration.’
The second interview was much shorter. They came to the point at once, and M. de Meinières told her that, like Louis XV, Henri IV had tried to reduce the Parlement to a single chambre, that Chancelier Séguier had explained that this was against the constitution and the King had given way. Now he, Meinières, had a solution in mind.
The Marquise: ‘Have you got it in writing?’
The President: ‘I have given it to M. de Bernis.’
The Marquise: ‘It comes to the same. Let me have the opportunity to be useful to you. I wish it with all my heart.’ She got up, curtseyed, and retired.
Madame de Pompadour and Bernis both worked during the next few months for a reconciliation between the King and the Parliament; the following September this took place and the Enquêtes and Requêtes resumed their functions.
Damiens was tried by sixty judges – five Princes of the Blood, twenty Pairs de France and members of the Grand’ Chambre of the Parlement. He was a native of Artois, with a little property there, and had been a superior servant – between a butler and secretary – in bourgeois houses. His masters were for ever grumbling about the state of public affairs, he had taken their words seriously, supposed that the country was in danger, and thought he could draw attention to this danger by wounding the King. He said he never meant to kill him. He certainly wished to draw attention to himself; he was always saying that everybody would talk about him, and seemed quite to look forward to the terrible end which he knew was in store for him.
He was found guilty of an attempt to murder his sovereign and was tortured to death outside the Hôtel de Ville. As the Duc de Luynes says, his last hour does not make agreeable reading. Thousands of Parisians and quite a few courtiers went to watch his agonies, and amateurs of torture came over from England for the show. But most educated people were rather shocked, not at the idea of the punishment, but at its being treated as an entertainment. Dufort de Cheverny says that he and his wife and a few friends, not caring for that sort of thing, made up a party and went to Sceaux for the day. Nobody could talk about anything else and it revolted them; they knew quite well that their servan
ts had all been to see it and they gave out that they did not wish to hear any details. When the King was told that a certain woman of his acquaintance had been to the Hôtel de Ville, he put his hands over his eyes and said: ‘Fi! La vilaine.’ He never spoke of Damiens by name, it was always ‘ce monsieur who wanted to kill me’. It seems rather curious that a humane man like the King, who had already said, ‘arrest him but don’t hurt him’, and had forgiven him, on what he thought was his death bed, should have allowed these fearful tortures. But justice was the prerogative of the Parlement and he was legally obliged to abide by their decision; Damiens’ punishment was the same as that suffered by Ravaillac, assassin of Henri IV. Paradoxical as it may sound, human life was valued high in those days; crimes of violence were rare and thought extremely shocking. There were astonishingly few murders, mass murder did not exist in Europe, and a sharp push administered to an Electress by Prussian soldiers constituted a German atrocity. No doubt people were more startled by the attempt than they would be today. Luynes got a letter from a friend saying: ‘Is it possible that the age of assassinations is returning to this earth?’ Voltaire said: ‘How could such a thing happen in these enlightened times? One’s blood freezes.’ And after Damiens’ death: ‘So Damiens died with his secret – which was really nothing but the insanity of an abominable soul.’
The King was so accessible that it would be easy to kill him at any time, inside as well as outside his palace, and this made it necessary to deter would-be assassins; torture was supposed to be a deterrent. Pain was regarded with a different eye from ours. Everybody, sooner or later, was obliged to endure horrid pain. There were no anæsthetics, the doctors applied their brutal remedies and conducted their primitive operations on fully conscious patients. Cardinal Dubois, for instance, must have suffered quite as much during the operation of which he died the next day, as Damiens on the scaffold; and they did not put him out of his misery when it was over. Women suffered dreadfully in childbirth; people with cancer had to bear it unalleviated until it killed them. Of all the highly civilized men who tell of this affair in their memoirs only Dufort de Cheverny seems to have wondered whether such an execution was necessary, and he only because the King survived. Damiens is never spoken of in pity, no term of opprobrium is too strong, le monstre, le scélérat, le détestable assassin, le parricide, ce misérable and so on; even Voltaire, who hated torture, considered that his end was quite natural and inevitable.
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