Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford

  The Dauphine’s next baby was called le Comte d’Artois to console that province for having spawned the reptile Damiens.

  18

  The Seven Years’ War

  THE SEVEN YEARS’ War, which ravaged so much of Europe, never touched the sacred soil of France. But it cost her her colonial empire. Canada and large tracts of India were taken by the English while the French army was pinned down in Europe and the French navy neglected for lack of funds. As for the Prussians, when they came back to earth after seven years on their favourite planet, they noticed that their ally had been acquiring world-wide dominion at the cost of a few hundred English lives, while they had ruined themselves, lost the flower of their manhood, suffered from famine and Russian atrocities, made themselves loathed throughout the Empire, and all, it seemed, for the sake of a sandy plain.

  In the nineteenth century the French could not forgive Louis XV for the loss of their colonies, but while it was happening they hardly noticed it. Public opinion was entirely against any form of colonization. The philosophes, two hundred years before their time, thought then as we think now on the subject and most of their fellow countrymen entirely agreed with them.

  ‘What of the noble savage?’ cried Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘has he no rights?’

  ‘An empire is like a tree,’ said Montesquieu, ‘if the branches spread too far they drain the sap from the trunk. Men should stay where they are; transplanted to another climate their health will suffer.’

  Voltaire denounced the horrible crimes committed in America by the Europeans and said: ‘France can be happy without Quebec.’

  The Encyclopédie devoted twelve lines to Canada, ‘a country inhabited by bears, beavers and barbarians, and covered, eight months of the year, with snow’.

  This line of thought was not unknown in England. Arthur Young speaks of ‘richer fields to fatten Nabobs – what difference to me when I pay the malt and beer duty to be told … that it produced the acquisition of Canada?’

  With so much propaganda pouring from such respectable pens, the literate classes in France rather naturally felt disinclined to expend large sums and the blood of their menfolk, in order to keep the territory which a few enterprising Frenchmen had conquered in these far-off countries, with their awfully hot, or awfully cold, climates. If the French provinces were dowdy and dull the colonies must be a hundred times more so. The unfortunate Montcalm and Dupleix, therefore, were, if not quite abandoned, quite insufficiently supported, and though they accomplished miracles they could not but be defeated in the end.

  Through all the diplomatic and political crises of recent years, life at Court had gone on exactly as usual. The only activity of the Austrian Ambassador to attract attention was the way he had his hair powdered, by two men with bellows. Members of the Parlements, grave and portentous, passed in and out of the King’s council chamber as if their robes had the power of making them invisible; the courtiers never spoke of them, or seemed to notice them at all. The outbreak of war, however, made a certain impact at Versailles. As at the beginning of all wars, there was a great scramble to get into the army; Maréchal de Belle-Isle’s ante-chamber was filled with young men clamouring for jobs. ‘No hurry, my boy, it won’t be over tomorrow.’ As at the beginning of all wars, too, the women were for or against it, according to whether their husbands or lovers were likely to be involved and whether they longed more for the safety or the glory of the loved one. No shame attached to the courtiers who preferred to stay at home and invent amusing songs about the French defeats. ‘We can’t help loving our defeats, they make such wonderful jokes.’

  They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was ‘embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians’. It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some fifty thousand people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour’s brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled on to his head from the portico of his embassy. Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague’s little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. ‘Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake?’

  But the King and the Marquise were two changed people; gone was the charming carelessness of their early years together. Her red lacquer room became his office, here he received the ministers and kept the state papers. Nothing was decided without her knowledge. If it be true that she marked the maps of Germany, which now replaced the Bouchers on her wall, with mouches (beauty spots) to show the course of the campaign, it was probably less out of a spirit of frivolity, than because they happened to be within reach, and were a suitable and convenient medium.

  The voyages, such a pleasure to both of them, were cut down, and work in their various houses came to a standstill. Very sadly they gave up Crécy and sold it to the Duc de Penthièvre; the voyages there were supposed to be the most expensive of all. ‘I regret nothing,’ she wrote to Stainville, ‘except my poor Crécy; I wouldn’t even admit this if I were not sure of overcoming my weakness. I ought to be there at this very minute.’ She went there for a last visit, without the King, to open the cottage hospital she had built in the village. It had forty-eight beds and a resident surgeon and she had sold her diamonds in order to endow it.

  After the beginning of the war we know but little about Madame de Pompadour’s private life. She was shut up in her apartment, working with the King and his ministers, and was seen much less at Court functions. In 1758 the invaluable diary of the Duc de Luynes comes to an end and we no longer have an almost daily account of the gossip and goings-on at Versailles. But everything we do know about her is rather sad. The Marquise had to a great extent lost her looks. She never ceased to mourn her little girl. Her heart troubled her, she was hardly ever well and often in pain. She worried very much over public events. The great compensation for all this was the companionship of the King. He went out hunting, he went off to his brothel, he saw a certain amount of his children, he performed his public duties; all the rest of the day he was with her. Their relationship was that of a couple happily married since many years.

  By the spring of 1757, Frederick was in possession of Saxony, he also occupied Bohemia and laid siege to Prague. The Dauphine was so much upset by the news from her home that she had a miscarriage. Her mother was subjected to indignities which finally killed her; her father, the civilized Augustus III, famous for his collection of pictures, fled; and Frederick stole all their possessions, even the petty cash which he found in the palace.

  Maurice de Saxe now reposed beneath the most beautiful of all eighteenth-century tombs at Strasbourg. He had died in 1750, at Chambord; he was a Protestant or he would have been buried, like Turenne, with the royal family at St Denis. ‘How sad’, remarked the Dauphine, ‘that we can’t sing a De Profundis for somebody who made us sing so many Te Deums.’ Lowendal, too, was dead. The King remarked bitterly that he no longer had any generals, only a few captains. Out of these captains he and Madame de Pompadour did their best to choose wisely; those they appointed were all (except d’Estrées) members of their own circle and it must be said that none of them was worth anything. Madame de Pompadour set her heart from the first upon a high command for the Prince de Soubise, one of her greatest and oldest friends. He was given an army corps; the Grande Armée was commanded by Maréchal d’Estrées, who, with forty thousand men, instead of the twenty-four thousand promised in the Treaty of Versailles, set forth for Hanover.

  D’Estrées crossed Westphalia, took Emden, subjugated Hesse and crossed the Weser, hardly meeting with any opposition at all. Cumberland, with an Anglo-German army, retreated before him to Hastenbeck. With lengthening lines of communication, it beca
me more difficult to keep the army in provisions, and at this point d’Estrées fell out with Pâris-Duverney, who was as usual supplying it. Maurice de Saxe had always had such perfect confidence in Duverney that he used to consult him on his plans of campaign: d’Estrées took a different line, high-handed and rude. At the same time he left Soubise, of whom he was jealous, completely in the dark about his dispositions. In other words he alienated the friends of the Marquise, never a very wise thing to do. Duverney used his enormous influence with the King and with Madame de Pompadour to replace d’Estrées by Richelieu. It was a curious error for this usually good judge of human nature to have made; but he saw, rightly, that now was the moment to strike hard and win the war and he was, no doubt, dazzled by Richelieu’s exploits at Genoa and Minorca.

  The Maréchal de Belle-Isle, realizing that an intrigue to replace d’Estrées was afoot, sent him a secret message saying that he had better soon have a decisive victory to report if he did not want to be recalled. D’Estrées attacked the Duke of Cumberland and won the Battle of Hastenbeck (26 July 1757). Too late, however. Duverney had by now persuaded the King, who in his turn persuaded the Marquise, that Richelieu was their best hope, and they had decided upon his appointment. Madame de Pompadour wrote to Duverney: ‘The King asks me to tell you, mon nigaud, that as your project has a political significance, you must confide it to the Abbé de Bernis. The Maréchal de Belle-Isle has been rather difficult; do stroke him when you see him. The King is speaking to M. de Richelieu tonight. I must warn you that he (Richelieu) tells everything to Madame de L …’

  So off went Son Excellence to replace d’Estrées. He would have been in time to claim the victory of Hastenbeck as his own if he had not stopped to spend a few days in Strasbourg with his mistress the Duchesse de Lauraguais who was on her way back from a watering place. The real victor of Hastenbeck was one Chevert. The sad necessity for a French Revolution is demonstrated by the case of François de Chevert. He was a first-class officer, the only good general that the King possessed. Belle-Isle knew this quite well, since Chevert had played an essential part in his brilliantly conducted retreat from Prague in 1742. Yet he could not be promoted to a higher rank than Lieutenant General because he was not noble and a high rank in the army was the perquisite of the nobility. How could France have gone into the nineteenth century with such a system of defence? The public, who knew nothing about Chevert, was outraged by the recall of d’Estrées immediately after such a success; a caricature circulated in Paris which represented him whipping Cumberland with a branch of laurel, while Richelieu picked up the leaves and crowned himself with them. Back at Versailles, d’Estrées compared his lot with that of Germanicus, also recalled a week after crossing the Weser, a piece of pretentiousness which lost him a good deal of sympathy.

  Frederick’s position now seemed to be desperate. He had been driven away from Prague by an Imperial army under General Daun, ‘the most beautiful, the gayest army possible to be seen’, as Madame de Pompadour described it, and was also hard pressed on the Russian front. His thoughts turned to suicide, and then to making peace with France. He began by trying to bribe Madame de Pompadour, offering her huge sums of money and the principality of Neuchâtel. She thought this a great joke and forwarded his letters to the Empress. Then Voltaire seems to have suggested that Richelieu would be a rather more likely person to treat with.

  The case of the Duc de Richelieu illustrates the fact that once a man has been convicted of treachery, he is better dead; the traitor will always betray. Frederick wrote to him in terms of fulsome flattery: ‘The nephew of the great Cardinal is born to sign treaties as much as to win battles … He who has merited statues in Genoa and conquered the Island of Minorca in the face of huge difficulties …’ and so on. Richelieu sent this letter to Pâris-Duverney, as a sign of his good faith. But then, instead of pursuing Cumberland and his beaten army, he hung about in Hanover, wringing money from the civilian population. When the burgomaster of a town brought him the keys – always in solid gold – Richelieu would pocket them. The burgomasters sadly pointed out that Turenne used to take the towns, but give back the keys.

  ‘Very likely,’ said Richelieu, ‘M. de Turenne was really inimitable.’ He levied huge sums from householders who would rather pay than have soldiers billeted on them – in fact he was up to every known dodge by which a general in those days could enrich himself. His own soldiers called him ‘Papa la Maraude’, and they soon had no vestige of discipline left. Richelieu believed that an army should live off the country and gave his troops a free hand to rob and ravish the civilian population. At last he turned his attention once more to the campaign. He proceeded, as at Fort St Philip, to ignore the rules of warfare and without any plan of battle, without any satisfactory arrangement for a supply line, he pursued the Duke of Cumberland to the banks of the Elbe. It was really asking for trouble. But his extraordinary luck persisted; he pinned Cumberland and his army between the Elbe and the sea, so that Cumberland had no choice but to open negotiations for a surrender. At this point the Seven Years’ War could have been won in a single campaign; Louis XV and the Empress would have had Europe at their feet and Madame de Pompadour, had she been given credit for the Austrian alliance for which, subsequently, she had been so bitterly blamed, would have gone down in history as a political genius. If, when the Regent had enough proof to cut off four of M. de Richelieu’s heads, he had cut off one, the history of France might have been different indeed.

  Instead of taking Cumberland prisoner, and disarming his troops, Richelieu treated with him and let him go, on the promise that he and his allies would disband and never fight against France while the war lasted. This arrangement, known as the Convention of Closter Seven, was perfectly meaningless; neither Richelieu nor Cumberland was entitled to sign any form of treaty, and it was quite as badly received, at first, in London, and by Frederick, as at Fontainebleau. But the French suffered from it. Richelieu had signed, in his usual airy manner, without fixing any date for the execution of the articles, or remembering to prohibit Cumberland and his troops from fighting against the allies of France. Bernis was partly to blame for this fatal convention. Though in his memoirs he pretends that it came as a bombshell and that Richelieu presented him with an accomplished fact, his letters to Stainville show that he knew quite well that something of the sort was going on and did not entirely disapprove of it.

  George II took no account of Cumberland’s parole – ‘here is my son, who has ruined me and disgraced himself ’ – refused to ratify the Convention, and wrote to the Hanoverian council of regency at Stade: ‘a victory gained by the King of Prussia would be a convenient occasion for falling unexpectedly upon the French, who are quartered in our states, in such a manner that they may be surprised separately in their quarters.’ To do him justice, Cumberland keenly felt the dishonour and retired into private life.

  Closter Seven was bad enough, but at least it had left the French army intact. Richelieu, now in full correspondence with Frederick, and probably receiving bribes from him, refused to send troops to Soubise in Saxony, who was clamouring for them. When finally, much too late, he did send them, no arrangements were made to feed them during their march and they arrived in a pitiful condition, quite unready for battle. The result was the crushing defeat of M. de Soubise and his army of French and Imperial troops at Rosbach, 1757. The blame for this must really be shared by Richelieu and the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, in command of the Austrians. He had also been bought by Frederick; doubts as to his loyalty had already been expressed in France weeks before the engagement took place. Rosbach was one of the battles most enjoyed by the jokers at Versailles; songs and caricatures without end mocked the unfortunate Soubise. ‘I’ve lost my army – wherever can it be – oh, thank goodness! I see it coming towards me – horrors! It’s the enemy!’ The Hôtel de Soubise was to let, they said, the Prince having gone to the Ecole Militaire. It would cost him nothing now to build a new house, he could do it with the stones that would be thr
own at him. And so on.

  Bernis wrote to Stainville that all this was very prejudicial to their friend (Madame de Pompadour); the public, which had disliked the appointment of Soubise, would only have forgiven it if he had won a victory – unfair perhaps, but the public is never fair on these occasions. M. de Soubise, who had behaved wisely before the battle, and like a hero during it, had better now retire and accept, with a good gracc, a distinguished reserve in the allied army. He was in no way to blame, it had been a fatal mistake to have two generals.

  As for Madame de Pompadour, she was in despair. She cried all night after receiving a letter from the Prince in which he made no attempt to minimize the disaster which had befallen his army, a disaster the more heartrending, as so often happens, because of the hopeless gallantry of certain regiments and individuals. She wrote to Madame de Lutzenbourg: ‘… you know how fond I am of him, and can imagine how much I mind the things they are saying about him in Paris. His army loves and admires him, as he deserves. Madame la Dauphine is fearfully unhappy at the death of her mother the Queen – another victim of the King of Prussia. How can Providence allow him to go on making everybody so miserable? I feel desperate about it all …’ She fought like a tiger for her friend, refused to hear of his retirement and was furious at what she considered the unfair and revolting campaign launched against him by all the stay-at-homes. She was determined that he should have a second chance. That winter Madame de Pompadour made Soubise come back to Versailles on leave, and did her very best to console him; never has a beaten general been so well-received at home. She was in particularly good spirits again by then, fatter and looking perfectly beautiful; the King very gay and ready to be amused, and they were both talking a great deal about love. The little staircase was unblocked, and the King appeared and disappeared unexpectedly as he used to. Bébé, a water spaniel which Soubise had left with Madame de Pompadour, was enchanted to see his master. When the Prince mentioned his defeat one evening at supper, Madame de Pompadour told him not to talk shop.