Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford

  At this time Madame de Pompadour and the King were seeing a great deal of that curious personage the Comte de St Germain. He amused and distracted them, and they forced themselves to believe in him, rather as children force themselves to believe in conjurers, to heighten the entertainment value. St Germain was a charlatan of whom not much has ever been known, except that he was very rich and spoke every European language. He has been accused, by French writers, of belonging to the English intelligence service and of being the father of Freemasonry. The English thought he was a Jacobite spy. But his own claim to fame was that he had lived for thousands of years and had known Jesus Christ.

  He described to Madame de Pompadour the Courts of the various kings of France where, he said, he had been persona grata. She decided that if she had not had the luck to live in the Court of her own King, she would have chosen that of François I, patron of the arts. One day St Germain played a little tune on her clavichord and the King asked what it was. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied carelessly, ‘the first time I heard it was at the entry of Alexander into Babylon.’ He astounded the King by removing a flaw from one of his diamonds. St Germain said that his eternal life (not youth, for he was a well-set-up man of about fifty) was due to an elixir which preserved those who took it always at the same age. Madame de Pompadour eagerly swallowed both the story and the drug; she said that it had done her a great deal of good. But in 1760 St Germain fell into bad odour with the police and Choiseul sent him packing. He wandered from one European court to another and died in 1780.

  As soon as the armies had gone into winter quarters, 1757–8, Richelieu, who was dying to see his mistresses again, asked for leave, not a very wise move if he had wanted to keep his command. Closter Seven had just been formally repudiated by Frederick’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Brunswick, who had announced his intention to resume hostilities at once. It hardly seemed the moment for the author of that unlucky armistice to go back to Paris and enjoy himself. The King granted him his leave but said that as it was impossible for the army to be without a commander-in-chief at such a critical moment he was sending the Comte de Clermont to replace him.

  Richelieu once more demonstrated his capacity for getting away with everything. He came back to Versailles, where the King was delighted to see him, and happily resumed his lady-killing operations there and in Paris. Very soon he was observed sneaking into the bedroom of one of his mistresses, by means of a plank thrown over the street from an opposite house. He used the fruits of his treachery to buy the beautiful Hôtel d’Antin on the boulevards, and added a wing ending in a round room which looked out over fields. The Parisians called it the Pavillon de Hanovre. It was pulled down in 1930 and rebuilt in the park of Sceaux. ‘I have seen it,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘there is a chamber surrounded with looking glasses and hung with white lutestrings, painted with roses. I wish you could see the antiquated Rinaldo who has built himself this romantic bower. Looking glass never reflected so many wrinkles.’

  The old mummy, as they called him at Versailles, was now sixty-two. His military career came to an end with the Convention of Closter Seven; his amorous career went on until he died, at the age of ninety-six. When he was eighty-four he pensioned off an old lady whose chief occupation in life had been finding girls for him and making all arrangements, and settled down with his fourth wife, a pretty young widow. She, worshipping him as much as all his other wives and mistresses, presented him with a son, who died at once, however – greatly to the relief of M. de Fronsac. Richelieu made up his quarrel with Maurepas when that minister was recalled, after twenty-seven years of exile, by Louis XVI; they used to sit together for hours on end at Versailles, which they alone, now, could remember under Louis XIV, regretting the glories of the past, perhaps, even – who knows? – regretting the Marquise herself.

  ‘Poor posterity,’ said Bernis, speaking of the Seven Years’ War, the personalities concerned and the dense atmosphere of intrigue in which it was conducted, ‘what will you understand of all this? What a booby Truth will make of you!’ After Rosbach he had but one idea, which was to make peace as quickly and as honourably as possible. The Prussian party in France, encouraged by two more allied defeats which followed almost at once, began to come out into the open. Pamphlets and memoranda poured from the pen of d’Argenson and found their way to the already discouraged officers at the front. Bernis told Stainville that ‘Les Ormes’ (d’Argenson and Madame d’Estrades) were quite as powerful with the army as the Ministry of War, but he took no steps to silence them. Cleverer in this than Hitler, Frederick had always courted the intellectuals, and from a very small outlay, consisting mostly of flattery, he now reaped rich dividends. The philosophes were on his side, to them he represented freedom of thought as opposed to the bigotry and obscurantism of their own King. He played upon the inborn distrust of all Frenchmen for Austria and the bogey of the Russian bear was invoked, not for the last time in history. Bernis was forever saying that it would be furieusement embarrassant if the Russians began asking for more territory. The French home front was quite as demoralized as the army; people could take no interest in the war and only longed for it to stop. Worst of all, money was short.

  Bernis became abjectly defeatist. Babet la Bouquetière was certainly no statesman. When the Austrian alliance was first proposed to him he was doubtful; then he supported it and actively helped to bring it into effect. At the beginning of the war he was enthusiastic about the alliance, and as soon as things began to go badly he came back to his original doubts, magnified a hundred-fold. ‘I told you so,’ was the burden of his song to the Marquise. He told her other disagreeable things as well. Her enemies, he said, would accuse her of continuing the war in order to give Soubise his revenge. To Stainville he wrote: ‘We have neither generals nor ministers, I find this phrase so true that I am quite willing to include myself in this category …’ ‘I pointed out [to the Marquise] that so far we have lost nothing at sea, that Minorca would more than make up for Louisburg … but that in the long run the English, whose navy is so much stronger, could not fail to take away our colonies. Our allies can never make up to us for such a loss …’ ‘… Our finances are no longer in a state to defray the enormous expenses.’ ‘I tell this to God and all his saints [Madame de Pompadour], we open big sad eyes, but nothing is done.’ Page after page of this stuff went to Stainville in Vienna, copied, of course, by the Austrian secret police and duly read by Maria Theresa. ‘What can be more blind than the courage which impels the Empress to try and defeat her enemy next year? What has she to hope for more than last year? The same men are in the same jobs, the King of Prussia is no different; our generals and ministers will always be inferior to him.’

  He was not far wrong. The war now took a regular course. Every spring Frederick would be attacked on three sides by three armies converging on Berlin; every spring his position would look hopeless, and every summer and autumn, allied disunity, bad generalship and lengthy supply lines fought his battles for him. Besides his own great courage and admirable troops he had two advantages, he was fighting on his home ground with unity of command. But the King and Madame de Pompadour, whose hatred for the Prussians bounded their horizon, refused to listen to the possibly reasonable advice of Bernis; and the Marquise began to see that if the war were to go on he would have to depart. He was obviously losing his nerve.

  The Comte de Clermont, who replaced Richelieu in Hanover, was a Prince of the Blood, brother of M. le Duc, great-grandson of the great Condé and grandson of Louis XIV. Though he had fought in many campaigns under Saxe, who had considered him a good officer, he was an Abbé and enjoyed the rich living of St Germain des Prés. The chorus, led by Richelieu, of jokes, songs and epigrams about his appointment, may be imagined. ‘His bottom is more suited to an armchair than a saddle,’ etc. It would have been more sensible, they said, with some truth, to have appointed the pugnacious Archbishop, Christophe de Beaumont. However, as soon as Monseigneur arrived at the front and had taken a look at the tr
oops he was to command, he got his own back on Richelieu with a crushing indictment. ‘I found Your Majesty’s army divided into three corps. The first is on the ground; it is composed of thieves and marauders … the second is under the ground and the third is in the hospitals.’ The state of these was not very flourishing; those surgeons and nurses who had not deserted were as ill as the patients; filth and famine prevailed. Clermont was obliged to cashier eighty officers on the spot, for being absent without leave and for major offences against the civilian population. A whole regiment of hussars was broken up, and incorporated in other units, for pillage, theft and rape. To such a pass had hopeless generalship reduced the finest army in the world in eight years since the death of Maurice de Saxe. Apart from their demoralization the soldiers were physically in poor shape, worn out with marching on short rations.

  Clermont was incapable of high command; almost immediately he began a series of retreats. Madame de Pompadour wrote to him continually to try and stiffen him up; he soon hated the post bag from Versailles more than any of his other troubles. He crossed the Weser. ‘What can I say, Monseigneur? I am in despair that you should have been obliged to cross the Weser and even more so at the amount of casualties you have had to abandon …’ He crossed the Lippe and arrived at Wesel, having lost Hanover and Hesse as well. ‘I hope your position on the Rhine is strong enough for you to be able to effect the necessary repairs … continue your good work, Monseigneur, and do not be discouraged.’ News arrived at Versailles that he was preparing a further retreat behind the Moselle. The Marquise wrote a frantic letter – the Empress was now in danger of being dethroned, in which case France would be left alone, dishonoured and lost. ‘This, Monseigneur, is an exact picture of our situation. I have no strength left to speak of anything else but my inviolable devotion to you.’ At last the long agony ended in the crushing defeat of Clermont at Crefelt (23 June 1758).

  This battle is chiefly remembered for the death of the Comte de Gisors, only child of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle. M. de Gisors, who was twenty-six, was one of those almost perfect young men who are so often killed in wars; he was truly mourned, by high and low, in Paris, at Versailles, in England and even in Germany: Frederick used to say he could forgive the French a great deal for having produced the Comte de Gisors. (It was he who once wrote from London: ‘Just as Madame de Pompadour shares the absolute power of Louis XV, Lady Yarmouth shares the absolute impotence of George II.’) His short life was saddened by Richelieu’s refusal to give him his daughter, the beautiful Septimanie. She married the Comte d’Egmont, an intensely dreary grandee of Spain. She and Gisors had been too virtuous to ‘find each other in society’, as her cynical old father had predicted; on the contrary they had been at great pains to avoid seeing each other. But their love had never altered. Gisors’ little young wife, daughter of Nivernais, mourned him to the end of her days and refused to marry again. They had no children.

  Everybody thought the blow would kill the Maréchal de Belle-Isle. Madame de Pompadour said that the King must go and see him at once, but he dreaded this visit and tried to put it off. ‘Barbare,’ she declaimed, ‘dont l’orgueil croit le sang d’un sujet trop payé d’un coup d’œil.’ (Proud barbarian, you deem the blood of a subject amply repaid by a glance.) ‘Who wrote that?’ he asked. ‘Voltaire.’ ‘Yes, I see. I suppose I’m the barbarian for having given Voltaire a post and a pension!’ Finally he went in great state, accompanied by the Queen and all the Court, to offer his condolences. He spoke nobly and with feeling to the Marshal, who found comfort in his words. So far from embarrassing the King with any display of grief he was perfectly stoical; he stayed at the Ministry of War, which the King had begged him to do, and buried himself more and more in his work.

  After so much gloom and bad news the Duc d’Aiguillon’s victory at St Cast was very welcome at Versailles. M. d’Aiguillon, a great friend and protégé of Madame de Pompadour, was the governor of Brittany; he had very much wanted to resign this post and go to the war and she had dissuaded him from doing so. In September 1758 he and his Breton volunteers, a sort of Home Guard he had created from such peasants, fishermen, squires and coast-guards as were not in the regular army, defeated a big English raid, a reconnaissance for invasion, at St Cast; three thousand Englishmen were killed and five hundred taken prisoner. D’Aiguillon’s enemies said that he was hiding in a mill during the engagement: ‘If our general did not cover himself with glory, at least he covered himself with flour.’ But d’Aiguillon was not a coward, whatever his other faults, and certainly the Marquise had no such suspicions.

  ‘We sang your Te Deum today,’ she wrote, ‘to my great satisfaction, always having predicted your success. Indeed how could it have been otherwise, with so much zeal, intelligence and so cool a head leading troops who only burned, like their commander, to avenge the King?’ ‘They say the mylords want to try again – I only hope it will be at the same cost to them.’ ‘I count on the good luck of Cavendish.’ Lord Frederick Cavendish, Colonel of the 34th Foot, was taken prisoner at St Cast. Madame de Pompadour always thereafter called d’Aiguillon ‘Cavendish’.

  In 1758, too, Soubise took his revenge for Rosbach at the battles of Sandershausen and Lutzelberg, victories which, like that of Hastenbeck, were won by the unpromotable, because not noble, Chevert. In spite of these encouraging events Bernis went on bleating his despair. ‘I am on the rack.’ ‘My brain is full of blood which keeps rushing to my head.’ ‘If I were capable of dying, or going mad. I should have done both by now.’ ‘Nous avons été trahis de partout.’ The Marquise could hardly bear the sight of his depressing little face. She still believed in the Austrian alliance as much as ever and was determined to prosecute the war; in these circumstances it was no use keeping Bernis. Stainville, able, ambitious, young and energetic, a Lorrainer, heart and soul with the Empire by long family tradition, was the obvious man to step into his shoes. Stainville certainly thought so and did all he could to get into them; after a perusal of Bernis’ long-winded whines to the Vienna embassy, it is difficult to blame him. They must have been unbearably irritating, especially as Stainville knew quite well that the Empress was reading them too, and that her suspicions of her ally were mounting daily. ‘The French, it seems, are only invincible when they are fighting against me.’

  It must be said that, if a politician who has once tasted power ever wishes to leave it, Bernis wished to. The whole thing had become too much for him. What he really wanted was to shelve the responsibility, which kept him awake at night, to surrender Foreign Affairs to somebody else, Stainville for choice, and to stay in the Conseil. At one moment it looked as if all this would be possible.

  The King wrote: ‘I am very sorry, Monsieur l’Abbé-Comte, that my affairs have affected your health so that you can no longer bear the weight of the work. Nobody wants peace more than I do, but it must be a solid peace, not a dishonourable one. I would sacrifice my own interests for it, but not those of my friends.’ He went on to say that he would regretfully allow Bernis to hand over Foreign Affairs to Stainville and told him to advise Stainville and the Empress of this change. To sugar the pill of what was, in fact, his dismissal, a Cardinal’s hat was procured for Bernis by Stainville, who, although Benedict XIV was dead, still had many friends left in Rome. In 1758 Stainville received a dukedom, and he was known hence forward as the Duc de Choiseul. An announcement appeared in the Gazette de France: ‘The health of Cardinal de Bernis, which has, for a long time now, been far from good, has made it impossible for him to continue in the heavy task of Foreign Minister. The King has accepted his resignation and has named the Duc de Choiseul as his successor. The King has kept a place for Cardinal de Bernis in his Conseil …’ Bernis received his biretta with great pomp and ceremony at the hands of the King, who was very nice to him and said he had never made a finer Cardinal. But both he and the Marquise were determined to get him out of the palace.

  The new Cardinal paid visits of state to the Queen, the Dauphin and Dauphine, the Duc de Bo
urgogne, the Duc de Berry, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, aged one; to Madame Infante and her daughter the Infanta Isabelle, to Mesdames Adélaïde, Sophie, Victoire and Louise. Then he left for his apartment in the Palais-Royal; it was six years before he saw Versailles again. The King wrote and told him to go and live in his château at Vic-sur-Aisne, near Soissons. No departing minister had ever been let down so lightly, but still there was no mistaking the fact that he had been dismissed and disgraced. Madame de Pompadour and Choiseul both felt rather guilty about him, and did what they could to lighten his exile, taking immediate steps to see that neither he nor his family should suffer financially. They wanted a bishopric for him, but this would have meant an interview with the King, who said it would embarrass him far too much and that he could not face it; but in 1764 they got his exile revoked, he came back to Versailles for a visit and was then made Archbishop of Albi. After the death of Madame de Pompadour, Choiseul sent him as Ambassador to Rome, where he died in the middle of the French Revolution.