The comte de Maurepas, minister of the navy, was Pompadour’s greatest detractor. He had made it his business to openly despise each of the king’s official mistresses, and his hatred for the marquise’s immediate predecessor, the duchesse de Châteauroux, had been so intense that when she died in 1744 after a very brief illness it was rumored that he had poisoned her.
In eighteenth-century France, the pen could be mightier than the sword, and in the right hands a cruel, if witty, epigram was a dangerous weapon. Such was the method Maurepas undertook to undermine the marquise de Pompadour, although he did not admit the authorship of his destructive verses.
Finally, in 1749, when she read a poem referring to the “riffraff” turning the once-elegant court vulgar—followed by an even more direct insult, a pun on her maiden name (“Isn’t it from the market that fish comes to us?”) the minister’s insolence became too much to bear.
Pompadour had long suspected the comte de Maurepas of circulating the scurrilous verses about her, so she paid him a visit and tried to call his bluff. “When will you find out who is writing these songs?” she demanded.
“When I do so, madame, I shall tell the king,” the comte replied dryly.
She tried to tamp down her agitation. “Monsieur, you show very little respect for the king’s mistresses.”
“On the contrary, madame,” Maurepas replied, “I have always respected them, whatever kind of people they may be.”
The marquise asked Louis to dismiss Maurepas, but for the first time in their relationship, the king denied her something. The two men had a long and storied friendship. Maurepas had served the king since 1715, when he had been made minister of the navy at the age of fourteen.
However, the comte then went too far. He had been present during a supper where Pompadour carried a bouquet of white hyacinth blossoms. Not too long afterward a four-line poem made its way through the corridors of Versailles, obliquely referring to a specific gynecological complaint.
By your manners noble and frank,
Iris, you enchant our hearts;
On our path you spread flowers,
But they are only flowers of white.
Madame de Pompadour suffered from an embarrassing condition called leucorrhea, which left a smelly white vaginal discharge. (As a side note, Catherine of Aragon had the same condition, which repulsed Henry VIII from her bed.) It was euphemistically known as “white flowers,” and it’s possible that the marquise developed it during the birth of her daughter. She also had the misfortune to have suffered at least three miscarriages by this time, and her greatest joy would have been to bear the king a child.
The only one who could have written those humiliating lines was the comte de Maurepas. The public revelation of the royal mistress’s most intimate details was beyond all bounds of propriety. Still, the comte was shocked when, on April 24, 1749, Louis finally dismissed him with a lettre de cachet, exiling him to his country estate of Bourges.
Maurepas’s exile sent a clear message to the court that the king now placed the marquise above everyone else. Even at Compiègne, the hunting lodge where the court spent its summers, Madame de Pompadour held her ritualized toilettes as if it were Versailles. On Tuesdays she received ambassadors as she dressed; a guest was doubly honored if she deigned to speak to him or her. But no matter their rank, even princes of the blood had to maintain a respectful distance from her person while she assiduously applied her makeup, including the costly rouge that denoted the highest-ranking women at court.
In advance of this formal ritual the marquise held a toilette secrète in her boudoir, which was the most exclusive ticket in town. And yet, it was said that despite all the grandeur her demeanor was always gracious, elegant, and dignified.
Beyond the gilded walls of the insulated court, however, unrest was spreading, and the excesses of the king’s mistress formed one of the chief topics of dissent. The Department of Menu Plaisirs, or Small Pleasures, which funded her theater troupe and footed the expenses for many of Pompadour’s extravagances, was said to be costing the people of France 2.5 million livres a year. The royal household spent 25 million livres annually, nearly one-tenth of the entire treasury’s revenue, and a sum higher than the navy’s budget. By the autumn of 1749, the kingdom was rife with complaints that the crown’s myriad building projects were not for the public good, but for the private pleasure of the sovereign and his mistress—intimate pavilions, zoos, and hermitages constructed on the grounds of every royal château, opulently furnished with luxury items to be seen and enjoyed by only a few pairs of eyes.
This was also the year that Louis made the unprecedented decision to bring the marquise when he went to inspect his fleet at Le Havre. Publicly flaunting their extramarital affair was bad enough, but people were shocked to see that Madame de Pompadour received all the honors that the municipal authorities would customarily have accorded the queen. When the royal party stopped for the night in Rouen, the queen’s chaplain forbade the adulterous couple to stay together under his roof; if the king wished to remain, the marquise de Pompadour would have to find separate lodgings. Refusing to be sundered from his lover, Louis elected to seek other accommodations.
The king shouldered the blame for openly parading his mistress about the country and behaving as though Madame de Pompadour were the queen of France. She was already acting like the uncrowned consort, modeling both her public and private toilettes after those held by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan. She even took Montespan’s former box at the theater and her pew in the royal chapel—a tacit public declaration that she was the next Athénaïs. And now when Pompadour spoke to courtiers, she used the word “us” to refer to herself and the king, a constant reminder that they were an established couple in the manner of spouses.
Before long it was clear, at least at court, that there were two queens of France gliding through the gilded halls of Versailles, but Marie Leszczyńska, although she wore the crown, was not the one who reigned. Louis would ascend the secret staircase to Pompadour’s rooms at all hours, unannounced, to converse with her, whether it was to share a confidence or an anecdote. By now he scarcely dared to visit Paris, the perennial cauldron of malaise and discontent, so great was his subjects’ disgust with his morals and his governance.
Times were changing—intellectually, socially, and religiously.
Louis, superstitious, yet a serial adulterer, had no intentions of altering his lifestyle. Although he routinely attended Mass, his refusal to take the sacraments led to the widespread view among his subjects that he was an unfit ruler who had tarnished the monarchy with his sinful ways.
Ironically, around the same time, Madame de Pompadour was becoming sexually frigid. Louis “thinks me very cold,” she once admitted to Madame Du Hausset, her lady of the bedchamber. “[C]old as un macreuse” (a type of cold-blooded game bird), in the king’s own words. She once tearfully confided in the sympathetic duchesse de Brancas, “I’m afraid of losing the King’s heart by ceasing to be appealing to him. Men, as you know, value certain things enormously and I have the misfortune of having a very cold temperament. I wanted to follow a diet that would warm me up to make up for this failing; and for two days this elixir has been doing me some good, or at least I think it has.” To boost her libido, for some time the marquise de Pompadour had been availing herself of every popular aphrodisiac, from celery soup, crayfish, truffles, and drinking chocolate flavored with ambergris, to triple shots of vanilla extract. For the most part they succeeded only in making her sick to her stomach.
Appalled, the duchesse told her the wacky regimen would sooner kill her than transform her into a wanton, and insisted that she swear off the quack remedies. The marquise reiterated what she had told Madame Du Hausset—that she adored the king and wanted to be attractive for him, yet she knew Louis found her to be cold and sexually passive—but “I would sacrifice my life to please him,” she averred.
Madame de Pompadour had never been a carnal creature, relying more on
her powers of intellect and artistic talent, her art of conversation, and her exceptional skills as a raconteuse. In fact, she found the physical act of lovemaking somewhat uncomfortable, and perhaps even embarrassing, due to her chronic vaginal discharges. Yet she could entertain, amuse, and listen. She could keep a secret. And she had attained her desire to become indispensable to Louis. If she rarely was his bedfellow or paramour these days, she undoubtedly remained his confidante, his sounding board, and minister without portfolio.
“She sells everything, even regiments. The king is increasingly governed by her…. She arranges, she decides, she behaves as though the king’s ministers were hers…more than ever she is the First Minister,” grumbled the comte d’Argenson. “The ministers tell her ahead of time whatever they have to say to the King. He himself wants it that way.” But Count von Kaunitz, by then the Austrian ambassador, noted that “[S]he has a quality that makes her highly qualified for government; she is capable of impenetrable secrecy. This is how she acquires the King’s trust, so much that as soon as something happens, he has the need to tell her every important thing that’s been said to him.”
In the autumn of 1749 Louis ruffled a lot of feathers at Versailles by moving Madame de Pompadour into a premium ground-floor apartment. These rooms with views of the inner courtyard as well as the flower beds and parterres had been the purview of the king’s eldest (and only married) daughter when she visited from her duchy of Parma. They boasted lodgings for the marquise’s doctor and lady of the bedchamber, as well as a bathroom, wardrobe room, and two studies. The rumor mill began to churn. Why such a déménage from her cozy aerie above the king’s own apartments? Was the royal mistress gaining favor or losing it?
The marquise had first captivated Louis in 1745 through her scintillating beauty and charm, and for five years she held him with her talents as a cultivated woman of the world. But as her libido waned she recognized the vital importance of maintaining her position as his maîtresse en titre. It was imperative to redefine her role without missing a beat—and she took a huge risk in doing so, for Louis was ruled by his loins. She decided to become the royal best friend.
By the end of 1750, the rumors of a change in the wind were already making their way through the halls and labyrinthine passages of Versailles. The comte d’Argenson, avidly awaiting her fall, crowed, “They say on all sides, those who know her best, that there is hardly any plaisir d’amour between her and her Royal lover anymore.” Still, the comte had to concede, “Let us assume that passion is no longer the knot of her ascendancy over him. There remains only: habit, which is very powerful in men as gentle and honorable as the King: the superintendence of his amusements and the careful attention to forestall his moments of boredom; and trust, the habit of soothing his heart and soul. It is by these means that she has arrived at governing the affairs of the State….”
To immortalize Louis and Jeanne-Antoinette’s Royal Romance 2.0 she commissioned a pair of allegorical marble statues, one of which was titled Friendship, in which her likeness appears as a neoclassical nymph, half-clad from the waist up. With her right hand on her bosom and her left one extended in an open gesture to the viewer, the figure offers her heart in a gesture of welcome and sincerity. At the start of their liaison her role model had been the Sun King’s famous mistress Madame de Montespan. Now she endeavored to emulate his last great mistress and secret morganatic wife, Madame de Maintenon.
But would friendship be enough to hold her Louis? The year 1751 marked Pope Benedict XIV’s Jubilee, and in celebration His Holiness was offering a plenary indulgence to anyone who engaged in a certain number of devotional exercises. The pope was also offering Catholics forgiveness for their sins in exchange for contributions to the Church.
The comte d’Argenson wondered whether the king, who hadn’t taken the sacrament since 1744, when he thought he was dying, would hop on the holy bandwagon, and if so, would his nemesis the marquise be given her walking papers? “Madame de Pompadour has had some fits of fever. This is what they call Jubilee fever, because the proximity of the Jubilee puts her into a great state of anxiety…. If the King decided to return to sincere religious practice, a strict confessor could demand that the marquise be considered as complicit in his adultery and should be publicly sent away.”
But the Jubilee came and went and the king remained a sinner, which meant that the marquise retained her job security. But the effort was costing her, both physically and emotionally. “We are so often on the road that I have given up hunting…. I need some time to think,” she wrote at the end of the year. Ten months later, in October 1752, she wrote, “I have just had a fever for ten days…[have been] bled, and have had a terrible headache…. I am overcome with visits, with letters, and still have sixty more letters to write.” Her life looked glamorous on the surface, but she was beginning to find it drudgery. In yet another letter she lamented, “The life I lead is terrible. I scarcely have a minute of my own: rehearsals and performances, and twice a week a trip…. Indispensable and considerable duties…” She was only thirty-one-years old.
Madame de Pompadour endeavored to divert the king from the boudoir by involving him in their shared passion of building, but this time she was taking the long view, determined that he should leave France a legacy beyond a few pretty pavilions. She encouraged him to establish the École Militaire, a cadet school for the sons of impoverished noblemen. Her prescience was commendable. In time the École Militaire markedly improved the quality of the French army. Its most notorious graduate was an ambitious, hotheaded Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte.
Also at his mistress’s instigation, Louis decided to patronize the porcelain manufacturers at Sèvres, creating an industry to rival their counterparts in China, and in Saxony, where Meissen ware was made. At the Manufacture Royale, France’s finest artists, including François Boucher, were enlisted to create images that could be reproduced on porcelain objects such as plates or vases. Because the items were so costly, the sovereign himself, with his paramour in tow, became shills for the new company. Once a year they transformed Versailles’ opulent Hall of Mirrors into a showroom where the thousands of courtiers who made the palace their residence could ogle the latest merchandise, which was all for sale. “At the king’s suppers, the marquise says it’s unpatriotic not to buy it, as long as one has the money,” sneered the comte d’Argenson. Soon, owning a piece of Sèvres became a badge of good taste and refinement.
Taste and refinement, however, would hardly be the phrase one would apply to a parallel venture. By 1753, Madame de Pompadour was dancing as fast as she could to devise divertissements to please the king. The Austrian ambassador Count von Kaunitz noticed that Louis was often rude or cutting to her. “It requires more skill than one might think to feign being madly in love without making oneself ill,” he observed.
At 4 rue Saint-Médéric, a modest and unassuming villa in Versailles, nicknamed the Parc-aux-Cerfs, or Stag Park, resided a series of pubescent girls. They had been brought to the house as virgins to ensure that they would be free of venereal disease, and their exclusive role was to carnally entertain Louis XV. They were told that he was a visiting Polish nobleman. If they surmised his true identity, they were not to breathe a word of it or they were summarily dismissed from their horizontal employment. Royal accidents were usually farmed out to strangers. Their mothers were told the children were dead. Sometimes the king would visit a girl at the Parc-aux-Cerfs. Other times she would be conducted to the apartment belonging to Louis’ valet Lebel within the Château de Versailles—ironically situated adjacent to the royal chapel—and left to wait in a room nicknamed le trébuchet: “the bird trap.”
The marquise de Pompadour has, over the centuries, mistakenly been identified as a pimp or bawd. But she had nothing to do with the Parc-aux-Cerfs. She did not recruit the girls, nor place them in Louis’ bed. At best, she was an enabler for tacitly accepting their existence. And once again, she took the long view. “It is his heart I want! All these little gi
rls with no education will not take it from me. I would not be so calm, if I saw some pretty woman of the court or the capital trying to conquer it.”
Her own heart would be sorely tested when, in mid-June 1754, her ten-year-old daughter, Alexandrine, fell ill at the convent where she was being educated, and died, most probably of an attack of acute peritonitis. Ten days later, François Poisson expired, overcome with grief at the loss of his beloved granddaughter “FanFan,” to whom he had been very close after her maman departed for the king’s arms.
Devastated that she had been unable to rush to her daughter’s side when the end was near, because the king needed her at Choisy, the marquise became inconsolable. But while she grieved she learned that one of her adolescent rivals from the Parc-aux-Cerfs, Mary-Louise O’Murphy, known to the courtiers as “la belle Morphise,” had given birth to a daughter who was baptized at the end of June. Of all the young girls who pleasured the French king during the era of the Parc-aux-Cerfs, “Morphise” is undoubtedly the most famous, as she is commonly believed to be the nude odalisque depicted derriere up, in a well-known painting by François Boucher.
The loss of Pompadour’s own daughter made the anguish all the greater. Yet she dared not permit herself much time to mourn. If she became reclusive she risked being supplanted by the new mother, or by some other nubile beauty. So jealous was the marquise of “Morphise” that when she recognized the girl’s features on a painting she had commissioned for the altarpiece at Crécy—in the persona of the Virgin, no less—she ordered the completed canvas to be removed from the church. “Morphise” herself was eventually banished from court when she blew the king’s cover by asking him, ostensibly coached by a friend, how he was getting on with his “vieille cocotte”—his old flirt—a pointed reference to Pompadour. She was married off to an army officer on November 27, 1755, and walked away from court with a dowry of two hundred thousand livres and an opulent trousseau.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 18
