At the end of 1752, the king had made Pompadour a duchesse, which gave her the honors of the tabouret, the right to sit on a special low stool in his presence. However, she would always use the title of marquise. But no matter her rank, Madame de Pompadour still had to watch her back. Occasionally one or two of the king’s young conquests from the Parc-aux-Cerfs were installed at court and swanned about as the beauties of the day. They threatened her ego, although as yet, none had endangered her position as maîtresse en titre. But in 1755, a scheme was set in motion that came within a hair’s-breadth of costing her the king.
The plan was concocted by the marquise’s purported BFF, the plump comtesse d’Estrades. When she came to Versailles a decade earlier, Jeanne-Antoinette had brought along her cousin Charlotte as a companion so that she would not have to navigate the strange, arcane world of the Bourbon court alone. Charlotte d’Estrades was also born a bourgeoise, but had wed into the minor nobility. Somewhere along the line the ambitious, jowl-faced comtesse grew tired of being the perennial sidekick and took a lover—none other than one of Pompadour’s greatest enemies at court, the comte d’Argenson. Madame d’Estrades was equally ambitious for her paramour; she wanted to see him become Louis’ Chief Minister. However, Pompadour, who not only detested d’Argenson but had considerable influence in all government appointments, was in the way. Therefore, the marquise had to be eliminated and supplanted by another maîtresse declarée. Their candidate was another of Madame d’Estrades’s cousins, the married, empty-headed, eighteen-year-old comtesse de Choiseul-Romanet.
The scheming pair of lovers tried to dangle their pretty bait under Louis’ nose and were making some progress. He was certainly attracted. But the little comtesse had been coached not to succumb without conditions: His Majesty had to dismiss Madame de Pompadour forever. While Louis’ loins burned for her, so to speak, he couldn’t bring himself to jettison a decade-long liaison for a night of passion. Pompadour, meanwhile, had to pretend she didn’t know what was going on, as she privately agonized over her future, which seemed to be spiraling out of her control.
One night at Fontainebleau, the king twisted his ankle on a staircase that conveniently led to the teenage comtesse’s bedchamber. Louis hobbled into the room, one thing led to another, and it appeared as though the grand bargain was about to be sealed.
The marquise fretted anxiously in her rooms, consoled by her friend the marquis de Gontaut. Also staying at Fontainebleau, purely by chance, was another member of the Choiseul family, Gontaut’s brother-in-law, the redheaded, pug-nosed comte de Stainville.
When the young comtesse burst forth from her bedroom, somewhat disheveled, clutching a letter and crying, “He loves me! It is done!” and asked her relations what to do next, the cunning comte de Stainville took it upon himself to counsel his kinswoman. He convinced her to hand over the king’s hastily written letter promising to dismiss the marquise and allow him to keep it overnight so he could mull over their course of action. The birdbrained girl complied, and Stainville immediately brought the letter to Madame de Pompadour—who marched straight to her royal lover and confronted him with his own promissory note.
A scene of tears and recriminations followed—after all they’d been through together, how dared the king be so craven that he not tell her to her own face that she was to be dismissed! The bottom line, however, was that Louis XV prized discretion above all else. He was livid that his tootsie was running all over Fontainebleau bragging about her conquest. Within twenty-four hours the comtesse de Choiseul-Romanet and her husband were exiled from court. Pregnant, either in her first trimester at the time of her banishment or as a result of her tryst with His Majesty, the comtesse died in childbirth.
Unfortunately, the two concocters of the scheme to replace the marquise remained firmly entrenched there. But Madame de Pompadour wished to reward the man who had exploded the plot. Louis wanted to banish the comte de Stainville merely for being a member of the Choiseul family, but the marquise suggested that he make him an ambassador instead. The king named Stainville his envoy to the Holy See in Rome. The appointment marked the beginning of a lifelong professional friendship between Madame de Pompadour and the comte—who would eventually be made duc de Choiseul and ambassador to the Austrian court, instrumental in brokering the 1770 marriage between the empress’s youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, and Louis’ grandson and heir, the dauphin Louis Auguste. In time, Choiseul would become Louis’ chief minister and foreign minister, the most powerful man in his government, until he was toppled by the monarch’s last maîtresse en titre, his enemy Madame du Barry.
The Choiseul-Romanet incident made it all the more apparent to the marquise de Pompadour that she should be the one controlling the access to the king’s bedchamber. At least she could vet his visitors first to ensure that they lacked an ulterior motive or were not the tool of another’s political agenda.
In January 1756, she wrote, “Except for the happiness of being with the King, which assuredly makes up for everything else, all the rest is nothing but nastiness and platitudes, in a word, all the worst of which we poor humans are capable.”
A sea change had taken place in her personality after the death of her daughter in 1754. The marquise’s profound depression not only affected her willingness or ability to eat and sleep, but it had forever altered her relationship with the king. She had turned to God and, in an effort to demonstrate her chastity to Him, had the connecting staircase between her apartments and Louis’ bricked up. She also gave up her famous theatrical performances, stopped eating meat on Fridays and Saturdays, began reading religious books, and no longer received the court at her toilette—although she did not go so far as to forswear rouge.
In 1756, it completely shocked the court when in February the king appointed her the thirteenth (there were customarily twelve) supernumerary dame du palais de la Reine, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, considered one of the highest honors at court. The halls buzzed with backstairs gossip. How could the pious Marie Leszczyńska countenance her husband’s whore in her household? But the queen knew that her rival had not warmed the king’s bed for quite some time, and sanctioned the appointment, and Madame de Pompadour took her job seriously.
Primarily from personal motives, the marquise decided to take sides in a religious dispute between two factions, the Jesuits, who had long been the court confessors, and the Jansenists, a conservative sect of Holy Roller types favored by the powerful members of France’s judicial bodies, the Parlements. A tug-of-war between Church and State and Crown grew hideous, with innocent believers being denied last rites and a Christian burial if they had confessed to a Jansenist priest. Madame de Pompadour had never been particularly religious, but decided to support the Church position (pro-Jesuit/anti-Jansenist) in the hope that as a fallen woman she would once again be received into the bosom of the Church. Her confessor, Père de Sacy, advised her to write to her husband, from whom she had received a formal decree of separation soon after she became the king’s mistress, and to plead for a reconciliation, as she might be granted redemption if she returned to her marriage. But Monsieur d’Etioles had a happy life and a new family of his own with his longtime mistress and didn’t want her back. Charles-Guillaume wrote a polite thanks-but-no-thanks letter (coached, it was rumored, by Louis’ cousin, the prince de Soubise). Well, if la Pompadour wasn’t sleeping with the king, nor was there any possibility of resuming relations with her husband, and as she had no desire to enter any other relationship, from her perspective it was as if the slate had been wiped clean. And with Rome now satisfied that she was undesired, and would therefore remain celibate for the rest of her days, Madame de Pompadour could begin to pave the path to heaven.
Or so she thought. Her confessor was not so progressive. Evidently, the Church position was, Once a slut, always a slut, and there was no wiggle room for repentance after all. From this contretemps with her confessor and her rancor against those of his Jesuit bent who would continue to damn her stems the inf
lated (and incorrect) claim that Madame de Pompadour was responsible for Louis’ campaign from 1761 to 1764 to expel the Jesuits.
She was powerful, though, and she approached her zenith in the late 1750s. “Mademoiselle Poisson, dame Le Normand [sic], marquise de Pompadour, was in fact the Prime Minister of the state,” wrote Voltaire.
On May 1, 1756, thanks to some clever buttering up of the marquise by the Empress Maria Theresa’s diplomatic envoys, the First Treaty of Versailles was signed. It obligated France and Austria, who had been enemies for the past 950 years, to aid each other in a time of war, except in case of a conflict between France and her other age-old nemesis, England. This pact, a baby primarily birthed by Pompadour and Choiseul on the French side, would pave the way for the marriage fourteen years later between Marie Antoinette and Louis’ eldest grandson. At the time, France believed the First Treaty of Versailles was merely a defensive strategy. Little did they know that war was about to break out between Maria Theresa and the king of Prussia over a region called Silesia, and that France would be dragged into a lengthy, expensive, and unpopular foreign conflict. Fought between 1756 and 1763 on several fronts, the Seven Years’ War would even cost France her North American colonies. Voltaire quipped that “a few acres of snow” (Canada) weren’t such a great loss, but Louis’ subjects were both livid and disgusted.
Pompadour would forever shoulder the blame, and what was perceived as her malignant political influence on the king would eventually cost him any public relations credit he had amassed during his reign. The only sympathy Louis elicited during the Seven Years’ War came at a high price, and nearly cost him his relationship with the marquise as well.
On January 5, 1757, angry about the high taxes levied on the already overburdened poor in order to fund the war, a deranged and disgruntled unemployed manservant named Robert-François Damiens stabbed the king with the short blade of his penknife while Louis stood in the courtyard of Versailles awaiting his carriage. Piercing his layers of outerwear, the blade plunged three inches into the king’s skin, and he was convinced he was bleeding to death. The royal family rushed to his side, and in the event that he was about to expire, his mistress was banned from his presence. For eleven agonizing days Louis—who was behaving like a hypochondriac, as he was told that he could be on the mend and dancing within the day if he wished it—neither visited the marquise nor sent for her to attend his bedside. But finally, on January 16 (other biographers put the date at January 13, only eight days after the incident), having had enough of his relatives and the toadying courtiers who seemed to count the minutes to Pompadour’s dismissal, he borrowed a cloak from her friend Madame de Brancas and went upstairs to the marquise’s apartments, where he remained for several hours.
When Louis returned, he was in much jollier spirits than he had been in weeks, and everyone was compelled to acknowledge that it was because he had just enjoyed a fabulous chat with his confidante and best friend. The sycophantic courtiers turned on a sou and scuttled back to Madame de Pompadour’s salon to curry favor with her. “She was the god in the Opera who came down in the machine to calm all anxieties,” observed her pal the duc de Choiseul. “She showed pleasure in seeing him, did not reproach him for his silence; she put him at his ease; he was most relieved to find peace instead of a storm of reproaches and from this moment he took up the same habit of going once a day to see her and telling her everything he knew.”
And within twenty-four hours the detestable comte d’Argenson, mastermind of the 1755 plot to replace her with the comtesse de Choiseul-Romanet, found himself stripped of all of his ministerial offices and banished to his provincial estate—a fate worse than death for a French courtier of the day.
Contrary to public opinion, it was Louis who determined government policy, not Madame de Pompadour, but she did often help him implement it, and he took her opinions and suggestions into account in the matter of appointing ministers and even military commanders—which led to disaster when he placed a crony of hers, the prince de Soubise (though also his cousin), in command of one of his armies during the Seven Years’ War. Soubise managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and the marquise was roundly criticized for pressuring the king to appoint him. Rumors continued to spread that the king was weak and ineffectual, guided—or misguided—into a gory sort of glory by his mistress, whose vain head had been turned by the clever empress of Austria.
Understandably, the marquise became stressed out by the disastrous situation in central Europe. She was plagued with health issues: headaches, sore eyes, coughs and colds, and innumerable sleepless nights. For a brief period after Damiens’ attack, Louis had tried to tamp down his overactive libido, as his multiple liaisons with pubescent girls repelled his subjects even more than his long-term affair with the elegant marquise, but his effort didn’t last long. Soon he was turning ever more frequently to his adolescent concubines from the Parc-aux-Cerfs. In the aftermath of Damiens’ gruesome execution on March 28, 1757, the king had grown even gloomier than usual, and the marquise used the occasion as a teachable moment to enlighten him on the climate that produced the would-be assassin.
In 1759, the king became smitten by a raven-haired, statuesque twenty-year-old named Anne Coupier, who went by the name Mademoiselle de Romans. That year, Louis also impregnated Marguerite Sainte-Hainault, one of the girls from the town house in the rue Saint-Médéric. She bore the king a daughter in 1760, the same year the king got seventeen-year-old Lucie d’Estaing with child. Madame de Pompadour, now pushing forty, took more than a passing interest in these fertile royal paramours, but there was never a question that the king’s by-blows would be legitimized or even be taken to reside in the palace. In 1761, Mademoiselle de Romans became pregnant, and Louis began to flaunt his luscious brunette everywhere. The son she bore him on January 13, 1762, was baptized Louis-Aimé de Bourbon, and for the first time, Pompadour worried. Would the king legitimize him? He obviously recognized the boy as his own.
Unable to suppress her curiosity, one day the marquise and the mistress of her household rode out to the Bois de Boulogne, aware that the new mother had a habit of brazenly breast-feeding her bastard in the park. To disguise her features, Madame de Pompadour held a handkerchief to her face and pretended to have a toothache in order to get close to the nursing mother and glimpse her longtime lover’s child—the infant she would have dearly loved to have given him herself.
Louis’ liaison with the bourgeois Mademoiselle de Romans made Pompadour appreciate all the more the precariousness of her position after so many years. Perhaps being the king’s most trusted confidante was no longer enough. More than anything, she wished to stay at court, but what remained between her and Louis seemed a mere shadow of their former romance.
Luckily for the marquise, motherhood had transformed Mademoiselle de Romans into a transparent gold digger, and Louis soon tired of her. He moved on to a less demanding chit, enjoying an even briefer flirtation with a woman from an even lower class.
The maréchale de Mirepoix, one of Pompadour’s friends at court, summed up the king’s attraction to the marquise long after the passion waned and Louis had turned to younger, nubile, and more willing girls to warm his bed. These adolescents could never know his mind. “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.”
In the spring of 1761, plagued with migraines, fevers, and failing eyesight, the marquise de Pompadour began to retire from society. By the time the Seven Years’ War was concluded in 1763, she rarely ventured upstairs to visit Louis, who now entertained his young conquests in his petits appartements above the state rooms, despite the specially constructed “flying chair” that servants drew up the stairs on pulleys because she frequently grew too winded to climb them. It was al
most as painful to acknowledge that she was no longer a part of that milieu.
Although she was only forty-two years old, by the summer of 1763, Madame de Pompadour had been ailing for some time. She was in constant pain; her legs were swollen and her limbs ached, she suffered from shortness of breath, and she had no appetite. Years of micromanaging her royal lover had worn the marquise out, physically as well as emotionally. Her unique role, with its demands of state, of courtesanry, and of intrigue, was all-encompassing and debilitating. Over the year, her condition steadily worsened.
The marquise de La Ferté-Imbault, a frenemy who had disdained to socialize with Jeanne-Antoinette even before the start of her illustrious royal liaison, described their meeting at the beginning of 1764, when she deigned to call on the favorite of two decades:
“I found her beautiful and grave. She seemed in good health, though she complained of insomnia, bad digestion and shortness of breath whenever she had to climb stairs…. She then went on to tell me, with the warmth and feeling of an actress who is good at playing her part, how distressed she was by the deplorable state of the kingdom, the parlement’s rebellion and the things going on up there (pointing to the King’s apartment, with tears in her eyes). She assured me that her staying with the King was a great token of her affection for him; that she would have been a thousand times happier living alone and quietly at Ménars, but that the King would not know what to do if she left him; and in opening her heart to me—which, she said, she could open to no one—she depicted her torments for me with an eloquence and energy that I had never seen in her before…. In sum, she seemed demented and raving, and I never heard a more convincing sermon proving the misfortunes tied to ambition; and at the same time, I saw her in turn so miserable, so insolent, so violently agitated and so uncomfortable with her supreme power that I came away from her, after an hour of conversation, struck by the thought that she had no refuge left but death.”
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 19
