by Will Durant
Amid the festivities word came that a French force, badly supported by its Bavarian allies, had allowed an Austro-Hungarian army to occupy parts of Alsace and Lorraine; Stanislas, never rid of misfortune, had to flee from Lunéville. Louis left Flanders and hurried to Metz, hoping to inspire the defeated army by his presence. But there, as the result of unwonted excitement, varied labors, indigestion, and midsummer heat, he fell seriously sick, and worsened so rapidly that by August 11 he was thought to be in danger of death. His mistress had followed him, and now superintended his care; the bishop of Soissons refused to allow him the last sacrament until the Duchess had been dismissed; Louis yielded and banished her to 150 miles from the court (August 14, 1744). The populace hooted her as she left the city.
Meanwhile Marie Leszczyńska had traveled in haste across France to be at the bedside of her husband; en route her cortege met the carriages of Châteauroux and her party. The King embraced the Queen, and said, “I have caused you much sorrow, which you do not deserve; I beg you to forgive me for it.” She answered, “Do you not know that you never need pardon from me? God alone has been offended.” When the King began to mend she wrote to Mme. de Maurepas that she was “the happiest of mortals.” All France went wild with joy at the King’s recovery and repentance; in Paris the citizens embraced one another in the streets; some embraced the horse of the courier who had brought the good news. A poet called the King “Louis le Bien-Aimé,” Louis the Well Beloved; the nation echoed the phrase. Louis, hearing of it, wondered, “What have I done to make them love me so much?”98 He had served as a father image for his people.
Frederick saved Alsace for France by invading Bohemia; the Austro-Hungarian army left Alsace to rescue Prague. Louis, still weak, joined his army advancing into Germany, and saw it take Freiburg-im-Breisgau. In November he returned to Versailles. He recalled Mme. de Châteauroux to favor, and exiled the bishop of Soissons; but on December 8, after many days of fever and delirium, the mistress died. She was buried at night to spare her corpse the insults of the crowd. Resentful of the clergy, the King avoided the sacraments at Christmas, and waited for another love.
For a time the nation forgot the sins of Le Bien-Aimé in the triumphs of its army, and a German Protestant general was the hero of France. Maurice de Saxe was the son of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. His mother was the Countess Maria Aurora von Königsmarck, distinguished among that monarch’s mistresses for such beauty and wit that Voltaire called her “the most famous woman of two centuries.”99 At eighteen Maurice married Johanna Victoria, Countess von Loeben, whose morals were as wicked as his father’s; he dissipated her fortune, denounced her adulteries, and divorced her (1721). After displaying his courage in many campaigns, he went to Paris to study mathematics; and in 1720 he obtained a commission in the French army. After surviving all the efforts of his ex-wife to have him poisoned, he found a devoted mistress in Adrienne Lecouvreur, then (1721) dominating the Comédie-Française. He left France in 1725 to carve out a kingdom for himself in Kurland (now part of Latvia). The great tragedienne, though suffering deeply the loss of her lover, gave him, toward the expenses of his enterprise, all her silver and jewels, forty thousand livres in all. With this and seven thousand thalers raised by his mother, he went to Kurland, and was elected to the ducal throne (1726). But both Catherine I of Russia and his own father supported the Polish Diet in opposing his accession, and a Polish army drove the otherwise invincible soldier out of Kurland. Returning to Paris (1728), he found that the great actress had waited for him faithfully, hoping now to be his sole love. But he had inherited the morals and instability of his father; he accepted her as merely prima inter pares among his mistresses.
Despicable in morals, using one woman after another without returning their devotion, he became on the battlefield an incomparable genius of strategy, bold in conception, alert to every danger and opportunity. Frederick the Great, his only rival in that age, said of him that he “could give lessons to any general in Europe.”100 In the spring of 1745, having been appointed commander in chief of the French army, he was ordered to the front. He was near death in Paris at the time, exhausted with excesses and suffering agonies from dropsy. Voltaire asked him how, in such a condition, he could think of taking the field. Maurice replied, “Il ne s’agit pas de vivre, mais de partir” (The important point is not to live but to set out).101 On May 11, with 52,000 men, he fought the English and the Dutch, 46,000 strong, at Fontenoy. Louis XV and the Dauphin watched the famous battle from a nearby hill. Maurice, too dropsical to ride a horse, directed the action from a wicker chair. Voltaire tells us, in what may have developed as a patriotic legend,102 that when the hostile masses of infantry came face to face within musket range, Lord Charles Hay, captain of the English Guards, called out, “Gentlemen of the French Guards, give fire,” and that the Comte d’Antroche replied for the French, “Gentlemen, we never fire first; do you begin.”103 Courtesy or stratagem, it was costly; nine officers and 434 foot men were killed, thirty officers and 430 soldiers were wounded, by that first volley;104 the French infantry faltered, turned, and fled. Maurice sent word to the King to withdraw; Louis refused, even when the retreating soldiers reached him; and perhaps his resolution shamed them. Then Maurice mounted a horse, reordered his forces, and let loose upon the enemy the “Maison du Roi,” the household troops of the King. Seeing their King in danger of capture or death, and inspired by the reckless ubiquity of Maréchal de Saxe under fire, the French renewed the battle; nobles and commoners on both sides became heroes in the anesthesia of fury and glory; finally the English fell back in disorder, and Maurice sent word to the King that the bitter engagement had been won. The English and Dutch had lost 7,500 men, the French 7,200. Louis bent his head in shame as the survivors cheered him. “See, my son,” he told the Dauphin, “what a victory costs. Learn to be chary of the blood of your subjects.”105 While the King and his entourage returned to Versailles, Maurice went on to take Ghent, Bruges, Audenaarde, Ostend, Brussels; for a time all Flanders was French.
Frederick canceled the results of Fontenoy by signing a separate peace with Austria (December, 1745); France was left to fight alone on half a dozen fronts from Flanders to Italy. By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) she relinquished Flanders, and had to be content with obtaining the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla for Louis’ new son-in-law, the Infante Don Felipe of Spain. Maurice of Saxony lived on till 1750, loaded with riches, honors, and disease, and finding time, between mistresses, to write some philosophical Rêveries:
What a spectacle is presented today by the nations! We see some men living in leisure, pleasure, and wealth at the expense of the multitude, which can subsist only by providing ever new pleasures for these few. This assemblage of oppressors and oppressed constitutes what we call a society.106
Another of the exalted few dared dream of a kindlier regime. René Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, who for three years (1744–47) served Louis XV as minister of foreign affairs, composed in 1739, but dared not publish, Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (1765). Those who till the land, he wrote, are the most valuable part of the population, and should be freed from all feudal dues and obligations; indeed, the state should lend money to small farmers to help them finance their future crops.107 Trade is vital to a nation’s prosperity and should be freed from all internal tolls, even, wherever possible, from all import or export dues. Nobles are the least precious element in the state; they are incompetent as administrators, and in the economy they are the drones of the hive; they should abdicate. “If anyone should say that these principles favor democracy and look to the destruction of the nobility, he would not be mistaken.” Legislation should aim at the greatest possible equality. The communes should be governed by locally elected officials, but the central and absolute power should reside in a king, for only an absolute monarchy can protect the people from oppression by the strong.108 D’Argenson anticipated the philosophes in hoping for reform throu
gh an enlightened king, and told the nobility what it recognized only on August 4, 1789, when it surrendered its feudal privileges. He was a stage on the way of France to Rousseau and Revolution.
In 1747 Louis yielded to the urging of Noailles, Maurepas, and Pompadour, and dismissed d’Argenson. The Marquis lost his faith in kings. In 1753 he predicted 1789:
The evil resulting from our absolute monarchical government is persuading all France and all Europe that it is the worst of governments.… This opinion advances, rises, grows stronger, and may lead to national revolution.… Everything is preparing the way for civil war.… The minds of men are turning to discontent and disobedience, and everything seems moving toward a great revolution, in both religion and government.109
Or, as the King’s new mistress was to put it, “Après moi le déluge.”
VI. MME. DE POMPADOUR
She was one of the most remarkable women in history, dowered with such beauty and grace as blinded most men to her sins, and yet with such powers of mind that for a brilliant decade she governed France, protected Voltaire, saved Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and led the philosophes to claim her as one of their own. It is difficult to look at Boucher’s portrait of her (in the Wallace Collection) without losing the impartiality of the historian in the infatuation of the man. Was she one of nature’s masterpieces—or just one of Boucher’s?
She was already thirty-eight when he painted her, and her fragile health was failing. He did not debase her with the superficial sensuality of his rosy nudes. Instead he pictured the classic features of her face, the grace of her figure, the artistry of her dress, the smooth delicacy of her hands, the “pompadour” of her light-brown hair. Perhaps he enhanced these charms by his imagination and skill, but even he did not transmit her gay laughter and gentle spirit, much less her subtle and penetrating intelligence, her quiet force of character, the tenacity of her sometimes ruthless will.
She had been beautiful almost from her birth. But she had not chosen her parents well, and she had to struggle throughout her life against aristocratic scorn of her middle-class origin. Her father was a provision merchant, François Poisson, who could never live down his name—Mr. Fish. Accused of malversation, he was sentenced to be hanged; he fled to Hamburg, maneuvered a pardon, and returned to Paris (1741). The mother, a daughter of the entrepreneur des provisions des Invalides, engaged in gallantries while her husband languished in Hamburg; she enjoyed a long liaison with a rich farmer general, Charles François Lenormant de Tournehem, who paid for the education of the pretty girl born to Mme. Poisson in 1721.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson had the best available tutors—Jélyotte, the great baritone, for singing, Crébillon père for elocution; in time she rivaled the stars of the stage in singing, dancing, and acting; “her voice in itself was a seduction.”110 She learned to draw and engrave, and played the harpsichord well enough to win the enthusiastic praise of Mme. de Mailly. When Jeanne was nine an old woman (whom she later rewarded for prescience) predicted that she would someday be “a mistress to the King.”111 At fifteen her beauty and accomplishments were such that her mother called her “un morceau de roi” a morsel for a king, and thought it would be a pity not to make her a queen.112 But the royal tidbit had already begun to cough blood.
When she was twenty M. de Tournehem persuaded her to marry his nephew, Charles Guillaume Lenormant d’Étioles, son of the treasurer of the mint. The husband fell in love with his wife, and displayed her proudly in the salons. At Mme. de Tencin’s she met Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Duclos, Marivaux, and added the art of conversation to her other charms. Soon she herself was entertaining, with Fontenelle, Montesquieu, and Voltaire on her line. She was happy, bore two children, and vowed that “no one in the world but the King himself would make her unfaithful to her husband.”113 What foresight!
Her mother thought that the exception could be arranged. She saw to it that Jeanne should go riding in a handsome phaeton in the Sénart woods, where Louis hunted. Repeatedly he saw her unforgettable face. The royal valets were bribed to praise her beauty to the King. On February 28, 1745, she attended a masked ball given in the Hôtel de Ville for the marriage of the Dauphin. She spoke to the King; he asked her to remove her mask for a moment; she did, and danced away. In April he saw her at a comedy played by an Italian troupe at Versailles. A few days later he sent her an invitation to supper. “Amuse him,” her mother advised. Jeanne amused Louis with surrender. He offered her an apartment at Versailles; she accepted. M. de Tournehem urged the husband to take the matter philosophically: “Do not incur ridicule by growing angry like a bourgeois, or by making a scene.”114 The King made M. d’Étioles a farmer general; he resigned himself to be a tax collector. The mother rejoiced in her daughter’s elevation, and died. In September Jeanne received a handsome property, became the Marquise de Pompadour, and was presented as such to the court and the Queen, whom she mollified with a modest confusion. The Queen forgave her as a necessary evil, and invited her to dinner. The Dauphin, however, called her “Madame Whore.” The court resented the intrusion of a bourgeoise into the King’s bed and purse, and did not fail to notice her occasional relapses into middle-class words and ways. Paris enjoyed epigrams and lampoons about “the King’s grisette.” She suffered her unpopularity in silence until she could consolidate her victory.
Seeing in Louis a god of boredom, to whom, having everything, everything had lost its savor, she made herself the genius of entertainment. She diverted him with dances, comedies, concerts, operas, supper parties, excursions, hunts; and in the intervals she delighted him with her vivacity, her intelligent conversation, and her wit. She set up the “Théâtre des Petits Appartements” at Versailles, and persuaded the court, as in the days of Louis XIV, to take parts on the stage; she herself acted in Molière’s comedies, and so well that the King pronounced her “the most charming woman in France.”115 Soon the nobles competed for roles; the dour Dauphin himself accepted a part opposite “Madame Whore,” and condescended to be courteous to her in the world of make-believe. When the King fell into religious moods she soothed him with religious music, which she sang so entrancingly that he forgot his fear of hell. He became dependent upon her for his interest in life; he ate with her, played, danced, drove, hunted with her, spent nearly every night with her. Within a few years she was physically exhausted.
The court complained that she distracted the King from his duties as a ruler, and that she was a heavy burden on the revenues. She adorned her figure with the most costly costumes and gems. Her boudoir sparkled with toiletware of crystal, silver, and gold. Her rooms were embellished with lacquered or satinwood or buhlwork furniture, and the choicest potteries of Dresden, Sèvres, China, and Japan; they were lighted with stately chandeliers of silver and glass, which were reflected in great mirrors on the walls; the ceilings were painted by Boucher and Vanloo with voluptuous goddesses of love. Feeling imprisoned even amid this luxury, she drew immense sums from the King or the treasury to build or furnish palaces, whose lavish equipment and extensive gardens she excused as required for entertaining majesty. She had an estate and the Maison Crécy at Dreux; she raised the sumptuous Château de Bellevue on the banks of the Seine between Sèvres and Meudon; she put up pretty “hermitages” in the woods of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne. She took over the Hôtel de Pontchartrain as her Paris residence, and then moved to the palace of the Comte d’Évreux in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Altogether the charming lady seems to have spent 36,327,268 livres,116 part of which took the form of art that remained in the possession of France. Her household expenses ran to 33,000 livres per year.117 France condemned her as costing more than a war.
She gathered power as well as wealth. She became the main channel through which appointments, pensions, pardons, and other blessings flowed from the King. She secured gifts, titles, sinecures for her relatives. For her little daughter, Alexandrine, whom she called “Fanfan,” she judged nothing too good; she dreamed of marrying her to a son of Louis XV by
Mme. de Vintimille; but Fanfan died at nine, breaking Pompadour’s heart. Her brother Abel, handsome and well-mannered, earned his own favor with the King, who called him petit-frère, brother-in-law, and often invited him to supper. Pompadour made him Marquis de Marigny, and appointed him directeur général des bâtiments—commissioner of buildings. He performed his functions with such industry and competence that nearly everyone was pleased. Pompadour offered to make him a duke; he refused.
Partly through him, but much more in her own person, she had a pervasive influence upon French—even European—art. She failed in her efforts to be an artist herself, but she loved art with a sincere devotion, and everything that she touched took on beauty. The minor arts smiled bewitchingly under her encouragement. She convinced Louis XV that France could make her own porcelain, instead of importing it from China and Dresden at a cost of 500,000 livres per year. She persevered until the government undertook to finance the porcelain works at Sèvres. Furniture, dinner services, clocks, fans, couches, vases, bottles, boxes, cameos, mirrors, assumed a fragile loveliness to meet her refined and exacting taste; she became the Queen of Rococo.118 Much of her extravagant expenditure went to support painters, sculptors, engravers, cabinetmakers, and architects. She gave commissions to Boucher, Oudry, La Tour, and a hundred other artists. She inspired Vanloo and Chardin to paint scenes of common life, ending the hackneyed repetition of subjects from ancient or medieval legend or history. She bore with smiling tolerance the grumblings and insolence of La Tour when he came to paint her portrait. Her name was given to fans, hairdos, dresses, dishes, sofas, beds, chairs, ribbons, and the “Pompadour rose” of her favored porcelain. Now, rather than under Louis XIV, the influence of France upon European civilization reached its highest point.
