But if, at the beginning, Madame de Pompadour’s only rival was a ghost, the field was soon teeming with women of flesh and blood. These rivals became more alarming when, after seven or eight years as royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour’s dewy beauty had faded and her increasing frigidity prevented her from having sexual relations with the king. She continued to meet the king’s every other need and subcontracted the sexual services to others by establishing a tiny bordello called Le Parc aux Cerfs on the edge of Versailles. Here one or two teenagers at a time—taken from the gutters and scrubbed with soap and water—would be ready to receive the king.
“All these little uneducated girls would never take him from me,” she said of the Parc aux Cerfs girls.25 But her greatest fear was being supplanted by a worthy rival. Madame de Pompadour once told her maid that she was engaged in “perpetual warfare”—like a weary gladiator in the ring, fighting off an unceasing stream of challengers, forced to thrust and parry until her dying day.26 Her fear of rivals caused her to paint over her pallor and leave her sickbed countless times during her nineteen years as maîtresse-en-titre. For Louis XV had little patience with illness, and Madame de Pompadour worried he might turn to another woman to lift his spirits if she allowed herself a long recuperation.
Should the king die or dismiss her, Madame de Pompadour kept as her refuge a sumptuous Paris mansion—which currently serves as home of the president of France. She would have loved to relax there a few weeks each year, outside the “tissue of malice.”27 But she rarely visited it for fear of leaving the king alone. And with good reason. Younger, prettier candidates popped up like mushrooms in the king’s path. One ambitious rival caused Madame de Pompadour particular concern. Marie-Anne de Coislin was a cousin of the Mailly family, and Madame de Pompadour well knew that the king had an irresistible fascination for Mailly women.
One evening Madame de Pompadour returned to her Versailles apartments and, throwing down her muff, told her lady’s maid, Madame du Hausset, “I never saw such insolence as that of Madame de Coislin. I was at the same table as her for a game of brelan this evening; and you can’t imagine what I suffered. The men and women seemed to take turns looking us over. Once or twice Madame de Coislin looked at me and said, ‘I take the lot!’ in the most insulting manner. And I thought I would faint when she said triumphantly, ‘I have a hand full of kings.’ I wish you could have seen her curtsey when she left me.”28
Madame du Hausset asked, “And the King, did he greet her warmly?” Madame de Pompadour replied, “You don’t know him, my dear. If he was going to move her into my apartment tonight, he would treat her coldly in public and be extremely friendly with me.”29
But Madame de Coislin made a strategic error. According to Madame de Pompadour’s friend, the writer Charles Duclos, “she could have succeeded but instead of leading her lover by degrees to the final conquest, which would have meant the downfall of her rival, instead of inviting his desires by withholding herself, she surrendered so quickly that she extinguished the desires of the King; she gave herself like a whore, and was taken and abandoned like a whore.”30
One of Madame de Pompadour’s best advisers was Madame de Mirapoix, who told her, “It is your staircase that the King loves; he has grown accustomed to going up and down it. But if he found another woman to whom he could talk of hunting and business, it would all be the same to him after three days.”31
Madame de Pompadour—who had moved into the grand Versailles apartments used by Madame de Montespan eighty years earlier—studied the lives of Louis XIV’s mistresses, seeking to learn lessons from their triumphs and failures. “Madame de La Vallière allowed herself to be duped by Madame de Montespan,” she told her lady’s maid, “but it was her own fault, or rather, the product of her good nature. Initially, she had no inkling because she could not believe in her friend’s treachery. Madame de Montespan was dislodged by Madame de Fontanges and supplanted by Madame de Maintenon; but her haughtiness and capriciousness had alienated the King.”32
Despite Madame de Pompadour’s knowledge that Louise de La Vallière had been duped into losing Louis XIV by her best friend, her closest call to losing Louis XV was orchestrated by her own cousin. Madame d’Estrades was a witty but ungainly woman who owed her position at court to Madame de Pompadour’s friendship and generosity. Madame d’Estrades was appointed lady-in-waiting to the king’s daughter and wormed her way into Louis’s affection as an amusing friend. She tried to seduce him, but as Louis could only be seduced by beauty, her attempt fell flat. Her cousin’s success continued to eat away at her, and she devised a new plan to unseat Madame de Pompadour.
Madame d’Estrades brought her beautiful nineteen-year-old niece Charlotte-Rosalie de Choiseul-Romanet to court. Madame de Pompadour arranged the girl’s brilliant marriage and obtained a plum position for her as supernumerary lady-in-waiting to the king’s daughters. The girl’s aunt pumped up her aspirations of replacing the rather worn Madame de Pompadour and winning for herself riches, power, and glory.
Madame d’Estrades would invite her niece to play cards in Madame de Pompadour’s apartments during her intimate evenings with the king and a few friends. Madame de Pompadour’s friends pointed out uneasily that the young woman seemed hell-bent on seducing Louis, but in this case she naively refused to suspect that sweet, pretty Charlotte-Rosalie could be so under-handed. As the months passed, Madame de Pompadour continued inviting the girl to events where the king would be present.
Gradually Louis became more interested in the flirtatious bride and made several secret appointments with her, during which she steadfastly refused to have sex with him. Madame d’Estrades and her lover the comte d’Argenson had coached Charlotte-Rosalie to refuse the king’s advances until she was assured of becoming his maîtresse-en titre—and ousting Madame de Pompadour. One day as Madame d’Estrades and d’Argenson sat together, Charlotte-Rosalie rushed in quite disheveled, having evidently just been ravished by the king. She cried, “It has happened. He loves me, he is happy, and she is to be dismissed. He gave me his word.”33 She had even obtained a letter from the king promising to get rid of Madame de Pompadour.
The silly girl, proud of her great accomplishment, showed her letter triumphantly to her cousin the comte de Stainville. The count, though no friend of Madame de Pompadour’s, cleverly decided to win the eternal gratitude of so powerful a woman. He convinced Charlotte-Rosalie to allow him to keep the letter a few hours, then visited Madame de Pompadour immediately. He informed her that his cousin was too immature to fill so important a position, one for which Madame de Pompadour was so eminently suited. He gave her the letter and politely departed.
For once Madame de Pompadour vented her rage at her royal lover. When Louis visited her that evening, she showed him the letter and—for the only time in their relationship—threw a shocking temper tantrum. The king, horrified that the indiscreet Charlotte-Rosalie had let his passionate letter out of her possession, agreed to banish her from court that very night. Seven months later she died after giving birth. She was twenty-one.
By way of an apology, a few days later he raised Madame de Pompadour’s status from that of marquise to duchess. When she was officially presented to the king and queen as duchess, she made her venomous cousin Madame d’Estrades witness her triumph and later banished her from court. Comte de Stainville had bet on the winning horse; although the king could not bear to see his face—a reminder of the painful episode—Madame de Pompadour had him appointed ambassador to the Vatican and he later became foreign minister of France.
Sometimes the Parc aux Cerfs girls, hired to keep serious rivals from bothering Madame de Pompadour, made trouble themselves. One such girl, the nubile fourteen-year-old Louise O’Murphy, was being coached by Madame de Pompadour’s enemies. One evening Louise asked Louis how things were between him and his “old woman,” referring to Madame de Pompadour.34 The king was shocked, and his “old woman” quickly had Louise married off with a large dowry, shortly before she gave bi
rth to a royal bastard.
After this episode the king visited Le Parc aux Cerfs incognito as a Polish nobleman. But one girl searched through her lover’s pockets as he lay sleeping and discovered that he was not a Polish nobleman but the king of France himself. Throwing herself at his feet she proclaimed her undying love for him. This poor girl was taken to an insane asylum—a surefire method of invalidating whatever stories she might relate about the king—and after a suitable period of incarceration married off in the country.
Another girl, a stunning prostitute displayed by Paris’s premier pimp, was seeking to ensnare the king with her sexual talents and hoped for far more than a stint at Le Parc aux Cerfs. The king’s valet and procurer, Lebel, a true friend of Madame de Pompadour’s, informed Louis that the girl was eaten up by venereal disease, putting an immediate end to her chances.
When Louis was clearly in love with the beautiful Mademoiselle de Romans, Madame de Pompadour again feared for her position. But she truly trembled when she learned that her rival was pregnant. Mademoiselle de Romans, quite sure that by means of her pregnancy she would oust Madame de Pompadour, took to bragging openly. The king, horrified at the noise she made, had her house searched and seized his love letters to her—proof that he had fathered her child.
Mademoiselle de Romans, certain her child would become a powerful duke, would often carry him in a basket to the Bois de Boulogne, sit down on the grass in her rich lace, and nurse him. Watching the king’s former mistress nurse a royal bastard soon became a Parisian pastime. One day Madame de Pompadour took her maid to see the young woman and her child. So that Mademoiselle de Romans would not recognize her, she pulled her bonnet down over her eyes and held a handkerchief to her jaw as if she had a toothache.
It was a sad scene: the aging mistress, who had suffered so many miscarriages in her efforts to give Louis a child, watching the young mother, her raven hair confined by a diamond comb, nursing the king’s baby. Madame de Pompadour and her maid exchanged some pleasantries and commented on the beauty of the infant before scurrying away. She seemed deeply distressed by the visit.
Toward the end of her life, Madame de Pompadour appeared to be giving up the struggle against rivals. The price of constant vigilance was poor health. In 1763, a year before her death at the age of forty-two, she retired twice from court for brief periods of rest, something she had never done in her eighteen years with the king.
Political Rivals
While most rivals hoping to supplant a royal mistress were ambitious individuals seeking financial rewards, some were candidates backed by powerful political coalitions bent on placing a malleable woman in the bed of power.
One mistress who ultimately lost to a political coalition was Madame Cosel, mistress of Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. This lady of towering powdered white curls and unblinking black eyes held on to her position by paying a bevy of spies to inform her of his every move. In the end, however, she was no match for a coalition of the king’s ministers.
Madame Cosel stuck to Augustus like glue almost twenty-four hours a day, except when he protested that he must meet alone with advisers to deal with matters of state. These meetings always made her extremely nervous, and with good reason. They were usually excuses to have sex with other women. So watchful was Madame Cosel that, heavily pregnant, she insisted on going into battle with him against the Swedes. But this time the king prevailed and sent her back to the safety of Dresden, though much against her will.
According to Augustus’s biographer Karl von Pöllnitz, when Madame Cosel discovered that the king had profited by her absence by having an affair with a wine merchant’s daughter in Warsaw, she thundered, “I am resolved not to undergo the fate of your other mistresses. I have for your sake quitted a husband, lost my reputation, and done all this, because you promised me upon oath an everlasting fidelity. I will not suffer your abuses, except your life pays for them. I am resolved to break your head with a pistol, and then to make use of it upon myself, as a punishment for my folly in loving you.”35
Another unfortunate scene occurred as she was recuperating from childbirth at Augustus’s court in Dresden. A note was passed to the king as he sat at Madame Cosel’s bedside along with his secretary of state, Mr. Caspar Bose. He read it and turned bright red. His mistress was so curious to read the missive that when she jumped out of bed, according to the report, “she showed the King and Mr. Bose on that occasion what no modest woman would have shown her husband without many persuasions.”36
Grabbing the letter, Madame Cosel found it was from Henrietta, the wine merchant’s daughter in Warsaw. Worse, it informed the king that she had given birth to his daughter. Madame Cosel went into a purple rage, crying, “Let her drown it! And would to God it was in my power to drown the mother too!”37 Augustus laughed, but Madame Cosel informed him that if he answered the letter or acknowledged the child, she would, still bleeding from childbirth, take the next stage coach to Warsaw to strangle both mother and child.
Madame Cosel’s bad temper was aimed not only at rivals for the king’s love, but at courtiers and officials as well, and worse, she meddled in political affairs. After suffering nine years of her tyranny, in 1713 a coalition of ministers decided she had to be replaced with a more compliant mistress. When Madame Cosel was again heavily pregnant at Dresden and the king was required to ride to Warsaw, his advisers used this opportunity to find him another mistress. They held a meeting, discussing all the possible candidates at the court of Warsaw. They finally settled on Countess Maria Magdalena von Denhoff because “she is sufficiently amiable to be capable of pleasing, but her mind is not so exalted as to be able to rule.”38
The new mistress having been chosen, the cabal had only to make the king and countess fall into each other’s arms. They first went to work on Madame Denhoff, using her mother to counter any qualms she might have about betraying her husband to become a royal mistress. Fortunately, Madame Denhoff readily agreed to the plan.
The cabal knew the king would be more difficult. “A brisk and lively disposition could only captivate him,” wrote his biographer, “and this was the chief quality Madame Denhoff was deficient in, who with a dull, heavy air affected the modesty of a virgin, which was directly opposite to the character the King required of his mistresses.” The advisers “were sensible that she would not suit their monarch’s fancy, but knew no lady at Court more proper to propose to him.”39
Augustus expressed a hearty interest at seeing the beauty so lauded by his friends but was predictably disappointed at their first meeting. He “liked not her dancing” and “his heart could not yet be affected by her beauty.” By this time he had figured out that his ministers wanted him to take a new mistress. He told one, “I am to be forced to love but till they find me a better than Madame Denhoff, I doubt whether I shall be unfaithful to Madame Cosel.”40
Undaunted, the king’s advisers threw him so often into the company of Madame Denhoff—who cast him “tender and languishing looks”—that slowly his heart became “enslaved.”41 But back in Dresden, Madame Cosel’s spies informed her of her rival. No sooner had she dropped a son than she got in a carriage to Warsaw to confront her faithless lover. Madame Denhoff’s supporters, hearing that the imperious mistress was on her way to foil their carefully laid plans, decided her arrival in Warsaw must be prevented at all costs. They quickly advised Madame Denhoff to create a scene that evening, pretending to be afraid for her life if Madame Cosel arrived in Warsaw.
Shedding a great many crocodile tears, Madame Denhoff told Augustus she would leave town rather than face her violent rival. Accordingly, the king gave orders to prevent Madame Cosel from entering the town. True to her reputation, when Madame Cosel was approaching Warsaw and given the message that she must turn back on the king’s orders, she took out a pistol and threatened to shoot the messenger if he tried to prevent her from going ahead. She was finally persuaded to go home rather than risk the royal displeasure, and instead seek to win b
ack the king’s love upon his return to Dresden.
But the political cabal made sure that reconciliation was impossible. The king allowed his former mistress to live in luxurious retirement, giving her Pillnitz Palace. But Madame Cosel was not one to live peacefully. After political intrigues against Augustus, she fled to Berlin, where the king of Prussia seized her and returned her to Saxony. Augustus, finally realizing she would always stir up trouble, locked her in a fortress despite her shrill cries for clemency. There she remained even after his death in 1733, until her own death in 1765, after forty-nine years of genteel imprisonment.
Friendly Rivalry
Sprightly Nell Gwynn, a comic actress born and bred in the London gutters, maintained her place in the harem of Charles II for nearly two decades despite bitter rivalry from duchesses and countesses. In 1667 seventeen-year-old Nell graduated from selling oranges in the theater pit to performing leading parts on stage. Shortly thereafter, she received her first invitation to Whitehall Palace to entertain at royal parties. The French ambassador reported to Louis XIV that Charles laughed to see her “buffooneries.”42
Though we can assume she began sleeping with the king around this time, she was not given a full-time position as royal mistress with its honors and financial rewards. Whatever remuneration Charles gave her was little enough, as Nell didn’t quit the stage for nearly three years. After she had given the king a son in 1670, Nell went back to the theater in protest. She wanted all her fans to know how shabbily Charles was treating her in comparison with his higher-born mistresses. Her ploy worked. After Charles moved her into a modest town house, bought her furniture, and agreed to pay for her living expenses, she retired from the stage.
Sex with Kings Page 13
