All this time her active brain was ever planning for higher honors and greater power. She aspired to becoming dame de palais, but as an excommunicated soul, a woman living in flagrant violation of the laws of morality and separated from her husband, she could not receive absolution from the Church, in spite of her intriguing to that effect. She did succeed, however, in influencing the king to make her lady of honor to the queen; therefore, in gorgeous robes, she was ever afterward present at all court functions.
She began to patronize the great men of the day, to make of them her debtors, pension them, lodge them in the Palais d'Etat, secure them from prison, and to place them in the Academy. Voltaire became her favorite, and she made of him an Academician, historiographer of France, ordinary gentleman of the chamber, with permission to sell his charge and to retain the title and privileges. For these favors he thanked her in the following poem:
"Ainsi donc vous réunissez
Tous les arts, tous les goûts, tous les talents de plaire;
Pompadour vous embellissez
La Cour, le Parnasse et Cythère,
Charme de tous les cœurs, trésor d'un seul mortel,
Qu'un sort si beau soit éternel!"
[Thus you unite all the arts, all the tastes, all the talents, of pleasing; Pompadour, you embellish the court, Parnassus, and Cythera. Charm of all hearts, treasure of one mortal, may a lot so beautiful be eternal!]
Voltaire dedicated his Tancrède to her; in fact, his influence and favor were so great that he was about to receive an invitation to the petits soupers of the king, when the nobility rose up in arms against him, and, as Louis XV. disliked him, the coveted honor was never attained. To Crébillon, who had given her elocution lessons in her early days and who was now in want, she gave a pension of a hundred louis and quarters at the Louvre. Buffon, Montesquieu, Marmontel, and many other men of note were taken under her protection.