Ne pourrai-je me consoler
Et voir Venus à sa toilette?”[34]
The King began to be bored by these incessant spectacles. He decided that there should be no more comedies, ballets, music, and dancing at Versailles, and that hereafter the representations should take place at the Château of Bellevue. The stage of this château was very small, and did not admit of a brilliant mise en scène. The number of spectators had to be greatly restricted. Accustomed to a real theatre, splendid decorations, and a numerous audience, the actors and actresses no longer showed the same enthusiasm. The hour of decadence had come. However, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Devin du Village was very successfully played in 1753. Madame de Pompadour took the part of Colette. The next day she sent fifty louis to Jean Jacques, who thanked her in the following letter:—
“Paris, March 7, 1753.—Madame: In accepting this present, which has been sent me by you, I believe I have testified my respect for the hand from which it came, and I venture to add that of the two proofs you have made of my moderation, interest is not the most dangerous. I am with respect, etc.”
The Devin du Village was the Swan Song. Madame de Pompadour no longer pleased Louis XV. as an actress. Hence she closed the Bellevue theatre, and her ambition became, if not to amuse, at least to interest, as a political woman, the master whose mistress she was said to be.
V
THE GRANDEURS OF THE MARQUISE DE POMPADOUR
Louis XV. had made his mistress what one might call a vice-queen. She had the power, luxury, riches, and adulations of royalty; everything, in fact, except its moral prestige. Surrounded by a court of ministers, prelates, and nobles, she throned it in the midst of pomp and opulence. She was the type of the woman à la mode, elegant, coquettish, absolute, always on show, insatiable for praise and success, thirsting for dignities, pleasures, and money; playing not merely the great lady, but the sovereign, having her courtiers, her creatures, her poets, reigning alike over the King and the kingdom.
M. Arsène Houssaye has said with justice: “Louis XV. had three prime ministers: Cardinal Fleury, the Duke de Choiseul, the Marquise de Pompadour.” But the Marquise was not an ordinary prime minister; she was a prime minister doubled with a mistress. To a woman invested with this exaggerated rôle, a display of power was necessary. The favorite set herself to create around her a sort of decorum, etiquette, and factitious grandeur. Like little women who wear enormously high heels, she made herself a pedestal. Madame d’Étioles had disappeared; nothing remained but the Marquise de Pompadour. To be a marchioness did not satisfy her, and she demanded and obtained the tabouret and the honors of a duchess. She had a box at the court theatre with a grating behind which she shut herself up tête-à-tête with the King. In the chapel a gallery in the grand tribune was reserved for her and her suite. People waited on her stairway at the hour of her toilette just as they await a ministerial audience in an ante-chamber. She used to say to the ministers: “Continue; I am satisfied with you,” and to the foreign ambassadors: “Observe that on Tuesdays the King cannot see you, gentlemen, for I think you will hardly follow us to Compiègne.”
One of the cabinets in her apartment was full of petitions. Solicitors approached her with respectful fear. The ducal mantle and velvet cap figured on the panels of her carriages. A nobleman carried her mantle and awaited her coming in the ante-chamber. A man of illustrious birth, a Chevalier d’Hénen, of the family of the Princes de Chimay, rode at her carriage door as equerry. She was served at table by a Chevalier of Saint Louis, her steward Colin, a napkin under his arm. Her chambermaid was a woman of quality, Madame du Hausset, who has left such curious Memoirs. The all-powerful favorite had not forgotten her family. Her father was ennobled in 1747. Her brother, Abel Poisson, became successively Marquis de Vandières, Marquis de Marigny, Marquis de Ménars. The marquisate not contenting him, he obtained a place created for Colbert, that of superintendent of crown buildings. He was as a patron of artists a Mecænas, an arbiter elegantiarum. The King, who treated him as his brother-in-law, gave him the blue ribbon and put him on an equality with the greatest nobles of the realm. Young Alexandrine, the daughter of Madame de Pompadour and M. de Étioles, was brought up at Paris in the convent of the Assumption.
The nuns showed her the greatest attention. She was addressed by her baptismal name, as was then the custom for princesses of the blood, and she was expected to make one of the most brilliant marriages in France. Madame de Pompadour desired pomp even in death. She bought a splendid sepulchre in the Capuchin convent in the Place Vendôme, Paris, from the Trémoille family. There she built a magnificent mausoleum, where her mother was interred and where she reserved a place for herself.[35]