Ils ne sont habités que par des baladins!...”[45]
A pamphlet entitled “The School of Man, or parallel between contemporary portraits and those of Holy Writ,” contained attacks of this sort against Louis XV.: “Too much incommoded by his greatness to take a girl from the green room, Lindor satisfied himself in true princely style: he had a large house with a theatre in it built expressly for him, where his mistress became a danseuse by title and office; men infatuated by the vanity of dancing women, insensate imitators of Candaules, do not fancy that the last Gyges died in Lydia.”
One should read the Memoirs of the Marquis d’Argenson and those of Barbier the advocate in order to get a just notion of the hatred felt for the Marquise by both the aristocracy and the middle classes. The people despised her quite as much, and held her solely responsible for all wretchedness and every disaster. The luxury of this parvenu irritated them, and they detested her profoundly. The following quatrain expressed the popular sentiment:—
“Fille d’une sangsue et sangsue elle-même,
Poisson d’une arrogance extrême,
Étale en ce château, sans crainte et sans effroi,
La substance du peuple et la honte du roi.”[46]
For those who knew how to listen, the Revolutionary storm was already rumbling in the distance.
Madame de Pompadour could not rely on her flatterers themselves. Voltaire, who had burned so much incense at the adored feet of the Marquise, who at Versailles had been her most zealous, ardent, enthusiastic courtier, forgot all that in his retreat at Ferney. He chaffed at his former idol and drew a most malicious portrait of her in his poem La Pucelle.
Thoroughly acquainted with the tone of public opinion, since she had her own police and an arrangement with the director of the post-office, who violated the secret of letters for her, Madame de Pompadour was in despair at so many attacks. Uneasy, feverish, dissatisfied with the King and the kingdom, considering herself as a victim of destiny, a woman unjustly dealt with by fortune, spitefully angry at Frederick the Great, who scoffed at her; at Louis XV., who neglected her for the young girls of the Deer Park; at the clergy, who regarded her as a tool of hell; at the Parliaments, which disdained her; at the nobility, who saw nothing in her but an ambitious bourgeoise; at the middle classes, who reproached her for being immoral; at all France, which scorned her,—she suffered as much in her vanity as in her pride, and said to her confidant, Madame du Hausset: “The sorceress told me I should have time to repent before dying; I believe it, for I shall die of nothing but chagrin.”