So then, to credit Madame de Pompadour, she had become a type of modesty and Christian renunciation. She adds: “Things remained in appearance just as they had been until 1755. Then, prolonged reflections on the evils which had pursued me, even amidst the greatest good fortune; the certainty of never arriving at happiness by worldly goods, since none had ever been lacking to me, and yet I had never attained to happiness; detachment from the things which had most amused me,—all induced me to believe that the only happiness is in God. I addressed myself to Père de Sacy as to a man fully penetrated with this verity; I bared my soul completely to him; he tried me in secret from September to the end of January, 1756. During this time he proposed that I should write a letter to my husband, the rough draft of which, drawn up by himself, I still have. My husband refused ever to see me.”
The Marquise then complained to the Sovereign Pontiff of Père de Sacy, who, according to her, was the victim of intrigues of every sort, and guilty of having told her that he would refuse her the sacraments so long as she did not leave the court. She added, in speaking of Damiens’s crime: “The abominable 5th January, 1757, arrived, and was followed by the same intrigues as in the previous year. The King did all in his power to bring Père Desmarets to the verity of religion. The same motives being at work, the response was not different; and the King, who earnestly desired to fulfil his duties as a Christian, was prevented from doing so, and soon after relapsed into the same errors, from which he would certainly have been extricated had they acted in good faith.”
Perhaps all is not hypocrisy in this note. I incline to believe that in spite of her idolatry for the court, the favorite recognized its miseries and nothingness. How many persons remain vicious while knowing well that vice produces their unhappiness! How many passionate people own to themselves that their passions are killing them! O Ambition! cries Saint Bernard, by what spell does it happen that, being the torment of a heart where thou hast taken birth, and where thou dost exert thine empire, yet there is no person whom thou dost not please, and who does not allow himself to be taken by surprise by the flattering attraction thou dost offer him. O ambitio, quo modo omnes torquens omnibus places?
It would have been easy to reply to the Marquise de Pompadour that if the grandeurs of this world gave her so little satisfaction, all she had to do was to withdraw from the court. Hence the Pope remained untouched by all this display of Christian philosophy. He could not make up his mind to consider the mistress of Louis XV. as a repentant Magdalen; and, far from blaming the Jesuits who had refused her absolution, he approved them. The haughty favorite did not admit that she was beaten. She kept silence, swearing, however, that she would be avenged.
IX
MADAME DE POMPADOUR AND DOMESTIC POLITICS
At home as well as abroad, in parliamentary and clerical quarrels, as in questions of external politics, Madame de Pompadour’s ideas were always undecided, inconsistent, variable. For that matter, it is not easy to find in a pretty woman the qualities needful to manage public affairs well. With very few exceptions, fashionable women are fickle, wilful, excessively impressionable, capricious, like nearly all persons who are flattered. If they meddle with government, their half-knowledge is more dangerous than complete ignorance. They have infatuations, foregone determinations; their mania for protecting makes them obstinate in sustaining undeserving favorites. Their most serious determinations often depend on trifles. A well-turned compliment influences them more than a good reason; they are the dupes of any one who knows how to flatter them without seeming to do so, and who can find more or less ingenious pretexts for justifying their whims or palliating their faults. Such was Madame de Pompadour.
Is it not curious to see this futile woman leaving her gimcracks and gewgaws to interfere in the most arduous theological or governmental questions, to pose as an arbiter between the magistracy and the clergy, the throne and the altar? “Certes,” writes D’Argenson in a style well worthy of the epoch, “it is better to see a beautiful nymph at the helm than a villainous crouching ape such as the late Cardinal Fleury. But these fair ladies are as capricious as white cats, which caress you at first and afterwards scratch and bite you.” Madame de Pompadour acted like that with the Parliament; sometimes she caressed, sometimes she clawed it.
The interminable struggle between secular jurisdiction and ecclesiastical discipline had all the ruthlessness, all the asperity, of a civil war. A society at once incredulous and fanatical grew excited over theological questions worthy of Byzantium, and even in the heart of the Seven Years’ War there were at Paris, as Voltaire remarks, fifty thousand fanatics who did not know in what country flowed the Danube and the Elbe, and who thought the universe turned upside down by the contradictory propositions of the adepts of Jansenism and the disciples of Molina.[48]
The question, however, was more serious than one might be inclined to believe. Jansenism, that third estate of religion, as it has been so justly called, was nothing more or less than a preliminary step toward republican doctrines. “Do not believe,” said Bossuet, apropos of the English revolution, “that it is simply the quarrel of the Episcopate, or some intrigues against the Anglican liturgy which have moved the common people. These disputes were as yet only feeble commencements whereby turbulent spirits made a trial of their liberty; but something more violent was stirring in the depths of men’s hearts; it was a secret disgust for all that had been authority, and an itching to innovate incessantly after the first example had been seen.”
French Jansenism had the haughty chagrin, the indocile curiosity, the spirit of revolt, which characterized the Protestantism of England. Louis XIV., so jealous of his royal prerogatives, had seen this at once. He felt that discipline is as indispensable to the Church as to the barracks, and comprehended that the throne has the same foundations as the altar. The thing aimed at by the bull Unigenitus of 1713 was to re-establish unity in doctrines; and when the Jansenists refused to submit to the decree of the Sovereign Pontiff, the great King said that this rebellion against the Pope would give rise to attacks against the monarchical principle. He was not mistaken. If the Parliament showed itself favorable to Jansenism, it was far less on account of such or such ideas on free will or grace, than by instinctive liking for the revolutionary spirit which existed in germ in the new sect. Religious controversies were to lead by slow degrees to political controversies. The Parliament led to parliamentarism. People began by contemning the episcopal jurisdiction of an archbishop in order to end by braving the authority of a king.