Prodige heureux, la voilà, la voilà!—
Ah! ventre bleu! Qu’est-ce donc que cela?
Je me trompais, c’est l’armée ennemie.”[51]
It is not by means of chansons that France can retrieve herself. She plays into the enemy’s hand by showing herself more Prussian than Prussia. Bernis finds himself submerged by this deluge of criticisms and assaults. “I am threatened by anonymous letters,” he wrote again to Choiseul in 1758, “with being presently torn to pieces by the people, and though I do not greatly fear such menaces, it is certain that approaching misfortunes which cannot be foreseen, could easily realize them. Our friend runs at least as much risk.” Ill in body and mind, Bernis could hold out no longer; he handed in his resignation. Louis XV accepted it in a letter dated October 9, 1758, which opened thus: “I am sorry, Monsieur the Abbé-Count, that the affairs you are charged with affect your health to such a point that you can no longer support the burden of the work.... I consent with regret to your turning over the foreign affairs to the hands of the Duke de Choiseul, whom I think to be at present the only suitable person, as I am disinclined to make an absolute change in the system I have adopted, or even to be spoken to about it.”
The three women in coalition against Frederick,—Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, Elisabeth, Empress of Russia, and Madame, the Marquise de Pompadour—carried the war as far as possible. France experienced nothing but reverses in every quarter of the globe. As Voltaire remarked, it seemed more exhausted of men and money by its union with Austria than it had been by two centuries of war against that country.[52] It must be admitted, however, that Madame de Pompadour’s obstinacy was very near succeeding. It is incredible that the King of Prussia, who stood alone on the continent against the forces of Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and half of the Empire, could long have maintained so gigantic a struggle. An unforeseen event, the death of the Empress Elisabeth of Russia, January 6, 1762, saved him. Madame de Pompadour felt that her vengeance was eluding her. It was necessary to renounce all ideas of glory and conquest, and to sign the disastrous treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg (February 10 and 15, 1763). Louis XV. gave up the cities he still possessed in Germany. He restored Minorca to England, and ceded to it Acadia, Canada, Cape Breton, the gulf and river of Saint Lawrence, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominique, Tobago, and the Senegal River with its factories. He only regained his Indian colonies on condition of not fortifying or garrisoning them. Finally he undertook to demolish anew the harbor of Dunkirk. The ruin of military prestige, commerce, the navy, and public credit, the loss of two hundred thousand men, several millions of money, and nearly all the colonies,—such is the balance sheet of the fatal war so ardently desired by the Marquise.
Voltaire had good reason to exclaim: “What was the result of this innumerable multitude of combats the tale of which now wearies even those conspicuous in them? What remains from all these efforts? Nothing but blood shed vainly in waste and desolate lands, villages in ruins, families reduced to beggary, and rarely does even a dull rumor of these calamities reach as far as Paris, always profoundly occupied with pleasures or equally frivolous disputes.” Then, returning to the cause or rather to the pretext of the strife, the author of the Siècle de Louis XV. says again: “It has been thought that it would have been very easy to prevent such misfortunes by coming to terms with the English concerning a small contested ground near Canada. But certain ambitious persons, to maintain their dignity and render themselves necessary, precipitated France into this fatal war. The same thing had occurred in 1741. The self-love of two or three persons was enough to lay all Europe waste. France needed peace so greatly that she regarded those who concluded it as benefactors of the country.” The Duke de Choiseul remained popular because he had been able to palliate somewhat the impression caused by such reverses by concluding, in August, 1761, the family pact between the Bourbons of France, Spain, and Italy, and had also had tact enough to win the support of the fashionable literary men, the arbiters of renown. But his friend, Madame de Pompadour, was the object of public vindictiveness. Wounded in her ambition, her vanity, and her pride, she could not be consoled.
XII
MADAME DE POMPADOUR AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
One day some one cited in presence of Louis XV. the example of Frederick the Great, who admitted the philosophers in vogue and famous men of letters to his intimate acquaintance. “That is not the way in France,” said the King, “and as there are a few more wits and great noblemen here than there are in Prussia, I should want a very big table to gather them all around it.” And then he counted on his fingers: “Maupertuis, Fontenelle, La Motte, Voltaire, Piron, Destouches, Montesquieu, Cardinal de Polignac.” His attention was called to the fact that he had forgotten D’Alembert and Clairant.—“And Crébillon,” said he, “and La Chaussée!”—“And Crébillon the younger,” cried some one; “he ought to be more amiable than his father; and then there are the Abbé Prevost, the Abbé d’Olivet.”—“Very well,” replied Louis XV., “for twenty-five years all of that crowd would have dined or supped with me.”
Madame de Pompadour, who was acquainted with the master’s dispositions, would not have made advances to the philosophers had she not been possessed by the passion for flattery. But how was she to resist compliments so well turned as those of Voltaire? This man, who in speaking of the Christian religion cried: “Crush the wretch!” kneeled to a royal mistress while enlarging the boundaries of the most insipid flattery. The censer which he wanted to banish from the churches he seized in order to wave it respectfully before the alcove of a Pompadour!
The Marquise had in her intimacy a man who never quitted her; this was Doctor Quesnay, her familiar, her guest, her confident, her physician, whom she had lodged just above her in an entresol of the château of Versailles. This little entresol, rendezvous of the boldest innovators, the most determined free-thinkers, the most ardent materialists, was the secret workshop of the future Revolution, the laboratory of disorder and destruction. There, talking, dining, declaiming, conspiring together, one met men such as D’Alembert, the chief of the Encyclopedists; Duclos, who said of the nobles who flattered him: “They are afraid of us as robbers are of street lamps with reflectors”; Helvetius, whose whole doctrine is summed up in this monstrous maxim, last word of egotism and immorality: “Man being merely a sensitive being should have but one object: the pleasure of the senses.” Marmontel relates that the Marquise de Pompadour, unable to induce this troop of philosophers to come down to her salon, came to their table instead and chatted with them.