Doctor Quesnay, her physician, was one of those peasants of the Danube, or better, to adopt a happy expression of the De Goncourts, one of those courtiers of the Danube who cloak a refined cleverness under an aspect of rudeness, and who live by the monarchy even while playing to the republicans. Strange Brutuses, contraband Catos, whose beautiful maxims can deceive none but simpletons! Rude democrats in appearance, time-servers in reality, who are proud to dine with great people and whose so-called dignity provokes a smile! Quesnay, this physical confessor, knew both the strong and the weak sides of the Marquise. He knew so well how to take her that he could quietly install in his entresol, just above the favorite’s apartment, the first club, that which agitated for the first time the downfall of the Church and the monarchy.
Madame de Pompadour was full of coquetries and amiability for the most dangerous adversaries of the old régime. La Tour’s pastel, which is at the Louvre, represents her seated in an armchair, her left arm resting on a table whereon are a globe and some books. The largest of these is the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia, that great arsenal of impiety, the prospectus of which had been launched by Diderot in 1750. Louis XV., always undecided, at first tolerated the gigantic collection of writings. Some years later (March, 1759) he revoked the privileges of the editors. A royal declaration of unwonted violence appeared at the same time against the authors, printers, publishers, and colporteurs of writings aimed against religion and royal authority. Almost every line proclaimed a death penalty. But a thousand means of eluding these Draconian laws were found, and most frequently authority closed its eyes.
Voltaire cried enthusiastically: “Long life to the ministry of the Duke de Choiseul!”
Nevertheless, warnings were not lacking to the favorite. She saw as clearly as Louis XV. himself the perils which the doctrines of the Encyclopedia made imminent for all kings. Madame du Hausset relates that a very curious anonymous letter was one day sent to the King and his mistress. As the author was bent on accomplishing his purpose, he had sent one copy to the lieutenant of police, sealed with this address: For the King; one with these words: To Madame de Pompadour, and still another to M. de Marigny. This letter, which greatly affected Louis XV. and his Marquise, struck them all the more forcibly because it was written in very respectful terms. Among other remarkable passages it contained the following prediction: “The Encyclopedists, under pretext of enlightening men, are sapping the foundations of religion. All sorts of liberty depend upon each other: the philosophers and the Protestants tend to republicanism as well as the Jansenists. The philosophers attack the trunk of the tree, the others some of its branches; but their efforts, without being concerted, will some day bring it down. Add to these the Economists, whose object is political liberty, as that of the others is liberty of worship, and the Government may find itself in twenty or thirty years undermined throughout and falling tumultuously into ruin.”
These prophecies of the coming Revolution are incessantly renewed in the writings of one of the ministers of Louis XV., the Marquis d’Argenson. It is he who writes in January, 1750: “Republicanism is every day gaining on philosophic minds. People take an aversion to monarchism through demonstration. In fact, it is only slaves and eunuchs who aid monarchism by their false wisdom.” And on December 20 of the same year: “See how many philosophic writers there are at present. The wind from England blows over this stuff. It is combustible. Look at the style in which Parliament remonstrances are written. These procureurs general of Parliaments, these State syndics, would at need become great men. All the nation would take fire; the nobility would gain the clergy, and then the third estate. And if necessity should arise for assembling the States-General of the realm to regulate the demands for money, these States would not assemble in vain. One should be careful; all this is very serious.”
It must be owned that D’Argenson is a true prophet. Every day he accentuates his sinister predictions. September 11, 1751, he writes: “We have not, like the Romans, any Visigoths or Saracens who might invade us; but the Government may experience a revolution. Consider that it is no longer either esteemed or respected, and, which is worse, that it is doing all that is needed to ruin itself. The clergy, the army, the Parliaments, the people high and low, are all murmuring, all detaching themselves from the Government, and rightly. Things are going from bad to worse.” He returns to the charge September 9, 1752: “The bad effects of our government by absolute monarchy are resulting in persuading France and all Europe that it is the worst of governments.... A mild but inactive prince allows the abuses to grow which were commenced by the pride of Louis XIV.; no reform when it is necessary, no amelioration, appointments blindly made, prejudices without inquiry; everything shows an increasing tendency toward national ruin. Everything is falling into tatters, and private passions are working underhand to ruin and destroy us.”
Is it not a curious thing to hear, forty years beforehand, the first mutterings of the formidable tempest which was to engulf everything,—nobility, clergy, Parliaments, monarchy? We are in the year 1750. The archers have arrested, as a police measure, certain vagabond children who were begging in Paris. Suddenly a rumor spreads that abductions are multiplying and that no family is any longer in security. Popular imagination is excited, overheated. People say that in order to restore his wasted forces the kingly debauché takes baths of children’s blood, like a new Herod. Madame de Pompadour, who has been imprudent enough to come to Paris, has barely time to escape from being torn to pieces. The people want to go to Versailles and burn the château, built, as they say, at their expense. The exasperated King says that hereafter he will not pass through Paris when going to Compiègne. “What!” he cries, “shall I show myself to these villainous people who say I am a Herod!” And to avoid entering thereafter the capital of which he has conceived a horror, he establishes outside the walls the road which is now called the path of the Revolt.
The tide of anger rises—rises incessantly against the favorite. The people overwhelm her with curses; they call her the King’s hussy. The daughters of Louis XV. designate her by a still more vulgar name. In November, 1751, the Dauphin and Dauphiness, on their way to Notre Dame, cross the bridge of the Tournelle. Some two thousand women surround them. “We are dying with hunger!” they say. “Bread! bread!” The Dauphiness trembles like a leaf. The Dauphin causes several louis to be distributed. “Monseigneur,” say the women of the people, “we do not want your money. It is bread we want. We love you much. Let that wretch be sent away who is governing the kingdom and ruining it! If we had hold of her, there would soon be nothing left of her but relics.”
If such were popular impressions before the Seven Years’ War, it is easy to comprehend what they must have been after the national humiliations which overwhelmed unhappy France. Madame de Pompadour thought she could remedy the immense unpopularity which pursued her by flattering still more the philosophers who could blow the trumpet of Renown for her. These singular patriots, who had celebrated the glory of the victor of Rossbach as if he had been a Titus or a Marcus Aurelius, asked only one thing to console them for the afflictions, shames, and miseries of their country: a regular persecution against the Jesuits. Madame de Pompadour was ready to follow Voltaire’s disciples on to this ground. She might have hesitated if the Jesuits had been her flatterers, if they had made a pretence of being her dupes, if they had concluded to play a rôle of complaisance in the comedies of her pretended repentance, if they had seemed to take her for another Maintenon, for a mother in Israel. But she did not forget that when, in 1756, she had been obliged to go to confession in order to be eligible for an appointment as lady of the Queen’s palace, Père de Sacy had refused her absolution, and that when the attempt was made on the King, in 1757, Père Desmarets had nearly obliged her to leave the court. Hence the Jesuits were condemned. A Parliament decree of February 22, 1764, commanded that within eight days they should take an oath not to live any longer according to their institute, to abjure the condemned maxims, and to hold no correspondence with their former superiors. “When the Jesuits were expelled,” says Chateaubriand, “their existence was not dangerous to the State; the past was punished in the present; that often happens among men; the Provincial Letters had deprived the Company of Jesus of its moral force. And yet Pascal is merely a calumniator of genius; he has left us an immortal lie.”
The great crime of the Jesuits was to have displeased the Marquise de Pompadour. One saw holy missionaries, untiring apostles, illustrious professors, men who had honored religion and science, old men surrounded by the esteem of all honest people, driven from their houses, deprived of all resources, expelled from France with a rigor and injustice so cruel that certain philosophers thought they could take up their defence in the name of humanity. Those Jesuits whom Madame de Pompadour was driving out, Frederick the Great was to shelter in his dominions. “They are the best priests I have ever known,” said he. Catherine II. was to welcome them to her vast states and make use of them in founding educational establishments.