She summoned embassadors before her, and addressed them with the regal we, assuming the style of royalty. She appointed bishops and generals, and filled all the important offices of Church and State with those who would do her homage. She dismissed ministers and created cardinals, declared war and made peace. Voltaire paid court to her, and devoted his muse to the celebration of her beauty and her talents. Montesquieu, Diderot, and Quesnay waited in her antechamber, imploring her patronage. Those authors who pleased her she pensioned and honored; those who did not were left in poverty and neglect. Even the imperial Maria Theresa, seeking the alliance of France, wrote to her with her own hand, addressing her as her "dear friend and cousin." "Not only," said Madame de Pompadour one day to the Abbé de Bernis, "not only have I all the nobility at my feet, but even my lap-dog is weary of their fawnings." Rousseau, strong in the idolatry of the nation, refused to join the worshipers at the shrine of Pompadour. She dared not send him to the Bastille, but vexatiously exclaimed "I will have nothing more to do with that owl."
As Madame de Pompadour found her charms waning, she maintained her place by ministering to the king's appetites in the establishment of the most infamous institution ever tolerated in a civilized land. Lacretelle, in his History of France, thus describes this abomination:
"Louis XV., satiated with the conquests which the court offered him, was led by a depraved imagination to form an establishment for his pleasures of such an infamous description that, after having depicted the debaucheries of the regency, it is difficult to find terms appropriate to an excess of this kind. Several elegant houses, built in an inclosure called the Parc aux Cerfs, near Versailles, were used for the reception of beautiful female children, who there awaited the pleasure of their master. Hither were brought young girls, sold by their parents, and sometimes forced from them. It was skillfully and patiently fostered by those who ministered to the profligacy of Louis; whole years were occupied in the debauchery of girls not yet in a marriageable age, and in undermining the principles of modesty and fidelity in young women."
When some one spoke to Madame de Pompadour of this establishment, she replied,
"It is the king's heart that I wish to possess, and none of these little uneducated girls will deprive me of that."
If the king in his rides chanced to see a pretty child who gave promise of unusual beauty, he sent his servants to take her from her parents to be trained in his harem. The parents had their choice to submit quietly at home, or to submit in the dungeons of the Bastille. One incident, related by Soulavie, in his "Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis XV.," illustrates the mode of operation:
"Among the young ladies of very tender age with whom the king amused himself during the influence of Madame de Pompadour or afterward, there was also a Mademoiselle Treicelin, whom his majesty ordered to take the name of Bonneval the very day she was presented to him. The king was the first who perceived this child, when not above nine years old, in the care of a nurse, in the garden of the Tuileries, one day when he went in state to his good city of Paris; and having in the evening spoken of her beauty to Le Bel, the servant applied to M. de Sartine, who traced her out and bought her of the nurse for a few louis. She was the daughter of M. de Treicelin, a man of quality, who could not patiently endure an affront of this nature. He was, however, compelled to be silent; he was told his child was lost, and that it would be best for him to submit to the sacrifice unless he wished to lose his liberty also."
The expense of the Parc aux Cerfs alone, according to Lacretelle, amounted to 100,000,000 francs—$25,000,000.
These were not deeds of darkness. They were open as the day. France, though bound hand and foot, saw them, and exasperation was advancing to fury. An anonymous letter was sent to Louis, depicting very vividly the ruinous state of affairs and announcing the inevitable shock. Madame de Hausset, in her memoirs, gives the following synopsis of this letter:
"Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of states have perished through this cause. Your ministers are without capacity. Open war is carried on against religion. The encyclopedists, under pretense of enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations of Christianity. All the different kinds of liberty are connected. The philosophers and the Protestants tend toward republicanism. The philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches, and their efforts will one day lay the tree low. Add to these the economists, whose object is political liberty, as that of others is liberty of worship, and the government may find itself in twenty or thirty years undermined in every direction, and it will then fall with a crash. Lose no time in restoring order to the state of the finances. Embarrassments necessitate fresh taxes, which grind the people and induce toward revolt. A time will come, sire, when the people will be enlightened, and that time is probably near at hand."