What a scene was that presented toward the end of February, 1745, when the Hôtel de Ville of Paris gleamed with a thousand lights, and its halls rang with seductive music! The city gave a ball to the court, as a return for the festivities which had accompanied the marriage of Louis the Dauphin. France was embroiled in an unfortunate war, which paved the way for one still more unfortunate: but the court danced. The king alone, of all the company, seemed absent and sad; while his wife, the poor, good Maria Leczinska, found a motive for living in her phlegm and her piety, his "favorite declarée," the "maîtresse en titre," the Duchesse de Chateauroux, took it into her head to die. The haughty noblesse of France, whom Louis XIV. had tamed, who had been corrupted by the rouerie of the Regent, and degraded by Louis XV. to the duties of the seraglio; the nobility of France, who had accustomed themselves to reckon among their privileges that of supplying royal concubines "du sang et rang," were most anxious to fill up the gap left by the deceased duchesse. But this time even the practised Duc and Maréchal de Richelieu failed, and in vain did that charming creature, the Duchesse de Rochechouart, display all her Hebe-like charms, in the hope of succeeding the Chateauroux. It was decreed that the French aristocracy should lose one of their most precious privileges.
The Hôtel de Ville ball had attained the acme of its splendour. The superbly decorated rooms which a few lustres later were to re-echo saturnalia of a frightfully different nature, were crowded with quaint and graceful maskers. Rococo was present in all the glory and fancifulness of its refined voluptuousness, and a remarkably rich show of feminine charms, heightened by all the coquetry of the toilette, was offered to the choice of the royal purchaser, for the more official object of the ball was to alleviate the "tristesse" of the lord of France, and offer a remedy for his sadness in the form of a lovely duchesse, comtesse, or baronesse.
Poor women of an immoral age! how many a girl, after her maid and milliner had done their utmost, had been instructed by her mother, how many a wife by her husband, how she should behave on this night in order to attract and retain the king's favourable glances! For it was a sign of an utterly corrupted epoch, that mothers considered they fulfilled a duty in teaching their daughters to seek the highest honour in the deepest disgrace.
This time, however, the plebeian rivalry was destined to bear away the prize from the aristocrats. The Heliogabalus of France had really forgotten his melancholy amid this abundance of beauty and seductions. His restless eyes were at length fixed by a tall, graceful, fair-haired girl, masked en Amazone, with bow and quiver on her shoulder, with floating hair, and heaving bosom. "Charming huntress!" His most Christian Majesty addressed her: "Happy the man who may be struck by thy arrows." To speak in the style of the Academy, this was a splendid moment to fire a dart into the king's heart; but whether the young Amazon had not been properly trained, or did not take the hint, she disappeared among the crowd of dancers. When on the point of pursuing her, the Bienaimé was impeded by an English country dance, performed by a bevy of young ladies. He devoured this "bouquet," so full of fresh charms, and, as our authority says, "incertain, il eut voulu les posséder toutes." The king went further, and surveyed at the end of the room the amphitheatrical daïs on which "les femmes de médiocre condition" were seated. Here, too, his Majesty found much to look at, much to admire; till a female mask forced her way through the beautiful crowd, and teased the king with masquerade freedom. The graceful coquetry of this teasing attracted Louis's curiosity: there was a grisettish esprit in the words of the beauty, something new and piquant for the worn-out roué. He begged her to unmask, and she did so while flying, and, as she fled, she let her handkerchief fall. The delighted king picked it up, and threw it over the heads of the ladies to its owner. A whisper immediately ran through the hall, "Le mouchoir est jété!"[78]
The sultan had thrown the handkerchief, but not to a perfect stranger. He had met the beauty frequently of late: while hunting in the forest of Sénart, she had passed him, gracefully reclining in her phaeton. Mademoiselle Poisson, now Madame d'Etioles, the daughter of a scoundrel, had been artistically trained by her mother to become an Odalisque. She had so often repeated to her daughter, "Tu es un morceau de roi," that the girl at last believed it, and prepared herself for the honour. In the interim, she married M. d'Etioles, the rich nephew of her mother's lover, which,—such was the nature of court morality at the period,—proved no obstacle, but rather a motive for her future exalted position. Her mother, with this object, negotiated with the king's first valet, Sieur Binet, the notorious predecessor of the more notorious Lebel; and the talent of Madame d'Etioles effected the rest.
The masked ball at the Hôtel de Ville entailed the finale. Ere long, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson was invited by his most Christian Majesty "pour souper dans ses petits cabinets et pour coucher avec elle." Immediately after, this woman of one-and-twenty years of age, who had been married four years and borne her husband two children, was solemnly presented at court under the title of a Marquise de Pompadour, to the queen, princes, and princesses, and in due form declared "maîtresse en titre;" that is, as matters stood, the mistress of France. Poor M. d'Etioles, "qui idolâtrait sa femme," tried at first to be disagreeable, but was sent on his travels, and eventually became appeased.
Everybody knows how the marquise governed France: it was she who made the alliance with Austria and sent Prince de Soubise to Rossbach. Under her government, France soon sank to such a point that Chesterfield, writing home in December, 1753, from Paris, declared that he found in that city all the signs of an impending revolution, such as are read of in history. Poisson-Pompadour ruled, and woe to the man who tried to oppose her autocracy: the dungeons of the Bastille or the iron cages of Mont St. Michel received the victims to the revenge of the Babylonish woman. The chanson and the satiric couplet alone dared to flash in the dark, and at times darted their shafts into the innermost apartments of the omnipotent lady.
In order to surround the blasé sultan with all the varying charms of seductiveness, the Pompadour, by Richelieu's advice, erected in the park of Versailles a hermitage, where she tried to arouse the blunted imagination of the roué, who had enjoyed everything and misused everything, by dressing herself as a gardener's wife, or as a milkmaid, or even as a nun. Nay, more: when these lures lost their charm in time, when the mistress heard that his most Christian Majesty was tired of her, and declared that she was as cold as a "macreuse," she assumed even more infamous duties, and with Lebel established the Parc aux Cerfs, which will remain an undying stain on regal France.
But even more horrible, possibly, is it to read, how the desire of imitating the career of the Pompadour—the wish, the hope, the longing to obtain the rank of maîtresse titrée—spread all over France, from the pestilential court atmosphere of Versailles to every point where a pretty girl was growing up. How shamelessly people acted in this respect, is recorded by Casanova, in his account of Mademoiselle Roman-Coupier, of Toulouse, who, however, only succeeded in becoming an untitled concubine. The corruption of kings is everywhere met half way by the villany of the nations. Regarding the matter humanly, this offers a species of palliation for Louis XV. and his co-religionists.
Après nous le déluge! was a fearful remark, which the Pompadour, in the intoxication of her frivolity and might, or perhaps in a moment of agony and desperation, replied to a friend who warned her against the future; and the deluge came, but that of terror was preceded by that of vulgarity. The ancien régime sank, draining the cup of vice to the dregs, from the reign of the Poisson to that of the Dubarry—that Dubarry, who, under the name of Mademoiselle L'Ange, had wallowed in the vicious mud of Paris ere his most Christian Majesty raised her to his couch. The lowest of all Hetæras, stretching herself on a bed of purple silk, and at her feet the King of France, busily engaged in boiling his mistress's coffee, and rewarding with a laugh of pleasure her Billingsgate remarks. What a picture!