About the time when spring gives place to the first advances of summer; when the trees were in leaf, and the plants in flower; when the bright greensward, enameled with its countless flowrets, carpeted the alleys of the park, Madame de Pompadour one morning begged Louis XV. to come and breakfast with her at the hermitage.
The king was conducted thither by his valet. His surprise was great. At first, before entering, at the sight of the humble thatched roof, he imagined that he was about to breakfast like a true anchorite, and began to fear seriously that the marchioness had not displayed much taste in the adornment of her retreat. He entered the court and proceeded straight to the door of the hermitage. At this instant a young peasant girl advanced to meet him; as she was well made, delicate, and pretty looking, the king began to find the hermitage more to his taste. With deep reverence his guide begged of him to follow her to the farm.
As he approached the farm, another peasant girl, more delicate still than the former, advanced to meet him, and, with a thousand reverences, presented him with a bowl of milk. At the sight of this pretty milkmaid, with her little straw hat coquettishly disposed on one side of her head, her white corset and blue petticoat, the king was charmed. Before taking the milk from her hands, he gazed at her a second time from head to foot. Her arms, which were uncovered, were white as lilies; she wore suspended from her neck a little gold cross, which seemed to lose itself in a magnificent bouquet of flowers which she wore in her bosom; but what above all astonished the king were two little stockingless feet incased in a pair of the most rustic sabots. With a motion of innocent coquetry, the pretty milkmaid drew one of her feet out of its wooden prison and placed it on the sabot. All at once the king recognized the marchioness, and avowed to her that for the first time in his life he had felt the desire of kissing a pretty foot. Madame de Pompadour returned with her royal lover to the hermitage, where he could not sufficiently admire the refined taste which had been displayed by the fair architect in the planning and arrangement of the building and grounds. This was the origin of what was afterward known as the notorious Parc-aux-cerfs.
It would be a difficult matter to study the political system of Madame de Pompadour, if, indeed, she can be said to have acted on a system. It cannot be denied that she possessed ideas, but more frequently her mind was a perfect chaos of caprices. It is well known, however, that the Duc de Choiseul, who united in his own person the portfolios of three departments of the ministry, and who disposed of all power, followed to the letter the policy of Madame de Pompadour; namely, in reversing the system of Louis XIV., in allying himself to Austria, and in forming a league, or rather a family pact, between the Bourbons of France, Italy, and Spain. The policy of Madame de Pompadour it was which annexed Corsica to France, and, consequently, Bonaparte, who was born at the decease of the marchioness, owed to her his title of French citizen.
Women look not to the future; their reign is from day to day; women of genius, who have at various epochs sought to govern the world, have never contemplated the clouds which might be gathering in the distance; they have been able to see clearly enough within a narrow circle traced around them, but have never succeeded in piercing the shadows of futurity. "Après moi le déluge," was Madame de Pompadour's motto.
The eighteenth century was a century of striking contrasts. The prime minister after Cardinal de Fleury was Madame de Pompadour. With the cardinal a blind religion protected the throne against the parliament; with the rise of the marchioness's power we perceive the first dawnings of philosophy, tormenting in turns both the clergy and the parliament. Under Madame de Pompadour's direction the king, had he been only as bold and determined as his mistress, would have become a greater king than ever. The cardinal was miserly and avaricious, the marchioness liberal to prodigality; she always said, and justly too, that money ought to flow freely from the throne like a generous stream, fertilizing and humanizing the entire State. The cardinal had been hostile to Austria, and favorable to Prussia; the marchioness made war with Frederick to humor Marie-Thérèse. The battle of Rosbach certainly belied her policy, but, to use her own words, "Had she the privilege of making heroes?"
And after all, is the historian justified in accusing this woman of all the dishonors and defeats of the reign of Louis XV.? She attained to power just as the old legitimate royalty—the royalty, as the French would call it, par la grace de Dieu—was fast giving way before the royalty of opinion. There was nothing left to be done at Versailles, simply because in Paris the power was already in the hands of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot. And so well did Madame de Pompadour comprehend this future royalty, that far from seeking to arrest its progress, she, on the contrary, sought to meet it half way. For we do not find her openly protecting and encouraging the philosophers of the day; those very men who, by the mere force of ideas, were destined to overthrow that throne on which she herself was seated! Thus we find also the various painters of the time, in their several portraits of the favorite, never failing to represent her surrounded with all the more celebrated revolutionary books of the day, such as the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophical Dictionary, the Spirit of Laws, and the Social Contract.
Madame de Pompadour, woman-like, loved revenge; and this, it must be said, was her worst vice. For a word she sent Latude to the Bastille; for a couplet she exiled the minister Maurepas. Frederick of Prussia took it into his head one day, in a moment of gayety, to call her Cotillon II., instead of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, and styled her reign of favor le régne de Cotillon; a witticism which so incensed her, that, according to some writers, we may trace to this petty cause the origin of the disastrous seven years' war.
The position of Madame de Pompadour at court as first favorite was, by all accounts, far from being an enviable one; as years rolled on she found herself necessitated to stoop to all kinds of meannesses, and to endure all sorts of humiliations, to preserve her already tottering empire. In order to make friends for herself in the parliament, she suppressed the Jesuits; and she afterward exiled the parliament in order to conciliate the clergy. Again, to prevent her royal, but most fickle minded lover, from choosing another mistress out of the ranks of the court ladies, she contrived that seraglio, the notorious Parc-aux-cerfs, "the pillow of Louis the Fifteenth's debaucheries," as Chateaubriand called it; at the last, hated and despised by all France, Madame de Pompadour said to Louis XV., "For mercy's sake, keep me near you: I protect you; I take upon myself all the hatred of France; evil times are come for kings; so soon as I am gone, all the insults which are now leveled at Madame de Pompadour will be addressed to the king."
Among the many desperate attempts which were made from time to time to dethrone her, the following is the most curious:—