“He is strange, the King,” she mused as if she had forgotten André, “how strange but few can guess—at one moment the slave of his passion, at another burning with a king’s ambition, at a third indolent and dull, at a fourth consumed by remorse, tortured by fear of God and the pains of hell. The ennui of a royal life, that is his bane. The woman who can amuse him, keep him from himself, he will never desert. And I will be that woman. My beauty will fade, but give me first five years—five years as I am to-day—and it will be death alone that will separate the King and me.”
“And you will rule France, Marquise?”
She wheeled with a flash of fire. “Yes,” she said, “I will rule France through the King.”
There was silence. Madame leaned against the carved mantelpiece; her eyes passed over the salon with its wealth and its refinement out into the measureless spaces of the future, to the rosy peaks known only to the dreams of ambition.
“Paris,” she murmured, “calls me happy, fortunate. Listen,” and she recited:
“Pompadour, vous embellissez
La cour, Parnasse et Cythère.
“M. de Voltaire is a poet. The homage of the poets, the philosophers, the artists, the wits, the homage of the world to her beauty, the love of a king—what can a woman desire more? I have them to-day, but shall I keep them? Mon Dieu! do they reflect, these mere men and women, what it costs to keep them? My life is a martyrdom. A false step, a stupid word, to be gay when I should be silent, to be dull when I should be gay—these may hurl me from my place. And the intrigues! The intrigues! Vicomte, I declare to you that at night I lie awake reckoning with tears what the day has accomplished, wrestling with what to-morrow may bring. Heartless, frivolous, and false are my foes. Is it surprising that I too should be heartless, frivolous, false? But I would not change my lot. No! Better far one year with the cup of pleasure at one’s lips; better far one glorious year in Versailles of passion and power, than an eternity of that life I knew as Madame d’Étiolles. Yes; if in twelve months I must pay the price at the Bastille I would drink now to the full the joys of an uncrowned queen of France.”
She sat down overpowered by the visions of her own spirit.
And André listened with a unique thrill of awe, torn by conflicting emotions. Of his own free will he had asked for her help because his ambitions thrust the sacrifice on him. Away from her presence he recalled with a shiver a word, a gesture, a look, that spoke of a cold selfishness, even of an insolent vulgarity, so strangely blended with such grace, charm, and sympathy. Her low birth, her position at Versailles, stirred in him the contempt that was the heritage of eight centuries of noble ancestors. But once face to face with her all his misgivings, all his scorn and dislike, melted away. And he dimly felt that her victory was no mere triumph of a beautiful and gifted woman over a man’s passion, the appeal of the flesh to the flesh, such as he knew and had yielded to so often. This was no mere idol of a royal and fleeting devotion, no mere splendid courtesan of Nature’s making; it was the breath of the human spirit to the human spirit, blowing with the divine mystery of the wind where it listed on the answering spaces of the sea. And the soaring sweep of her ambition awoke in his soul ambitions not less daring and supreme. What man in whom the ceaseless call of the siren voices within, voices that no priestly code, no laws, and no arguments can still, voices whose sweetness and strength rise from the unfathomable abysses where flesh and spirit are indistinguishable—what man who has from childhood listened to those voices within but must feel the triumphant echo when he finds a woman tempted and inspired as he has been tempted and inspired? Madame de Pompadour might be what the Court said, but there were hopes, visions, in her which the Court and King would never fathom, which it might be well she herself could only see and follow because she must. She was fate, this woman, the fate of France. Let others judge her. He could not. It was enough to listen to her summons and to obey.