CHAPTER XVII
DENISE’S ANSWER
The Queen’s ladies had been entertaining their friends, and the antechamber was well filled with a company of the most fashionable and powerful of the noblesse, particularly of those high-born ladies and gentlemen who devoted whatever time they could spare from breaking the Ten Commandments with a dulcet courtesy to the amusement of political intrigue. Strangely enough the Queen’s friends were drawn from three very different types—there were the “devout,” les dévots, les rigoristes, to whom the free-thinking of the fashionable philosophers coming to be the mode in the Faubourg St. Germain was anathema maranatha, my lords of the hierarchy of the bishops, with the high-born women who were their obedient pupils; there were the “fribbles,” the great seigneurs with their wives and sisters and daughters privileged morally as well as politically if only the breach were made within their own class and with due regard to etiquette and good manners, the men and women born within the purple who sincerely believed that “God could scarcely condemn a person of that quality” for what would be mortal sin in a bourgeois; and there were the “snobs,” the women above all of the inferior noblesse remorselessly struggling upwards who snatched at the splendid opportunity a queen’s cause and a minister’s cause offered. Monsieur the Dauphin, mesdames the princesses of the blood were known to hate Madame de Pompadour, to be plotting her overthrow; that was enough. Surely with royalty lay the social future.
“Yes, to be sure,” the Abbé St. Victor was explaining with the smile of the lay roué to the Duchesse de Pontchartrain, “the King’s sin would be only one-half as heinous if Madame de Pompadour were simply a widow or even a demoiselle”; he took a pinch of snuff and regretfully shrugged his shoulders.
“Or if she were really vulgar,” the Duchess interposed with the pouting staccato which she knew became her best. “I wonder if all bourgeoise women are like her. She is not vulgar, alas! and really it is her duty to be vulgar. Pontchartrain says she dresses better than I do.”
“That is mere outward show,” the Abbé remarked, “as well as being not true.”
“I wonder,” the Duchess asked with an air of profundity, “if a woman can be vulgar inside without being vulgar outside.”
“She is not a Christian,” Mademoiselle Eugénie pronounced. “That is enough for me.”
“But she goes regularly to mass,” objected the puzzled Duchess.
“To show her fine dresses to the Duke de Pontchartrain,” Mademoiselle retorted with sour severity. “Clothes, Madame, have nothing to do with religion.”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried the Duchess, alarmed, “don’t say so to Pontchartrain. It would put the most embarrassing ideas into his head.”