Madame de Pompadour: Eminence without honor

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Lewis, Tess

A skillful woman knows how to mingle pleasure with the general interest and, without boring her lover, contrives to have him do what she wants.

-Mme. de Tencin

[S]uch a combination-that of the genius of a Richelieu in the body of a Pompadour are not, perhaps, in the order of things possible.

-Sainte-Beuve, "Louis XV"

Posterity has not been kind to Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's spectacular mistress. But then, neither were her contemporaries. There was no official role for the king's maitresse en titre, yet, aside from offering obvious physical and aesthetic benefits, she performed the crucial function of political lightning rod. As the editor of the eighteenth-century courtly almanac, Science des personnes de la cour, pointed out, the kings' favorites are a "shield against hatred," a target of all attacks and reproaches for mistakes and misfortune. However, Louis XV's fifty-nine-year reign was marred by such a dire series of mistakes and misfortune that even as notable and notorious a mistress as Madame de Pompadour could not shield him enough. Louis le Bien-aime (the well-loved) declined to le Bien-hai (the well-hated) halfway through her two-decade tenure as mistress from 1745 until her death in 1764.

The Marquise de Pompadour, nee the bourgeoise Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, shouldered much of the blame for France's "Reversal of Alliances" from Prussia to Austria and the resulting disastrous Seven Years War, as well as for the kingdom's recurrent financial difficulties. Yet, well before she had transformed herself from "necessary friend" to de facto prime minister, defamatory verses, known as poissonades, were gleefully recited throughout Paris and the Court.

The great lords abase themselves,

The financiers enrich themselves,

All the Poissons [Fish] are getting big,

It is the reign of the scoundrels . . .

A little bourgeoise,

Raised to be a slut,

Brings everything down to her level

And makes the court a slum. . . .

In fact, many of the cruelest poissonades, such as one alluding to leukorrhea, a gynecological malady from which she suffered, were undoubtedly written by her most dangerous enemy in the court, the Comte de Maurepas. This Minister of the Navy and Secretary of State in the King's Household had long been jealous of the King's favor and was widely suspected of having poisoned the King's previous mistress, Madame de Chateauroux. Even with the help of the sinister chief of police, Nicolas Berryer, and his cabinet noir, in charge of steaming open all correspondence and preparing reports and extracts for her and the King, Madame de Pompadour was rarely able to discover the poems' authors with any certainty. A strong suspicion became grounds enough for a sentence of exile or even life imprisonment in the Bastille.

The Marquise, certainly, had her flaws, but these flaws were simply not great enough to warrant the relentless maligning of her reputation in her lifetime and after her death. She was extravagant and acquisitive, but also one of the few royal patrons at the time who paid her bills generously and in full. She created an entire porcelain industry in Sevres that fed the court's hunger for fashionable novelty, not to mention a great number of craftsmen's families. And Louis XV, easily bored when not hunting, demanded constant distraction. So, if the budget for Menus Plaisirs, or court entertainment, increased sixfold from 400,000 livres a year under Louis XPV to the 2,500,000 needed to support Madame de Pompadour's theatricals, galas, and soirees, the fault is not hers alone.

She also put a great deal of energy and of her own money into founding the Ecole Militaire, a school to train the sons of impoverished aristocrats as military officers. This was money she earned, it is true, as income from estates given to her by Louis XV, though they were financed by her mother's lovers and reverted to the crown after her death. The school turned out many well-trained officers, among them Napoleon Bonaparte, and greatly strengthened the French army by the turn of the century.

Madame de Pompadour valued loyalty above all and was blind to the weaknesses of those who were loyal to her, pressuring Louis XV to appoint her followers to positions for which they were not always qualified. Yet there were not always many competent alternatives. Nor had there been for some time. The King's great-grandfather, Louis XIV, was traumatized as a child by the Fronde civil war in which Parlement tried to restore the constitution that Cardinal Richelieu had destroyed. To prevent the aristocracy from exerting any power again, Louis XIV had done all he could to reduce most of the court nobility from statesmen to fawning courtiers. Under his reign, courtiers were compelled to stay at Versailles and follow an exacting and rigid daily schedule. Their only hope for gaining favor or influence was through flattery. Prospects under Louis XV were not much better. Had Madame de Pompadour not monopolized Louis XVs attention and trust for her favorites, the Duc de Richelieu would have lobbied for his. Richelieu was a man with as much ambition but less talent than his great-uncle the Cardinal, and, having previously wielded influence over Louis XV by supplying him with mistresses whom he could himself control, like his friend the Duchesse de Chateauroux, the Duc was, from the beginning, one of the Marquise's main rivals.