Madame De Pompadour Quotes

Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.

Disgusting foods, as Madame de Pompadour discovered, do not arouse the senses. They only dull them. Seduction, as you know by now, for women starts with the ears and for men starts with the eyes and for both, travels directly to the stomach. Some say you need sweet murmurings in the ears, but I say laughter, intrigue and delicacies are more powerful.

Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living. Change is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.

Madame de Pompadour never seems to have sold any of the objects which belonged to her. They accumulated in their thousands, and filled all her many houses to overflowing; after her death Marigny was obliged to take two big houses in Paris which, as well as the Elysée and the Réservoirs, contained her goods until the sale of them began. Furniture, china, statues, pictures, books, plants, jewels, linen, silver, carriages, horses, yards and hundreds of yards of stuff, trunks full of dresses, cellars full of wine; the inventory of all this, divided into nearly three thousand lots, very few lots containing less than a dozen objects, took two lawyers more than a year to make. Few human beings since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things.

Samppanja on ainoa viini, jota nainen voi juoda monta lasillista ja silti näyttää kauniilta

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was “embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians” (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour’s brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague’s little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. “Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake?

A priest came. He told her she must send for d’Etioles; obediently she did so, but her husband begged to be excused, saying that he was not well. Then she confessed and communicated. The next day was Palm Sunday, the King was in church all day. Faithful Gontaut, Soubise and Choiseul stayed with her, until she said: ‘It is coming now, my friends; I think you had better leave me to my soul, my women and the priest.’ She told her women not to change her clothes, as it tired her and was no longer worth while. The priest made a movement as if to leave the room; she said: ‘One moment, M. le Curé, we’ll go together’, and died.

Pen en papier zijn te ruiken in mijn omgeving.

Madame de Pompadour has to think about Hills and Mountains.

For centuries France and the Habsburgs had been enemies, as they had during the War of the Austrian Succession that had just ended (1748). But slowly the recognition was dawning on Maria-Theresa and her chancellor Kaunitz, and on Madame de Pompadour and, with less conviction, her lover Louis XV, that they were less threatened by each other than by the emergent powers of England (which was struggling with France for empire in India, North America and the West Indies) and Prussia (which had seized and so far kept Silesia).

Three years later she published her first biography, Madame de Pompadour, and the reviews again were good. ‘Miss Mitford . . . admires money and birth and romantic love,’ her friend Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘. . . good food, fine clothes, “telling jokes”, courage and loyalty, and has no time for intellectual problems or the lingering horrors of life.’37 The eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote that everyone who had enjoyed The Pursuit of Love would be delighted that its characters had reappeared, ‘this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French history. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention, which can be called Versailles, as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh. Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history.’38 Another friend, Raymond Mortimer, described the book as ‘extremely unorthodox . . . it reads as if an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone’. Nancy did not know whether to feel complimented or not. ‘I was rather taken aback,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘I had seen the book as Miss Mitford’s sober and scholarly work . . . he obviously enjoyed it though he says the whole enterprise is questionable.’39 The book was apparently banned in Ireland as being a potential threat to happy marriage.

The Prince de Croÿ, who disapproved of her, says over and over again that it would not be possible to be prettier. Président Hénault, the Queen’s greatest friend, writes: “One of the prettiest women I ever saw.

The Queen having settled into a dreary little life with her unfashionable friends, gaiety and amusement centered on the King’s set and was led by his mistress. Besides all this, Louis XV was extremely attractive. He was tall and handsome, he had a most caressing look, a curious husky voice which nobody ever forgot who had once heard it, and a sexy moodiness of manner irresistible to women; the haughty air, which came in reality from shyness, in no way detracted from his charm.

The French loved their kings as the English never have, with an unreasoning love which was later to turn to an unreasoning hatred. The personality of the King of France was therefore of great importance.

They were like a huge family whose head was the King. They could do nothing, not even go to Paris for the day, or be inoculated against smallpox, certainly not arrange marriages for their children, without his express permission. Their privileges were enormous, and their power non-existent.

Louis XIV had practically lived in public, but Louis XV, more highly strung than his great-grandfather, arranged a suite of rooms for himself where he could be away from the crowd. This suite, though it consisted of fifty rooms and seven bathrooms, and was in itself like a country house, was known as the petits appartements; even the courtiers could only go there if they had the privilege of the grandes entrées or by invitation.

On the 10th September the Court returned to Versailles; and that same evening one of the royal carriages drove up to a side door. Madame de Pompadour got out of it, accompanied by her cousin Madame d’Estrades, and went quickly upstairs to an apartment which had been prepared for her. Next day the King supped there with her alone; her reign of nearly twenty years had begun.

They all wore thickly embroidered satin skirts over enormous panniers; short muslin sleeves; small white feathers, held in place on their lightly powdered hair with diamonds; and narrow trains.

As soon as the voyage to Choisy was over, it was time for the annual voyage to Fontainebleau. This word, voyage, simply meant that the King went from one of his houses to another. He was for ever on the move, though long journeys through beautiful France were almost unknown; he gyrated in the same little circle, Choisy, Marly, La Muette, Trianon, and later Bellevue, Crécy, St. Hubert, and Petit Trianon.

Twice a year, in July and October, the whole Court moved off, for six weeks at a time, to Compiègne for army maneuvers, and Fontainebleau for hunting; and that was indeed an upheaval in ce pays-ci. The royal family, courtiers, Princes of the Blood, and ministers got on to the road; followed by the state papers, archives, and a great deal of furniture, silver, and linen. The whole thing entailed enormous trouble and expense. The dates for these journeys were fixed by the King at Christmas and nothing but death could alter them.

Madame de Pompadour had her father to stay at Fontainebleau and, in spite of the fact that he was a real fish out of water at the Court, she was perfectly natural with him; the idea that she might be ashamed of him never crossed her mind. The King gave him a property called Vandières, and though Poisson himself said that nothing would induce him to change his name, at his age, Abel was henceforward known as M. de Vandières (avant hier, said the wags). In 1750 the King gave Poisson another estate, Marigny. Again the old boy refused to change his name, but Abel became M. de Marigny and in 1754 was made a Marquis. To save confusion I will call him Marigny from now on.

It was against Court etiquette to use any diminutive, or the second person singular, in the King’s presence, even brothers being obliged to say vous to each other. He had certainly never heard such a word as Frèrot in all his life. He himself called Abel petit frère and soon became extremely fond of him. The fact is that the King liked family life, and could hardly have enough of it. This the courtiers, who saw him so regal and terrifyingly aloof, could never understand. As for the bourgeois idiom of his mistress, he thought it quite delightfully funny, and very soon he was heard calling his daughters by the most outrageous nicknames: Loque for Madame Adélaïde, Coche for Madame Victoire, Chiffe for Madame Louise. Madame de Pompadour had nicknames for everybody all her life; her friends, her pet animals, even her houses were continually called by new names when she spoke or wrote of them.

Breezy, eccentric noblemen, so common in England, where they led an independent life on their own estates, were almost unknown in France. Certain members of the royal family were an exception. The Comte de Charolais was a ripsnorting oddity; he dressed like a gamekeeper and ordered his coachman to run over any monks he might see on the road, but he could afford such vagaries as he was a cousin of the King’s.

Whenever a fine piece of celadon or porcelain in the shape of a fish came the King’s way, he would buy it and have it mounted in ormolu for Madame de Pompadour; she signed her own engravings with a huge baroque fish, and Marigny took fishes as his coat-of-arms.

It was the custom for the King to address people by their names and titles; he would not, like everybody else, say Monsieur, when speaking to a man, or Monsieur de X when speaking of him, but always Comte de X.

Chat was the pastime of the age, cheerful, gossipy, joking chat, running on hour after idle hour, all night sometimes; and at this the Marquise excelled.

Sadly enough, the only thing that was not perfect in this relationship was its sexual side. Louis XV was a Bourbon, and had their terrible temperament, while Madame de Pompadour was physically a cold woman. She was not strong enough for continual love-making and it exhausted her. She tried to work herself up to respond to the King’s ardours by every means known to quackery, so terrified was she that he would one day find out her secret; but she began to make herself ill.

Altogether, and it was the great complaint against her, she was supposed to have cost the King thirty-six million livres (the Seven Years’ War cost 1,350 millions), but her various houses were built on his land and all but Ménars reverted to him at her death.

She was always terrified of losing him; she strained every nerve to keep up with him in all his activities, he so strong and she so delicate, and in the end it killed her. She had many miscarriages during the first years, which must have pulled her down and disappointed her, for she naturally longed to have a child with the King. Certainly she never rested enough after them—two days in bed, smelling delicious, is the most we hear of. The King would sup alone, or with one other friend, in her room on these occasions. Then the exhausting life began once more. Seldom in bed before two or three in the morning, she was obliged to be up again at eight, dressed as for a ball, to go to Mass in the unheated chapel. For the rest of the day, not one moment to herself. She must pay her court to the Queen, the Dauphine, and Mesdames, receive a constant succession of visitors, write sometimes as many as sixty letters, and arrange and preside over a supper party.

The four main pastimes were love, gambling, hunting, and the official entertainments. Love was played like a game, or like a comedy by Marivaux; it had, of course, nothing to do with marriage. Children, in those days, were married off in their teens, and these little husbands and wives usually grew up to be very fond of each other, sharing the same interests, absorbed in the family and its fortunes. Even if they did not like each other, which was rare, they could generally manage to get on, since good manners demanded that they should; it was quite unusual for a woman to go back to her father or into a convent because she could not bear to live with her husband. She had a lover, he had a mistress; everything was most friendly.

As in the Queen’s bedroom there was no chair for her visitors, who were therefore obliged to stand, whatever their rank, even if they were Princes of the Blood. In the whole history of France no other commoner had ever dared to behave thus,

Unfortunately, like so many of the rulers of France, Louis XV did not understand money at all. When he was younger he came back from Paris one day so horrified by the poverty and famine he had seen there that he immediately dismissed eighty gardeners. Then it was pointed out to him that these men and their families would die of starvation, so he took them back again. He had the irritating impression that he could never do right.

He knew his master well enough to know that this was final. Ministers who lost their jobs at that Court were always exiled, since the King did not care to see their gloomy, reproachful faces, with an implied, “I told you so,” when things went wrong. Nobody had ever been recalled. Maurepas, luckier than most, did return to Versailles; some twenty-five years later Louis XVI made him Prime Minister and was not well-advised in doing so.

Croÿ is full of admiration, but deplores the fact that Madame de Pompadour should have given the King “an unfortunate taste for expensive little things which cannot last.” This view was shared by the public. Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.

The death of Alexandrine was a crushing blow from which Madame de Pompadour never fully recovered. She felt that she had nothing to look forward to any more, that the future could only offer her old age and death. She longed more than ever for Marigny to found a family which would be an interest and a comfort to her and to whom she could leave her collections. But he wanted a love match—years later he made one, with disastrous results. Like many childless women, Madame de Pompadour now turned more and more to the minor but not unrewarding love of dogs and various other pet animals.

Alas, at this point Fate stepped in and settled the matter. Alexandrine was seized with “convulsions”—appendicitis almost certainly—at the convent where she was being educated, and died before her mother could get to her. She was ten years old (1754). Madame de Pompadour was so prostrated with grief that, the news coming at a critical moment for her, the doctors thought that she might herself collapse and die. The blow did kill old Poisson, who died four days later. Marigny, in spite of the fact that he was now the heir to his sister’s vast estate, was also beside himself with misery. The King, though he was, understandably, more worried for the mother than grieved about the daughter, was kindness and solicitude itself; he sat by Madame de Pompadour’s bed hour after hour and hardly left her for days. She rewarded him by pulling herself together as soon as she was physically capable of doing so, and resuming life as if nothing whatever had happened. In a few weeks she seemed quite unlike a bereaved mother. But four months later, at a performance, by the Comédie-Française, of Les Troyennes, she fainted dead away and could not be brought round for a long time; nobody could think why, until it was realized that a mother, in the play, had lost her daughter at that moment.

French architecture was very little affected by either the baroque or the rococo, and it was now moving to a new and even greater severity of line. Madame de Pompadour liked everything that was new and she foresaw that furniture and interior decoration would slowly but surely follow the architecture; she told her brother to bear this constantly in mind and to study all the classical remains that he could find. Cochin says that the Italian journey of M. de Marigny and his companions marked a turning point in French art; the turning point in fact from the style of Louis XV, all curves and arabesques, to what we call the style of Louis XVI, but which is also that of a long part of the reign of Louis XV, all straight lines and angles. From the acanthus leaf to the laurel.

In Mme. de Pompadour, Nancy discovered a heroine who was everything and nothing she admired. Although the leader of aristocratic society, the Marquise always remained true to her bourgeois origins. Unlike her aristocratic biographer, she despised the petty feuds and malicious gossiping which dictated court life. She truly loved Louis XV, much to Nancy’s surprise, and her sole ambition throughout their relationship was to make the King happy.

When Louis XIV decided, after the civil war known as the Fronde, to keep the great nobles under his eye and to rob them of power, he had cunningly played upon the French love of fashion and fun; all fashion and all fun were gathered together at Versailles. Parisian society, though very middle-class, hummed with life and could be enjoyed from time to time as a change from the Court; the provinces were unthinkable. The heaviest blow that could befall a man was banishment to his estates; this did not only mean loss of place and influence; the exile, condemned to live in the country, became ridiculous in the eyes of his friends.

While the Ile de France was like an enormous park or garden, containing thousands of glorious houses, rural France was a desert.

Versailles had remained unchanged since Louis XV’s great-grandfather, the Sun King, had reduced the French aristocracy to the level of serfs in silk. Every noble family in France, unless in exile or desperately poor, lived there under the King’s watchful eye.

The very next letter discret et fidèle was addressed à Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, à Etioles. It enclosed title deeds to an estate of this name and an extinct Marquisate revived in favor of Madame d’Etioles. Her new coat of arms, also enclosed in the same thrilling packet, was three castles on an azure ground.

A possible way would be an introduction through one of his body servants. These men, whose functions were handed down from father to son, whose families always ended by being ennobled, and who themselves employed between ten and twenty servants, were very important in the palace hierarchy. In some respects they had more influence with the King than any of his courtiers; he confided many things to them and was very fond of them.

Ever since the Marquis de Montespan had driven up to Versailles in a coach draped in black, with a pair of stag’s antlers wobbling about on its roof, the Kings had had a healthy respect for husbands and their possible reprisals.

The King was in love; he had seen enough of her by now to feel certain that she would never bore him, and she could soon be taught not to embarrass him. “It will amuse me,” he said, “to undertake her education.” Besides, she worshiped the ground he trod on, a fact to which no man can ever be quite indifferent.

The Court was always referred to, by those who belonged to it, as ce pays-ci, this country, and indeed it had a climate, a language, a moral code, and customs all its own. It was not unlike a public school and just as, at Eton, a boy cannot feel comfortable, and is, indeed, liable to sanctions, until he knows the names of the cricket eleven, various house colors, who may or may not carry an umbrella, or on which side of a street he may or may not walk, so, at Versailles, there were hundreds of facts and apparently meaningless rules which it would be most unwise to ignore.

There was a special salute for every woman at the Court, according to her own and her husband’s birth; the excellence of her housekeeping, the quality of her suppers, also entered into the matter. Variations of esteem were expressed in the curtsey. A movement of the shoulder practically amounting to an insult was a suitable greeting for the woman of moderate birth, badly married and with a bad cook, while the well-born Duchess with a good cook received a deeply respectful obeisance. Few women, even when brought up to it, managed this low curtsey with any degree of grace. The most ordinary movements, the very look and expression, were studied as though on a stage; there was a particular way of sitting down and getting up, of holding knife, fork, and glass, and above all of walking. Everybody could tell a Court lady from a Parisian by her walk, a sort of gliding run, with very fast, tiny steps so that she looked like a mechanical doll, wheels instead of feet under her panniers.

Madame d’Etioles would have to learn the relationships of all the various families, who was born what, married to whom, and ennobled when. The two different sorts of nobility, the noblesse de robe and the old feudal aristocracy, must be clearly distinguished and their connections known. This was becoming complicated because the old nobility, unable to resist the enormous fortunes of the new, had swallowed its pride and married wholesale into plebeian families.

The look and general demeanor must be happy. Cheerfulness was not only a virtue, but a politeness, to be cultivated if it did not come naturally. If people felt sad or ill or anxious they kept it to themselves and showed a smiling face in public; nor did they dwell on the grief of others after the first expression of sympathy.

When the Court was campaigning the Maréchal des Logis allotted rooms. On certain doors he would write: pour le Duc de X whereas others would merely get: le Duc de X; people would do anything to have the pour.

There was a running feud between the French Dukes and the princely families of the Empire, who, their estates having at one time or another, by conquest or marriage, passed to France, were now French subjects. (Prince, unless of royal blood, is no more a French title than it is an English one.)

Richelieu then struck. He gave orders that no properties were to be taken from Les Menus, that none of their workmen, or musicians, were to be employed, by anybody whatsoever, without a chit signed by himself. The musicians, who received this warning on their way to a rehearsal, rushed to his office to ask for further instructions; they were plainly told that they must work no more for Madame de Pompadour. M. de la Vallière then went round to protest; the terrible Duke merely made a gesture which indicated that, as indeed everybody knew already, he was very friendly with Madame de la Vallière. The Marquise now entered the fray. What she said to the King is not known, but that evening, while his hunting boots were being pulled off by Son Excellence, the King asked him how many times he had been to the Bastille? “Three times, Sire.” That was all, but it was enough. The Duke was obliged to take the hint and to reverse the orders he had given.

The Théâtre des Petits Cabinets lasted for five years, after which it became too much for Madame de Pompadour and she gave it up. During this time a total of 122 performances was given of sixty-one different plays, operas, and ballets. They were rehearsed until they could not be improved, even the most acid critics of the Marquise being obliged to state that never did any performance fall below first-class professional standards, and that she herself was entire perfection in all of them.

The King adored his children, especially the daughters. Between him and the Dauphin relations were apt to be rather strained. The jealousy which monarchs often feel for their heirs came between them; besides, they were too near in age and too different in character to be great friends. The Dauphin was a prig; he disapproved of his father’s morals and mode of life, and made his disapproval felt.