The Bourbon Kings of France (20 page)

During the Fontenoy campaign, Louis had written every day to Mme d’Etioles; one letter contained the patent creating her Marquise de Pompadour. Meanwhile the Abbé de Bernis, a man of fashion, was instructing her in the mysteries of court etiquette. (Though many years later, Talleyrand heard that she never quite lost her ‘vulgar accent and gauche manner’.) Upon the King’s triumphant return to Versailles in September 1745 she was presented to the Queen by the Princesse de Conti (in return for the payment of her gambling debts), in Louis’s presence—he was red with embarrassment. The Queen greeted the new favourite with unexpected kindness. Mme de Pompadour was so agitated that, when taking her glove off, she broke her bracelet. Overcome, she told her lover’s wife with deep emotion that she would do her best to please her.

The favourite certainly succeeded in pleasing Louis. Besides organizing every sort of party and diversion, she kept him amused with such toys as private theatricals. A minute playhouse, with room for only fourteen spectators, was erected at Versailles, the first performance taking place in 1747; the play was Molière’s
Tartuffe
, which Louis thoroughly enjoyed. Later, the theatre was enlarged to hold over forty. More than sixty plays and operas were presented by the
Théatre des Petits Cabinets
before its creator brought it to an end in 1752, including works by such fashionable writers as Voltaire and Crébillon. The favourite chose the plays with great care, the King having a peculiar dislike of tragedies, preferring comedies with happy endings. The operas were those of Lully, Rameau and de Campra. There were also performances of sacred works—
motets
by Lalet and Mondonville. On one occasion Louis was so pleased by the little orchestra that he gave the musicians gold snuff boxes bearing his portrait. In the plays, however, the actors were all amateurs, consisting of Mme de Pompadour and her friends. Only very favoured members of the court were invited to the theatre.

Later, long after Mme de Pompadour’s death, Louis commissioned his favourite architect, Jacques Ange Gabriel, to build a full-sized theatre at Versailles; it was known as Gabriel’s Opéra. Less well known, perhaps, is another of the King’s commissions, the cathedral at Versailles which was begun by Mansard de Sagonne in 1743. In addition Louis slowly converted Versailles to suit his passionate desire for privacy, constructing the famous
petits appartements
on the upper floors of the right wing, overlooking the Marble Courtyard, and reached by secret staircases; the palace became a ‘rat’s nest’ of little flats. But at the same time he also redecorated the salons and great state rooms in the new Rococo style, supervising the redecoration, with almost unbelievably graceful results. His alterations at Fontainebleau were even more drastic. The Ecole Militaire and the Place de la Concorde (both by J A Gabriel) are also his creations—originally the latter was the Place Louis XV.

His mistress shared the King’s mania for building, landscape gardening and the decorative arts. She has been described as ‘undoubtedly the key to an understanding of French taste in the first half of the eighteenth century. She gave it just that exquisitely graceful and feminine touch which still fascinates us today.’ Her houses were fabled for their elegance and beauty—notably the châteaux of La Celle, and of Bellevue, and the Hôtel d’Evreux (now the Elysée and the home of the Presidents of France); she also built ‘hermitages’ at Versailles and Fontainebleau. The prosperity of the state porcelain factory at Sèvres owed a good deal to her influence. Nancy Mitford wrote of her, ‘Few human beings since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things.’ Perhaps the most fitting monument to the friendship—one might almost say partnership—between Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour is the delicious little palace which he built for her in the gardens of Versailles, but which she did not live to see completed—the
Petit Trianon
.

Mme de Pompadour made the King aware of a new world of intellectuals, bringing him into contact with men like her doctor, François Quesnay, who was a pioneer economist and founder of the Physiocrats. She admired the period’s leading thinkers, the
Philosophes
, who returned her admiration; when she died, d’Alembert said, ‘She was one of us,’ and Voltaire went into mourning. But she failed to make a
Philosophe
of Louis XV, who although not without intellectual tastes—he amassed a fine library of scientific books, collected rare manuscripts, and spent much time in his laboratory—did not care for the new ideas. None the less, he cannot have objected to her patronage of men like Rameau.

One must not overlook the King’s own patronage. He jealously protected his Academie des Beaux Arts, giving the best pupils bursaries to study in Rome at the French Academy in the Palazzo Mancini. He also attended the annual exhibitions in the Salon Carée of the Louvre. As a leading authority on eighteenth-century French art (Alvar Gonsalez Palacios in
Il Luigi XV
, Milan 1966) tells us, ‘Louis XV himself could always recognize what was best in the art of his time. He could see talent even when it was accompanied by impertinence, as in the case of the painter Quentin La Tour’ [who was rude and half-crazy]. The King also took special pains to help Boucher whose paintings still convey so much of the reign’s atmosphere. Louis commissioned furniture from such masters as Oeben and Riesener, taking a keen interest in its manufacture, which sometimes took years. In addition he watched with pleasure the progress of the new state porcelain factory which had been founded in 1738 (at Vincennes—later it moved to Sèvres) as a rival to Meissen.

Mme de Pompadour was not strong, and after some years began to find Louis’s physical demands exhausting. She tried such aphrodisiacs as hot rooms, chocolate and truffles, and even celery soup, but to no avail; her lover said unkindly that she was ‘as cold as a coot’. In 1752 she therefore took the dangerous step of ceasing to sleep with him, relying on the indispensability of her companionship. She knew that so long as the King had his ‘Deer Park’ he would bed with illiterate girls who only interested him with their bodies, and ought therefore to be immune from the charms of any lady of the court. She had nothing to do with the Park, but prudently did nothing to discourage Louis in his use of it. Most unjustly it earned her the epitaph,

(Here lies a maid for twenty years, a whore for fifteen and a procuress for seven.)

The
Parc aux Cerfs
has given rise to pleasurable legends of naked young women being hunted through the woods by the King and his hounds. Carlyle writes zestfully of, ‘a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works of men, daily dragging virgins into thy cave’, Michelet of ‘an infamous seraglio of children whom he bought’. In reality, the Park was a modest house in the town of Versailles which discreetly procured healthy young women of the people for His Most Christian Majesty’s pleasure; many wealthy men of the period kept similar private brothels. The girls were engaged by Louis’s valet, Lebel, and brought to a little flat in the palace known as the ‘Bird Trap’; if they gave satisfaction they were then boarded—seldom more than one at a time—at the Park under the supervision of the house-keeper, Mme Bertrand. They were nearly always professional prostitutes with only their youth and beauty (and health) to recommend them. The most famous was Louise O’Murphy, whose posterior was immortalized by Boucher; she stayed at the Park for four years until she was dismissed for making an impertinent remark about Mme de Pompadour; the King arranged a good marriage for her. Before going to bed, Louis would sometimes make his little whores kneel down with him and they would say their prayers. Rumours about the establishment spread all over Paris and it was said that just as every man descends from Adam, so every Frenchman would descend from King Louis XV. Probably Louis sired no more than twenty bastards at most.

Otherwise, the King’s private amusements were far from sordid. It was the world of
fêtes champêtres
and
commedia dell’ arte
revels of the sort painted by Boucher and Fragonard, of picnics in Elysian parks, of Venetian carnivals, of parties on the water in gondolas, of balls in lamplit woodland glades where the court wore masks and dominoes and dressed as Pan and Flora, as Pierrot and Columbine. Louis loved music and adored dancing—pleasure has never been more elegant than it was in his reign. One bitter winter Mme de Pompadour had her flowerbeds filled with porcelain flowers while the air was sprayed with summer scents.

None the less, life at court was still stately and much of court etiquette remained unchanged until the Revolution. Even so, Louis XV’s timetable was very different from that of Louis XIV. Although he slept in his great-grandfather’s bed, instead of rising at the same hour every day he often slept long, telling his valet when to wake him; alternately he rose very early, before the servants, and lit his own fire. Having washed, shaved and dressed—he was scrupulously clean—he breakfasted on fruit and black coffee. He no longer used a
chaise percée
in public but had a modern, private
cabinet
with one of the new English water-closets. Council meetings, audiences and Mass occupied the morning, until he dined in public, by himself at a square table; unlike Louis XIV he ate with a knife and fork. He drank copiously but not heavily; his wines were usually burgundy or champagne (as Governor of Guyenne, the Duc de Richelieu once brought him the finest bordeaux obtainable, but the King merely sipped it, muttering ‘drinkable’, and never touched it again).

In the afternoon Louis hunted or shot; out of season he walked or went for a hard gallop. He killed on average over 200 stags a year, besides many wolves and wild boar, frequently exhausting his huntsmen and grooms. Violent physical exercise was essential to his wellbeing, though another reason why he, and indeed all Bourbons, were so passionately addicted to hunting may have been that it offered a chance of being by oneself and behaving naturally. There was a softer side to hunting which is often overlooked—ladies following the hounds down woodland rides in fast little phaetons, and the delightful hunt breakfasts painted by van Loo. Perhaps the greatest of all French sporting artists was discovered by Louis—Jean Baptiste Oudry, from whom the King commissioned a dazzling series of tapestries, ‘The Royal Hunts of Louis XV’.

Like most Bourbons, Louis liked working with his hands. Sometimes he would spend a whole day toiling with his gardeners. He was an expert silversmith and at Marly in 1738 made a pair of candlesticks. He also turned ivory.

In the evening the King joined the Queen and the Royal family at supper, after which—having a true Bourbon appetite—he would often slip away and eat a second supper with his mistress. Then he might drive to Paris to go to the opera, to dance masked at one of the public balls, or to visit a brothel. Sometimes he stayed at home, giving little supper parties, playing cards and making coffee into the small hours of the morning; frequently his pages fell asleep on his bed waiting for the
Coucher
. As soon as they had left him, Louis, who did not even bother to undress, would jump out of the state bed and join his mistress by a secret staircase.

Frequently the King was away from Versailles. He spent much time at Compiègne, Marly, Rambouillet, La Muette, Fontainebleau, moving about to escape from his awful boredom. When he went to inspect the fleet at Le Havre in 1749, he travelled all night and hunted all day, exhausting his entourage. He was always escorted by his hunt staff and by a special bodyguard of the Black and the Grey Musketeers; at Rambouillet 500 persons had to be housed on each visit. Louis understood little about money; once, hearing that the poor were starving, he sacked eighty gardeners, but took them back when it was explained to him that as a result they too would starve.

Although the King far preferred women’s company, he had his male cronies, some being lifelong friends. Among them were the Duc d’Ayen (a Noailles and a soldier) and the Comte de Coigny, who was killed in a duel over a card dispute in 1749. From his youth these two accompanied Louis everywhere, were invariably invited to his little supper parties, and escorted him on the nocturnal expeditions. Other men friends were the Duc de Vallière (one of the better French soldiers of the reign and a gunnery expert), and the rather silly Duc de Penthièvre, a bastard Bourbon who was Grand Huntsman of France, and whose lovely château of Saint Leger was frequently borrowed by the King. Ayen, Vallière and Penthièvre all had the misfortune of outliving their master and of surviving until the Revolution.