"Madame de Pompadour was not merely a grisette, as her enemies
attempted to say, and as Voltaire repeated in one of his malicious
days. She was the prettiest woman in Paris, spirituelle, elegant,
adorned with a thousand gifts and a thousand talents, but with a
sort of sentiment which had not the grandeur of an aristocratic
ambition. She loved the king for himself, as the finest man in the
kingdom, as the person who appeared to her the most admirable.
She loved him sincerely, with a degree of sentimentalism, if
not with a profound passion. Her ideal had been on arriving at
the court to fascinate him, to keep him amused by a thousand
diversions suggested by art or intellect, to make him happy and
contented in a circle of ever-changing enchantments and pleasures.
A Watteau-like country, plays, comedies, pastorals in the shade,
a continual embarking for Cytherea, that would have been the
setting she preferred. But once she had set foot on the shifting
soil of the court, she could only realize her ideal imperfectly.
Naturally obliging and good-hearted, she had to face enmity open
and concealed, and to take the offensive to avoid her downfall.
Necessity drove her into politics, and to become a minister of
state. Madame de Pompadour can be considered as the last king's
mistress, deserving of the name. The race of the royal mistresses
can then be said, if not ended, to have been at least greatly
broken. And Madame de Pompadour remains in our eyes the last
in our history, and the most brilliant."