portfolio of foreign affairs, and who was one of Madame de Pompadour’s
favorites, was charged with drawing up the treaty. “Notwithstanding
his first objections as a man of sense, he did not long resist the
general movement which carried away all who surrounded him; he was
dazzled, and thought he was contributing to the greatest political
operation that had been attempted since Richelieu. At first everything
seemed to succeed as well as could be desired, and the new alliance so
highly vaunted at court seemed to be taken even better still by the
public.”[50] The Marquise triumphed. She amused herself by engraving
on an agate in onyx an allegory, which represented France and Austria
joining hands above the altar of Fidelity, and trampling under foot the
mask of Hypocrisy and the torch of Discord.
At the start, people were full of enthusiasm and confidence. The victor
of Mahon was esteemed as successful in war as in love. Nothing was
dreamed of but mighty feats and conquests. But presently all took on
a gloomy look. The convention of Closter-Seven, so imprudently signed
by Marshal de Richelieu on September 8, 1757, was the signal for
unnumbered catastrophes. “One does not die of grief,” wrote Bernis to
Choiseul, December 13 of the same year, “for I am still alive after
September 8. Since that epoch, faults have been accumulated in a
fashion one can hardly explain, without supposing bad intentions. I
have spoken with the greatest force to God and His saints. I excite
pulses a little, and then the lethargy recommences; people open big
eyes, and that is all there is about it.... It seems to me as if I were
minister of foreign affairs in Limbo. Try, my dear count, if you can
excite more than I the spirit of life which is becoming extinct in
us; for my part, I have dealt all my great blows, and have concluded
to be in an apoplexy like the others over sentiment, without ceasing
to do my duty like a good citizen and an honest man.” The former abbé
of the court become a minister, the once superficial man whom Voltaire
used to call “Babet, the-bouquet-holder,” was indignant at the general
apathy and carelessness. “It is unexampled,” wrote this friend of
Madame de Pompadour, “that so great a game should be played with the
same indifference as a game of checkers.... Sensitive, and, if I dare
say it, sensible as I am, I am dying on the wheel, and my martyrdom
is useless to France.... May God send us some will or other, or some
one who will have one for us! I would be his valet de chambre if they
liked, and with all my heart.”
As soon as the struggle began, unfortunate France was amazed at
the illusions she had cherished. The truth appeared to her. Bernis
comprehended that the shortest follies are the best. January 6, 1758,
he wrote to Choiseul, then Ambassador to Vienna: “My advice would be to
make peace, and to begin by a truce on land and sea. When I shall know
what the King thinks of this idea, which I have not found in my manner
of thinking, but which has been presented to me by good sense, reason,
and necessity, I will inform you. Meanwhile, try to make M. de Kaunitz
certain of two things that are equally true; namely, that the King will
never abandon the Empress, but that it will never do for him to be
ruined with her. Our respective faults have made a hopeless wreck of a
great project which was infallible in the first days of September. It
is a beautiful dream which it would be dangerous to carry further, but
which it might some day be possible to resume with better actors and
better combined military plans. The more directly I have been charged
with this grand alliance, the more ought people to credit me when I
counsel peace.”
Unfortunately, Madame de Pompadour was headstrong, which is one of the
attributes of mediocrity of mind. Confounding heroism with obstinacy,
she thought that to struggle indefinitely against ill fortune, was to
display greatness of soul. The more faults a general of her choice
committed, the more inveterately did she uphold him. She was like those
gamesters who are checked by no ill luck, and who never give up playing
until they are ruined. Public opinion condemned such obstinacy. The
French do not know how to support reverses. They overwhelmed Soubise,
defeated at Rossbach, with sarcasms, and appeared to be infatuated with
the victor. People took the fashion of exalting Frederick the Great
and of cursing his enemy, Madame de Pompadour, Cotillion IV., as she
was called. Soubise was the scape-goat on whom rained all the jests,
chansons, and satires:--
“Soubise dit, la lanterne à la main,
J’ai beau chercher, où diable est mon armée?
Elle était là pourtant hier matin,
Me l’a-t-on prise où l’aurais-je égarée?
Ah! je perds tout, je suis un étourdi;
Mais attendons au grand jour, à midi.
Que vois-je? O ciel! Que mon âme est ravie!
Prodige heureux, la voilà, la voilà!--
Ah! ventre bleu! Qu’est-ce donc que cela?
Je me trompais, c’est l’armée ennemie.”[51]
It is not by means of chansons that France can retrieve herself. She
plays into the enemy’s hand by showing herself more Prussian than
Prussia. Bernis finds himself submerged by this deluge of criticisms
and assaults. “I am threatened by anonymous letters,” he wrote again to
Choiseul in 1758, “with being presently torn to pieces by the people,
and though I do not greatly fear such menaces, it is certain that
approaching misfortunes which cannot be foreseen, could easily realize
them. Our friend runs at least as much risk.” Ill in body and mind,
Bernis could hold out no longer; he handed in his resignation. Louis XV
accepted it in a letter dated October 9, 1758, which opened thus: “I am
sorry, Monsieur the Abbé-Count, that the affairs you are charged with
affect your health to such a point that you can no longer support the
burden of the work.... I consent with regret to your turning over the
foreign affairs to the hands of the Duke de Choiseul, whom I think to
be at present the only suitable person, as I am disinclined to make an
absolute change in the system I have adopted, or even to be spoken to
about it.”
The three women in coalition against Frederick,--Maria Theresa, Empress
of Austria, Elisabeth, Empress of Russia, and Madame, the Marquise
de Pompadour--carried the war as far as possible. France experienced
nothing but reverses in every quarter of the globe. As Voltaire
remarked, it seemed more exhausted of men and money by its union
with Austria than it had been by two centuries of war against that
country.[52] It must be admitted, however, that Madame de Pompadour’s
obstinacy was very near succeeding. It is incredible that the King
of Prussia, who stood alone on the continent against the forces of
Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and half of the Empire, could long
have maintained so gigantic a struggle. An unforeseen event, the death
of the Empress Elisabeth of Russia, January 6, 1762, saved him. Madame
de Pompadour felt that her vengeance was eluding her. It was necessary
to renounce all ideas of glory and conquest, and to sign the disastrous
treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg (February 10 and 15, 1763). Louis
XV. gave up the cities he still possessed in Germany. He restored
Minorca to England, and ceded to it Acadia, Canada, Cape Breton, the
gulf and river of Saint Lawrence, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominique,
Tobago, and the Senegal River with its factories. He only regained his
Indian colonies on condition of not fortifying or garrisoning them.
Finally he undertook to demolish anew the harbor of Dunkirk. The ruin
of military prestige, commerce, the navy, and public credit, the loss
of two hundred thousand men, several millions of money, and nearly all
the colonies,--such is the balance sheet of the fatal war so ardently
desired by the Marquise.
Voltaire had good reason to exclaim: “What was the result of this
innumerable multitude of combats the tale of which now wearies even
those conspicuous in them? What remains from all these efforts? Nothing
but blood shed vainly in waste and desolate lands, villages in ruins,
families reduced to beggary, and rarely does even a dull rumor of these
calamities reach as far as Paris, always profoundly occupied with
pleasures or equally frivolous disputes.” Then, returning to the cause
or rather to the pretext of the strife, the author of the _Siècle
de Louis XV._ says again: “It has been thought that it would have
been very easy to prevent such misfortunes by coming to terms with the
English concerning a small contested ground near Canada. But certain
ambitious persons, to maintain their dignity and render themselves
necessary, precipitated France into this fatal war. The same thing had
occurred in 1741. The self-love of two or three persons was enough to
lay all Europe waste. France needed peace so greatly that she regarded
those who concluded it as benefactors of the country.” The Duke de
Choiseul remained popular because he had been able to palliate somewhat
the impression caused by such reverses by concluding, in August, 1761,
the family pact between the Bourbons of France, Spain, and Italy, and
had also had tact enough to win the support of the fashionable literary
men, the arbiters of renown. But his friend, Madame de Pompadour, was
the object of public vindictiveness. Wounded in her ambition, her
vanity, and her pride, she could not be consoled.
XII
MADAME DE POMPADOUR AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
One day some one cited in presence of Louis XV. the example of
Frederick the Great, who admitted the philosophers in vogue and famous
men of letters to his intimate acquaintance. “That is not the way in
France,” said the King, “and as there are a few more wits and great
noblemen here than there are in Prussia, I should want a very big table
to gather them all around it.” And then he counted on his fingers:
“Maupertuis, Fontenelle, La Motte, Voltaire, Piron, Destouches,
Montesquieu, Cardinal de Polignac.” His attention was called to the
fact that he had forgotten D’Alembert and Clairant.--“And Crébillon,”
said he, “and La Chaussée!”--“And Crébillon the younger,” cried some
one; “he ought to be more amiable than his father; and then there are
the Abbé Prevost, the Abbé d’Olivet.”--“Very well,” replied Louis XV.,
“for twenty-five years all of that crowd would have dined or supped
with me.”
Madame de Pompadour, who was acquainted with the master’s dispositions,
would not have made advances to the philosophers had she not been
possessed by the passion for flattery. But how was she to resist
compliments so well turned as those of Voltaire? This man, who in
speaking of the Christian religion cried: “Crush the wretch!” kneeled
to a royal mistress while enlarging the boundaries of the most insipid
flattery. The censer which he wanted to banish from the churches
he seized in order to wave it respectfully before the alcove of a
Pompadour!
The Marquise had in her intimacy a man who never quitted her; this was
Doctor Quesnay, her familiar, her guest, her confident, her physician,
whom she had lodged just above her in an entresol of the château of
Versailles. This little entresol, rendezvous of the boldest innovators,
the most determined free-thinkers, the most ardent materialists,
was the secret workshop of the future Revolution, the laboratory
of disorder and destruction. There, talking, dining, declaiming,
conspiring together, one met men such as D’Alembert, the chief of the
Encyclopedists; Duclos, who said of the nobles who flattered him: “They
are afraid of us as robbers are of street lamps with reflectors”;
Helvetius, whose whole doctrine is summed up in this monstrous maxim,
last word of egotism and immorality: “Man being merely a sensitive
being should have but one object: the pleasure of the senses.”
Marmontel relates that the Marquise de Pompadour, unable to induce this
troop of philosophers to come down to her salon, came to their table
instead and chatted with them.
Doctor Quesnay, her physician, was one of those peasants of the Danube,
or better, to adopt a happy expression of the De Goncourts, one of
those courtiers of the Danube who cloak a refined cleverness under an
aspect of rudeness, and who live by the monarchy even while playing to
the republicans. Strange Brutuses, contraband Catos, whose beautiful
maxims can deceive none but simpletons! Rude democrats in appearance,
time-servers in reality, who are proud to dine with great people and
whose so-called dignity provokes a smile! Quesnay, this physical
confessor, knew both the strong and the weak sides of the Marquise.
He knew so well how to take her that he could quietly install in his
entresol, just above the favorite’s apartment, the first club, that
which agitated for the first time the downfall of the Church and the
monarchy.
Madame de Pompadour was full of coquetries and amiability for the most
dangerous adversaries of the old régime. La Tour’s pastel, which is at
the Louvre, represents her seated in an armchair, her left arm resting
on a table whereon are a globe and some books. The largest of these is
the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia, that great arsenal of impiety,
the prospectus of which had been launched by Diderot in 1750. Louis
XV., always undecided, at first tolerated the gigantic collection of
writings. Some years later (March, 1759) he revoked the privileges of
the editors. A royal declaration of unwonted violence appeared at the
same time against the authors, printers, publishers, and colporteurs
of writings aimed against religion and royal authority. Almost every
line proclaimed a death penalty. But a thousand means of eluding these
Draconian laws were found, and most frequently authority closed its
eyes.
Voltaire cried enthusiastically: “Long life to the ministry of the Duke
de Choiseul!”
Nevertheless, warnings were not lacking to the favorite. She saw as
clearly as Louis XV. himself the perils which the doctrines of the
Encyclopedia made imminent for all kings. Madame du Hausset relates
that a very curious anonymous letter was one day sent to the King and
his mistress. As the author was bent on accomplishing his purpose,
he had sent one copy to the lieutenant of police, sealed with this
address: _For the King_; one with these words: _To Madame de
Pompadour_, and still another to M. de Marigny. This letter, which
greatly affected Louis XV. and his Marquise, struck them all the
more forcibly because it was written in very respectful terms. Among
other remarkable passages it contained the following prediction: “The
Encyclopedists, under pretext of enlightening men, are sapping the
foundations of religion. All sorts of liberty depend upon each other:
the philosophers and the Protestants tend to republicanism as well
as the Jansenists. The philosophers attack the trunk of the tree,
the others some of its branches; but their efforts, without being
concerted, will some day bring it down. Add to these the Economists,
whose object is political liberty, as that of the others is liberty of
worship, and the Government may find itself in twenty or thirty years
undermined throughout and falling tumultuously into ruin.”
These prophecies of the coming Revolution are incessantly renewed
in the writings of one of the ministers of Louis XV., the Marquis
d’Argenson. It is he who writes in January, 1750: “Republicanism is
every day gaining on philosophic minds. People take an aversion to
monarchism through demonstration. In fact, it is only slaves and
eunuchs who aid monarchism by their false wisdom.” And on December
20 of the same year: “See how many philosophic writers there are
at present. The wind from England blows over this stuff. It is
combustible. Look at the style in which Parliament remonstrances are
written. These procureurs general of Parliaments, these State syndics,
would at need become great men. All the nation would take fire; the
nobility would gain the clergy, and then the third estate. And if
necessity should arise for assembling the States-General of the realm
to regulate the demands for money, these States would not assemble in
vain. One should be careful; all this is very serious.”
It must be owned that D’Argenson is a true prophet. Every day he
accentuates his sinister predictions. September 11, 1751, he writes:
“We have not, like the Romans, any Visigoths or Saracens who might
invade us; but the Government may experience a revolution. Consider
that it is no longer either esteemed or respected, and, which is worse,
that it is doing all that is needed to ruin itself. The clergy, the
army, the Parliaments, the people high and low, are all murmuring,
all detaching themselves from the Government, and rightly. Things
are going from bad to worse.” He returns to the charge September 9,
1752: “The bad effects of our government by absolute monarchy are
resulting in persuading France and all Europe that it is the worst of
governments.... A mild but inactive prince allows the abuses to grow
which were commenced by the pride of Louis XIV.; no reform when it
is necessary, no amelioration, appointments blindly made, prejudices
without inquiry; everything shows an increasing tendency toward
national ruin. Everything is falling into tatters, and private passions
are working underhand to ruin and destroy us.”
Is it not a curious thing to hear, forty years beforehand, the
first mutterings of the formidable tempest which was to engulf
everything,--nobility, clergy, Parliaments, monarchy? We are in the
year 1750. The archers have arrested, as a police measure, certain
vagabond children who were begging in Paris. Suddenly a rumor spreads
that abductions are multiplying and that no family is any longer in
security. Popular imagination is excited, overheated. People say that
in order to restore his wasted forces the kingly debauché takes baths
of children’s blood, like a new Herod. Madame de Pompadour, who has
been imprudent enough to come to Paris, has barely time to escape from
being torn to pieces. The people want to go to Versailles and burn
the château, built, as they say, at their expense. The exasperated
King says that hereafter he will not pass through Paris when going to
Compiègne. “What!” he cries, “shall I show myself to these villainous
people who say I am a Herod!” And to avoid entering thereafter the
capital of which he has conceived a horror, he establishes outside the
walls the road which is now called the path of the Revolt.
The tide of anger rises--rises incessantly against the favorite.
The people overwhelm her with curses; they call her the _King’s
hussy_. The daughters of Louis XV. designate her by a still more
vulgar name. In November, 1751, the Dauphin and Dauphiness, on their
way to Notre Dame, cross the bridge of the Tournelle. Some two thousand
women surround them. “We are dying with hunger!” they say. “Bread!
bread!” The Dauphiness trembles like a leaf. The Dauphin causes several
louis to be distributed. “Monseigneur,” say the women of the people,
“we do not want your money. It is bread we want. We love you much. Let
that wretch be sent away who is governing the kingdom and ruining it!
If we had hold of her, there would soon be nothing left of her but
relics.”
If such were popular impressions before the Seven Years’ War, it
is easy to comprehend what they must have been after the national
humiliations which overwhelmed unhappy France. Madame de Pompadour
thought she could remedy the immense unpopularity which pursued her
by flattering still more the philosophers who could blow the trumpet
of Renown for her. These singular patriots, who had celebrated the
glory of the victor of Rossbach as if he had been a Titus or a Marcus
Aurelius, asked only one thing to console them for the afflictions,
shames, and miseries of their country: a regular persecution against
the Jesuits. Madame de Pompadour was ready to follow Voltaire’s
disciples on to this ground. She might have hesitated if the Jesuits
had been her flatterers, if they had made a pretence of being her
dupes, if they had concluded to play a rôle of complaisance in the
comedies of her pretended repentance, if they had seemed to take her
for another Maintenon, for a mother in Israel. But she did not forget
that when, in 1756, she had been obliged to go to confession in order
to be eligible for an appointment as lady of the Queen’s palace, Père
de Sacy had refused her absolution, and that when the attempt was made
on the King, in 1757, Père Desmarets had nearly obliged her to leave
the court. Hence the Jesuits were condemned. A Parliament decree of
February 22, 1764, commanded that within eight days they should take
an oath not to live any longer according to their institute, to abjure
the condemned maxims, and to hold no correspondence with their former
superiors. “When the Jesuits were expelled,” says Chateaubriand, “their
existence was not dangerous to the State; the past was punished in the
present; that often happens among men; the _Provincial Letters_
had deprived the Company of Jesus of its moral force. And yet Pascal is
merely a calumniator of genius; he has left us an immortal lie.”
The great crime of the Jesuits was to have displeased the Marquise de
Pompadour. One saw holy missionaries, untiring apostles, illustrious
professors, men who had honored religion and science, old men
surrounded by the esteem of all honest people, driven from their
houses, deprived of all resources, expelled from France with a rigor
and injustice so cruel that certain philosophers thought they could
take up their defence in the name of humanity. Those Jesuits whom
Madame de Pompadour was driving out, Frederick the Great was to shelter
in his dominions. “They are the best priests I have ever known,” said
he. Catherine II. was to welcome them to her vast states and make use
of them in founding educational establishments.
Voltaire triumphed. “Ferney was the European court,” says Chateaubriand
again in his _Analyse raisonnée de l’Histoire de France_; “this
universal homage rendered to the genius who was sapping by redoubled
blows the foundations of society as it then existed, is characteristic
of the approaching transformation of that society. And nevertheless it
is true that if Louis XV. had caressed ever so slightly the flatterer
of Madame de Pompadour, if he had treated him as Louis XIV. treated
Racine, Voltaire would have abdicated the sceptre, he would have
bartered his power against a distinction of the ante-chamber, just as
Cromwell was momentarily ready to exchange the place he now holds in
history for the garter of Alix of Salisbury; these are mysteries of
human vanity.”
Madame de Pompadour had sought the eulogies of Voltaire; she obtained
them. From the moment when she persecuted the Jesuits she had a right
to his approbation. When she dies, the patriarch of Ferney will be
almost affected. He will write to Damilaville: “Consider, dear brother,
that true men of letters, true philosophers, should regret Madame
de Pompadour. She thought as she ought to; no one knows that better
than I. Truly, we have sustained a great loss.” And to Cardinal de
Bernis: “I think, Monseigneur, that Madame de Pompadour was sincerely
your friend, and if it be permitted me to go further, I think from
the depths of my rustic retreat that the King experiences a great
privation. He was loved for himself by a soul born sincere, who had
justness in the mind and justice in the heart.” Voltaire is always the
same. What he lacks is not simply religious faith, but the moral sense.
While the foundations of the monarchy were cracking on every side,
the patriarch of Ferney, that ancient courtier of noble lords and
sovereigns, was trembling with joy and pride. “All that I see,” he
wrote to M. de Chauvelin, April 2, 1762, “is sowing the seeds of a
revolution which will infallibly arrive, but which I shall not have the
pleasure of witnessing. The light is spreading so from place to place,
that it will burst out on the first occasion, and then there will be
a fine row. The young men are very lucky; they will see many things!”
Madman, who regretted not being destined to see the scaffolds of ’93!