Read Online Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford - Free Book Online Page B

without the possible disappointments and weariness of fulfilment. The rest was good for her after all her recent emotions; she only ever felt really well in the country, where she could keep reasonable hours and live on a milk diet. To one so devoted to her family the company was perfect; she had her parents with her as well as Abel and M. de Tournehem. Madame Poisson was ill, getting worse every day; but extremely courageous and sustained by the joy she felt at her daughter’s new position. The baby, Alexandrine, was out at nurse in a nearby village where her mother often went to see her. Another relation staying in the house was a widowed cousin of Le Normant d’Etioles, the Comtesse d’Estrades; this young woman belonged to a rather better society than the Poissons and was inclined to show off about it. She was already great friends with Babet la Bouquetière. Madame d’Etioles looked up to her, admired her and thought her in every way perfect; they were each other’s confidantes and bosom darlings.
    Voltaire wrote and suggested himself. ‘I have your happiness at heart, more perhaps than you imagine, more than anybody else in Paris. I’m not speaking now as an ancient old lady-killer, but as a good citizen when I ask you if I may come to Etioles and say a word in your ear, this month of May.’ He stayed, off and on, most of the summer, in one of those good-tempered moods the charm of which comes to us down the ages, making it impossible not to love him. He wrote to Président Hénault, from Etioles: ‘At her age she has read more than any old lady of that country where she is going to reign and where it is so desirable that she should reign.’ The
philosophes
were naturally enchanted that their young friend and admirer should queen it at Versailles; they counted perhaps on a little more protection than they got from her. When she first arrived there she was not powerful enough to stand up to the Jesuits and later on she rather changed her views about the
philosophes
and their revolutionary ideas. All the same, without her, they would have fared much worse than they did.
    This charming house party was not without various excitements as the long summer days went by. Collin, a young lawyer, said to have a dazzling career in front of him, came from Paris with a deed of separation between Le Normant d’Etioles and his wife. It had been effected, by decree of the Parlement, at six o’clock one morning; there was no publicity. D’Etioles was away, as usual, on some interminable journey to do with M. de Tournehem’s business. A few months later, Reinette asked Collin if he would give up his practice and devote himself to looking after her affairs; she told him to think it over well, as, should the King get tired of her, he would find himself out of a job. He took the risk, and never regretted having done so.
    Every day a courier arrived from the Grande Armée with one or two letters from the King:
à Madame d’Etioles à Etioles
, sealed with the motto
discret et fidèle
. One night a powder magazine blew up at the nearby town of Corbeil; there was a tremendous bang and the drawing-room door was blown in. Was it an omen? 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 favour of Reinette. Her new coat of arms, also enclosed in the same thrilling packet, was three castles on an azure ground. Voltaire and Bernis wrote poems for the occasion in which Etioles and Etoiles were synonymous and Pompadour rhymed with Amour; everything was as merry as a marriage bell.
    The King too was enjoying himself. He slept on straw, sang ditties with his soldiers in his curious loud cracked voice, all out of tune, and wrote his letters to Etioles on a drum. The campaign went very well; Ghent was taken and Fontenoy was a resounding victory. This battle is supposed to be the classic illustration