Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (22 page)

Witnesses of the historic meeting would recall that the Madame de Pompadour greeted the forty-two-year-old queen with, “Madame, it is my most ardent desire to please you.” The queen was said to have later remarked that their conversation had been a “long one of twelve sentences.” From that point onward, it is unlikely they ever spoke more than a dozen lines again.

One of the royal ladies of the court who escorted the Madame de Pompadour to her audience with the queen that day was the Princess de Conti. The princess had been among the first to welcome her into the court. Yet her husband, the prince, had no interest in stroking the latest pussycat to hop onto his cousin’s lap. The Madame de Pompadour tried to win Conti’s favor, but none of her charm, no flattery, warmed him to her.

Members of the court noted he said very little to her, and when the prince did speak to Pompadour, he made clear what he thought of her; that no matter what her title, she was not a noblewoman. During a discussion that he and the king were having regarding the tensions with the Protestants, for which the Madame and her handmaid happened to be present, Pompadour said, “Do you never lie, Prince de Conti?” The prince responded, “Only on occasion… to ladies.”

In 1752, King Louis made a surprise announcement: He was going to bestow upon Madame de Pompadour the rank of duchess. The optics of the honorific meant that Pompadour continued to have a special place in the king’s heart. Pompadour was now able to sit at public supper and ceremonies with the king and queen. The king, it seemed, also hoped that the outwardly
exalted title might soften the realization for Pompadour that she was no longer his favorite in bed. His new favorite was at the very ceremony where Pompadour was made a duchess, but soon she, too, would be gone, with many, many more to follow.

From her window at the palace at Versailles, the newly appointed duchess watched them shuttled to a discreet entrance to the middle-aged king’s private chambers in ornate sedans carried by footmen and in carriages.
Petits oiseaux
, as they were known around the palace. Small birds. Being brought to his birdcage. To flutter about and land on him as she once did.

Madame Pompadour embarked on a new strategy to maintain her proximity to the king, by serving as adviser on affairs foreign and domestic. As long as she could chirp in his ear and he regarded her as indispensable, she would have respect and security. There was the training that her mother, clever as the four foxes, had given her: “Beauty, if it draws the man, does not suffice to hold him.…”

Pompadour disagreed with every bit of advice that Conti gave the king. Where the prince would advise the king to compromise with
parlement
and the Jansenists and the Protestants, she would remind the malleable and melancholy Louis XV that he was still the king and this was still his monarchy and that he should hold firm to the royal decrees made by him and his predecessors. She was supportive, if not a driving force, behind the king’s decision in 1755 to send in the musketeers and quash the parliamentary dissension with force.

She wasn’t in an especially merciful mood. The previous June of that year her own daughter, ten-year-old Alexandrine, had died of peritonitis off in a convent. Pompadour was not able to get away, but her ex-husband was with their daughter as she died. But there was more to her reasoning than a heart hardened by her
daughter’s death and the spectacle of girls not much older than her daughter being carted into the king’s bedroom.

Pompadour had worked hard to earn her place among the aristocracy, alongside the king. She had lately taken on the role of arranging for the illicit births of the king’s bastard children to occur as if they never happened. She wasn’t about to allow herself to be knocked off the summit of Olympus by a smug prince.

At every turn, she contradicted the prince and blocked the appointment of his friends and even his own chances for promotion. Toward the end of 1756 she supported the king’s decision not to put Conti in command of a French army near Prussia and she fully supported the king’s decision to strip Conti of his role overseeing the Secret du Roi and thereby undermine the prince’s chance to be installed as the king of Poland. Both were promises the king had made to the prince. Conti was furious.

“Because I have not given him the command, which in all likelihood will assemble on the lower Rhine,” the king remarked, “he says he is dishonored. This is a word one puts forward constantly nowadays, and which shocks me infinitely”—“shocks” meant to be received slathered in sarcasm. “Perhaps he will put some water in his wine.”

The hope that the public and all of the different political and religious factions had held when Conti was advising the king was quickly evaporating. Now, in the words of one official, “public discontent is everywhere. The estrangement and bullheadedness of
parlement
has become stronger than ever. Those who were the most disposed to submit have retracted. One talks only of murder and poisoning.… In short, there are nothing but complaints and murmurs and protests against the ministry. It is about Madame de Pompadour they complain the most.”

Then, with the start of the new year, on January 7, 1757,
came Damiens with his dagger. Within days of the savage show of the Damiens execution, a royal edict was declared, proclaiming death to “all those convicted of having written or printed any works intended to attack religion, to assail the royal authority, or to disturb the order and tranquility of the realm.” It was a decree that sounded as if it were dictated by the Duchess Pompadour herself.

Another explanation for why the king might have installed his cousin on the panel investigating Damiens may have been that in the event his mistress was correct in her suspicion that the prince was not to be trusted, Pompadour might at last have prevailed upon the king to keep the potential enemy close while she dispatched the lieutenant of the French police, Nicolas-René Berryer, and an agent with Protestant credentials now hired for the task, Jean-Frédéric Herrenschwand, to investigate the rumors of the prince’s involvement in the Protestant uprising allegedly brewing rapidly in the Bordeaux region.

In the early months of 1757, as that investigation began during the Damiens, Herrenschwand gained the trust of Jean-Louis Le Cointe, the Protestants’ chief diplomatic representative in Paris. It had been Le Cointe who had helped facilitate the meetings between Conti and Pastor Rabaut in the abandoned hotel along the waterfront. Herrenschwand got Le Cointe to confide in him.

Le Cointe revealed that he and Conti met almost daily and were in communication with English agents who had been sent to the region in that early part of 1757. According to Le Cointe, Conti had sent Rabaut a memoir outlining questions and plans for a revolt. Allegedly, Conti had told Le Cointe, “It is not uniquely for the people that I act, but also for myself. For the
moment that there are no longer any laws, the throne would be for the first occupant, and I have interest where the rights of my family are concerned.”

Le Cointe said that many in the south prepared to take up arms; that there had been a Protestant synod where a handful of pastors, Gibert and others, had committed they “were prepared to give the prince carte blanche.”

By June 1757, Herrenschwand had insinuated himself directly with Pastor Gibert: “I found him to be resolved and unshakable in his ideas. This miserable person even dared to tell me that he would defend them and that he was in a position to do so, having about four thousand well-drilled men who lack neither chiefs nor arms, and that if they were not successful, in his design, then he would decide to leave the kingdom with about fifteen thousand
religionnaires
; that all the arrangements for this departure had been taken beginning at the present. He defied whoever it might be to stop it given the measure by which it was assured.” The spy noted that Gibert never admitted direct contact with Conti.

Intelligence Herrenschwand gathered indicated that whatever correspondence Conti had sent to Rabaut, the pastor had destroyed, and for his part, Rabaut appeared uninterested in an armed revolt.

By mid-to late summer of 1757, Herrenschwand filed an ominous and what would prove prophetic report, which he sent to Paris. He stated that he was worried that Gibert had the ability to muster twenty thousand men with arms, and with help of an invading force, that would be difficult to suppress.

“I hardly dare say what I think,” the spy wrote before saying what he thought. “But there is every reason to believe, that the person in question has already made attempts on the exterior as he has made in the interior; many reasons make me suspect this. I hope
God wills that I am mistaken, but it is of the greatest consequence not to lose sight of this affair; of all the objects which should occupy the Government, this one seems to me to merit the most attention.

In separate correspondence he wrote in August, “That the Prince risked nothing; that no one could ever prove anything against him; that he had everything in order as much at home as abroad.… Ministers seemed to take pride in the fact that sooner or later the prince was going to change religion and in consequence unite all Protestants.”

On September 20, at the dinner hour, 135 sails of the British fleet were spotted off the coast of France. Eighteen warships, six frigates, two hospital ships. The fleet was observed near the Île-de-Ré, traveling south. Among the armada was the
Royal George
with one hundred cannon; the
Ramilies
, the
Neptune
, and the
Namur
, with a total of ninety cannon. British marines aboard totaled at least eight thousand. About 6 p.m. on that September twentieth, the fleet anchored just at the entrance to the Bay of Biscay, under the command of Jean-Louis Ligonier.

Ligonier had been raised in a French Protestant home. His family had left France when he was a boy because of the tyranny enacted upon them. It was Ligonier who had recommended to William Pitt, England’s minister of war, that the fleet approach France through Rochefort, just north of Bordeaux. Ligonier had solid intelligence that the port was vulnerable. He also had word from Gibert that he and his men were ready and had the support of a powerful prince.

Initially, the British assault could not have gone better for them or worse for the French. After having stayed anchored just outside the entrance to the bay throughout the twenty-first and the day of the twenty-second, that evening one portion of the fleet traveled into Biscay and anchored; then another group sailed in and anchored.

At 8 a.m. on the twenty-third, about eight ships leapfrogged from the rear directly toward Rochefort, stopping short of the Île-d’Aix, a small island fortress midway between the entrance of the bay and the mainland of Rochefort. Aix responded with only three hours of cannon fire before it surrendered. For the next six days the British fleet took prisoners at Aix and burned its military installations to the ground. With Rochefort’s outer defenses neutralized, Ligonier’s easy winning of the coast seemed guaranteed. But the fleet would never advance farther. On October 1, Ligonier pivoted his ships and their sails disappeared over the horizon.

In the weeks and months that followed, there was much introspection and postbattle analysis in Paris and London. The officials and citizens in each country wanted explanations. In England, the British demanded to know why their “elephant had labored to give birth to a mouse.” In France, the tenor of the inquiries came with pride, tempered by Versailles’s wish that not too many questions be asked.

For the French, Herrenschwand had proved to be the hero. Based upon the intelligence he had provided during those summer months, King Louis XV had dispatched six battalions of guards into the towns Gibert had indicated were inclined to rise up. The troops spent weeks confiscating arms and took up quarters in many of the homes. The French had taken the precautionary measures to snuff out the sparks before they could light something more explosive. The moves worked, though they might not have if the British fleet had not been delayed.

The “Secret Expedition” took time to get King George II’s approval. In fairness to the king, he was facing a cat’s cradle of military engagements in the region and this campaign, if pursued, would affect nearly all of them. The king was receiving petitions
for assistance from his ally, King Frederick II in Prussia, that he was running out of hands to fend off the Swedes and Russians. If the English didn’t help, Frederick said, he’d have no choice but to seek an alliance with the French. Not to mention Her Majesty’s troubles with the upstarts in the American colonies.