The Book of the Courtesans (24 page)

The air of casual comfort which the marquise exuded must have provided a balm
for Louis XV. An intensely private man for a king, he had lost his whole family
practically in the space of a week when his mother, father, and brother died
suddenly of diphtheria. It is said he was saved simply because his nurse would
not allow the doctors, whom she rightly distrusted, to treat him. Growing up
unprotected by either a mother or a father in the forbidding court of his great-
grandfather Louis XIV cannot have been easy, either. And to make matters worse,
after Louis XIV died, there were rumors that the regent, his great-uncle,
Philippe d’Orléans, duc de Chartres, had plotted to poison him. Though
the rumors were untrue—the regent was always kind to him and the young
Louis grew to love him—he was surrounded by those who believed what had
been said and cautioned him to be even less revealing than was usual at court.

Now here was Pompadour, who adored him and had stolen his heart, acting in a
more intimate manner than anyone dreamed possible at Versailles. When she used
affectionate nicknames for the members of her family, it shocked other members
of the court; but Louis laughed whenever he heard her call her brother “
Frèrot
” and soon adopted silly nicknames for his daughters,
calling Madame Adelaide “
Locque
” as in “rag,”
for instance, and Madame Victorie “
Coche
” as in “
Coach.”

Would Pompadour’s graciousness have led her to alter her habit of
familiarity had the king disliked it? Above all else, she wanted to please him.
But this question cannot be answered, if only because it betrays an ignorance
of the nature of what passes between lovers who are, as Louis and Pompadour
were supposed to be, meant for each other. Each one’s idiosyncrasies, as
well as virtues, are aligned fortuitously with the other’s needs and
desires. Thus, even being in the presence of the beloved is a delightful gift.
And in the case of Pompadour, who wanted to give more than carnal pleasures to
her lover, this alignment allowed her to perceive and respond to the king’s
needs, at times even before he himself knew what he lacked.

She would, for instance, watch his complexion carefully. Whenever his face grew
liverish and yellow, she knew that he was bored. Boredom had to be a serious
condition for him. Confined for years to his nursery, he would have associated
dullness with the loss of his parents, as well as the danger that reputedly
surrounded him. Whenever Pompadour saw this color arise, she was on alert to
divert him. Here, too, the lovers’ propensities were aligned. She read
widely and loved the theatre, painting, and architecture. Though among these
literature was the only interest Louis did not share with her, he benefited
greatly from what she read. Her library included a wide range of material,
everything from history to Voltaire’s philosophy to Racine’s plays to
paragraphs culled by censors from the court’s mail to the police reports
that were the equivalent of tabloids today. After her death, her brother
Marigny sold her library, which contained at her death
3
,
525
volumes. (He withheld only one book from the sale,
Représentations de M. de Lt. Général de Police de Paris sur
les Courtisanes à la Mode et les Demoiselles de Bon Ton
par une
Demoiselle de Bon Ton.) She could recite whole speeches from a number of plays
she knew by heart, and told Louis tidbits gleaned from less elevated sources
with great comedic skill. She was known to be funny.

Let us recall that since those who make us laugh tread a thin line, perilously
close to what might offend, humor requires a certain gracefulness. And the
other meaning of grace, which is generosity, plays an important role in this
respect, too. Witty remarks which proceed from a generous nature are more
likely to be well poised, balanced carefully between kindness and candor. The
wish is to tell the truth without wounding, or at least without inflicting a
wound that is too grave.

Which calls to mind the fact that Pompadour was not always allowed to be funny.
Understandably, given the losses Louis suffered during his childhood, he was
subject to morbid moods, periods when he brooded on death, which might be
sparked off by the slightest stimulus, even the sight of a cemetery from the
window of the royal coach as the lovers traveled through the countryside. We
can only guess that Pompadour must have tried to divert him from this
preoccupation because eventually she was forbidden to try to make the king
laugh on the occasions when he was dominated by such a mood. To have the
patience to allow her lover to retain his gloominess would be hard for a woman
who was by nature giving; yet clearly Pompadour was capable even of this.

Pompadour’s generous nature, which above all she aimed at the king, may
explain why Louis was known to open his purse strings more graciously with her
than anyone else at his court. The gifts that she gave him in return were more
than token; it was not only because she understood his nature but because she
possessed considerable skills of all kinds that she was able to amuse him so
successfully. Using the men and women of the court who had talent as actors or
dancers, altogether she organized
122
performances of
61
different plays. And since she herself had been
trained to act and sing by teachers from the Comédie-Française, more
often than not she also played the major female parts. Once, she even took on
the leading masculine role. It was after seeing Pompadour perform the role of
the prince in
The Prince de Noisy
that Louis leaped onto the stage and
embraced her, saying, “You are the most delicious woman in France.”

Because of her theatrical success, plans for a theatre to be built at
Versailles were drawn up. Though it was only finished after her death, during
the rest of her life, all of which she lived at Versailles, she and the king
had many conferences with the architect, the famous Gabriel, over the design.
One of the activities that usually proved to keep the king from turning yellow
was architecture. He loved to watch buildings as they went up and rooms as they
were decorated, redecorated, and then decorated all over again. His interest
started young, and perhaps it was also connected to loss. Soon after Louis lost
his immediate family, the regent moved the seat of government to Paris, taking
the young king with him to the Tuileries Palace. By the time the court returned,
Louis was fourteen years old, and so enamored of Versailles that he spent days
wandering around the property admiring its architecture and Lenôtre’s
famous gardens. History has bequeathed us a legendary scene of the young king
lying for hours on the floor of the Hall of Mirrors while he focused his
attention on the ceiling.

Louis and Pompadour spent a great deal of time making the rounds between one
royal palace or another, as well as visiting the many houses that Pompadour had
steadily acquired during her reign. Thus, in addition to her hand in the
constant building at Versailles, she supervised the redecorations at
Fontainebleau, Choisy, and Marly, and she also spent considerable time
supervising work at her own houses—among them, the Hermitage at
Versailles, her house at Crècy, a house called Montretout, another called
La Celle, as well as Province, Bellevue, and the Hôtel d’Evreux, which
would one day become the Palais Elysée (currently the official residence
for all the presidents of France). She embellished each house with great care,
arranging for fifty orange trees here, painted decorations by Loo there; a
series of painting by Boucher linked together with garlands of wood carved by
Verberckt adorned one room at Bellevue; walls of white and gold or bright
pastel enamel in colors invented by the Martin family were everywhere; and all
her houses were well ornamented by objects that she chose or even commissioned,
an ormolu lantern decorated with flowers of Vincennes china, screens of
amaranthus wood, Dresden candlesticks, a dovecote on a column. The list is very
long. After her death, it took lawyers one year simply to make an inventory.

The public, understandably angry at the expense, complained. As did various
ministers at court, especially Maurepas, who blamed the naval defeats he
commanded on expenditures, the cost of which he implied should have gone to buy
battleships. But the marquise’s appetite mirrored Louis’ need for
divertissement and so the incessant building continued.

As for what remains from this period of decadence, we can only be grateful, for
we have all inherited it. There is, to begin with, the simple matter of a
patronage that produced so much. Pompadour was generous in her support of the
arts, giving a sinecure to Voltaire at Versailles, and continuing his pension
even after, feeling spurned by the king, he wrote verses maligning her;
sponsoring a play by Crébillon and making certain not only that it was
performed at the Comédie-Française, but that it was a success there.
By the time of her death she owned hundreds of paintings, all of which had been
paid for, a fact which many in the royal family and the aristocracy could not
claim. Perhaps the years when she was young and her father was out of the
country, a time during which she and her mother lived in poverty, gave her a
sensitivity to the material needs of artists that those who are born to
abundance sometimes lack.

In this she had combined two attributes of the Graces, the ability of the muse
to inspire art and the generosity to support it. In addition to many other
artists, she made certain that Boucher, her own official painter, was well
housed and fed while suggesting projects to him and winning him many
commissions. At her request, the king established the now famous factory at
Sèvres for the production of porcelain vases and china for which Boucher
produced many designs. And through her brother Marigny, who by her influence
with the king had been made the Superintendent de Bâtiments (or as we
would say it today, Beaux-Arts), she saw that Boucher was appointed director of
design for the manufacture of Gobelins tapestries.

Working with her brother again, she initiated and supervised many of the
monuments that characterize the city of Paris as we know it today, which would
hardly be the same without the restoration of the Louvre, or the building of
the Ecole Militaire, or Gabriel’s designs for the Place de la Concorde and
Soufflot’s for the Panthéon. And though she died before its completion,
it was her vision that gave us one of the prettier buildings at Versailles,
the Petit Trianon.

By the light of this legacy, we can perhaps see that within Pompadour’s
understanding of her lover lies an understanding of human nature. A nature that
responds well to what she left us, hungering not only for the bread but for the
grace, too, that is our common birthright.

KLONDIKE KATE

Satiety

(THE SIXTH EROTIC
STATION)

N
OW THAT HE’S
flush and has his own
rooms and his own claw-footed tub, he can bathe to his heart’s content,
before he puts on the shirt he paid to have starched and ironed, and the shiny
leather shoes and new wool suit he bought for himself on his last trip to San
Francisco. He wants to look his best when he goes to the Palace Grand Theater.
He’s been planning this night for months, ever since his claim came in.
Though he’s seen it a hundred times, he does not want to be late for
Kate’s show. But even so, just as he starts to leave, when he notices a bit
of dirt under his thumbnail, he stops to scrub it out. Although she has never
complained at all about his grubby appearance whenever he came in tired from
the digs and sat drinking with her, she might feel differently now that she is
going to take him upstairs.

He is glad to see the show again because it gives him time to anticipate
and dream, to build up to a private finale. Though he doesn’t fool himself.
She has to have known for a while how much he thinks of her, and yet, kind as
she always was when he told her all his troubles, he knows she has another
regular man, more sophisticated, more of her world. As one more time he watches
the extraordinary grace with which she dances, all that gauzy fabric whirling
around her, his longing has a different quality now that he knows his desire
will soon be met.

He stays in the back of the theatre almost shyly until he sees her nod, and
then, looking at the gold watch he has recently bought for himself, he waits
for fifteen minutes, just like she told him, before he heads up the stairs
toward her sanctuary. The room is as he imagined it, only being real and right
there before his eyes—something he can touch and feel and smell—
even better. The walls are red and gold; the red bedspread matches the walls,
and all the littler things, the picture frames, the vases, the satin-covered
chair, show her knowledge of fine things, a knowledge he hopes to have someday
for himself. And the way she invites him in is fine, too, making him
comfortable and yet at the same time giving him the sense that everything she
does is a cut above the ordinary.

What a sense of satisfaction he feels now as slowly she lays her lovely robe
over the bedpost. And while he moves across the room to her he marvels at the
fine lingerie she is wearing, which she tells him came all the way from France.
All the refinement of the room seems to be in her body, the way her skin feels
against his. And she amazes him in still other ways. Perhaps he should have
guessed at the skills she had. After all, he said to himself when he reflected
on it later, anyone who can keep two hundred yards of chiffon flying above her
head ought to be able to elevate just about anything. She can tease weight
itself past gravity, he thought. But it is not just the mechanics of what she
does that has impressed him. He has all he longed for now, even what he never
quite understood before that he wanted. It is not just that she had made him
happy. He is laughing to find himself lighter than air. And she has given him a
deeper pleasure, too; as if reaching into the center of who he is, she has
mined the gold that was deep inside.