THE PAVILION OF LUCIENNES

Madame Du Barry throned it like a queen. At last she had succeeded in being able to assume, whenever the notion took her, the manners and language of the great ladies. Choosing her associates from among women of the highest rank, a Maréchale de Luxembourg, a Duchess d’Aiguillon, a Maréchale de Mirepoix, she received dukes and peers, ministers and ambassadors. When Gustavus III., King of Sweden, came to the court of France, in 1771, he offered a very rich collar to the favorite’s little dog. The policy of Madame Du Barry, if one admits that a woman of that sort can have a policy, was more authoritative, more conservative, than that of Madame de Pompadour. Madame Du Barry did not rely upon the philosophers, and always alarming Louis XV. about the danger of parliaments, she incessantly reminded him of the example of princes who, like Charles I., allow their royal prerogatives to be attacked. At the auction of Baron de Thiers’s effects, she bought a portrait of that unhappy monarch for twenty-four thousand livres, and it is asserted that, showing this painting to Louis XV., she said to him: “France, do you see this picture? If you let your Parliament go on, it will cut off your head, as the English Parliament did to Charles.”

The sense of danger restored to the old sovereign a vigor which assured his tranquillity so long as he lived. The Parliament had assumed a factious attitude in consequence of its quarrels with the Duke d’Aiguillon. Declaring that “its members, in their profound affliction, found their minds not sufficiently free to give decisions on the property, life, and honor of the King’s subjects,” it refused to render justice. Louis XV. destroyed this beginning of revolution in its germ. During the night of January 17, 1771, all the members of the Parliament were arrested in their dwellings, and summoned to reply merely yes or no to an order to resume their functions. All responded negatively. They were at once declared unseated, and departed into exile. A new Parliament, called the Maupeou Parliament, after the chancellor who had advised this coup d’État, took the place of the former one, and showed itself perfectly docile. As has been remarked by M. Théophile Lavallée, the wheels of the governmental machine were so worm-eaten that even the organ of resistance, touched by the finger of a courtesan, a Du Barry, crumbled into powder. To the people, the magistrates seemed only privileged persons discredited by the trials of Lalli, Calas, and La Barre. Maupeou announced that justice would be rendered gratuitously, that appointments should no longer be hereditary, and that a new code of civil and criminal procedure would be drawn up. Voltaire, always the partisan of success, went into ecstasies over the glory of the chancellor, the author of this stroke, and celebrated it in an enthusiastic piece of verse:—

“Oui, que Maupeou, tout seul, du dédale des lois Ait pu retirer la couronne, Qu’il l’ait seul rapportée au palais de nos rois, Voila ce que j’ai vu, voila ce qui m’étonne. J’avoue avec l’antiquité Que ses héros sont admirables; Mais, par malheur, ce sont des fables; Et c’est ici la vérité.”[52]

Madame de Pompadour had overthrown the Jesuits. The Jansenists were crushed by Madame Du Barry. From his retreat at Ferney, Voltaire flattered the favorite with those refinements of adulation of which he had the monopoly. June 20, 1773, he wrote the following letter:—

“MADAME,—M. de Laborde tells me you have ordered him to embrace me on both cheeks on your account:—

“Quoi! deux baisers sur la fin de ma vie! Quel passeport vous daignez m’envoyer! Deux! c’est trop d’un, adorable Egérie, Je serais mort de plaisir au premier.[53]

“He has shown me your portrait; do not be angry, Madame, if I have taken the liberty of returning it the two kisses:—

“Vous ne pouvez pas empêcher cet hommage, Faible tribut de quiconque a des yeux. C’est aux mortels d’adorer votre image, L’original était fait pour les dieux.[54]

“I have heard several bits from M. de Laborde’s _Pandora_; they have seemed to me very well worthy of your protection. The favor shown to the real fine arts is the only thing which could enhance the brilliancy with which you shine.

“Deign, Madame, to accept the profound respect of an old solitary whose heart has no longer hardly any sentiment but that of gratitude.”

Public opinion was less severe on the favorite than might be believed. People pardoned her fortune, because she was, as they vulgarly said, a good girl, because “she had in her heart the affections of the common people, their natural attachments, the sentiment of family.”[55] She went every fortnight to spend a day with her mother, whom she had transformed into a Marquise de Montrable, and provided with a lodging at the convent of Saint Elisabeth, a carriage, a country seat, and a little farm, called La Maison Rouge, near Lonjumeau.

Madame de Pompadour, the personification of the middle class parvenue, had excited furious anger in all ranks of society. The Du Barry displeased less, because she was less haughty. Her triumph, moreover, was in harmony with an epoch when, as Chateaubriand has said, “court and city, men of letters, economists and encyclopedists, great lords and gentlemen, financiers and burghers, resembled each other, as witness the memoirs they have left us.”

More and more wearied of the rules of etiquette, the aged Louis XV. thought of nothing but living like a private gentleman, loving women, hunting, and good cheer as long as possible. All that was grand fatigued him. Versailles, too vast, too majestic for him, harassed him like a prison. To the magnificent residence of Louis XIV. he greatly preferred the little pavilion he had built in 1771, just beside the château of Luciennes, and which belonged to Madame Du Barry.

There are monuments which are symbols. This palace-boudoir, temple of a libertine divinity, represents marvellously the close of the reign of Louis XV. Ledoux was the architect of this little masterpiece, and its salons were adorned by the brushes of Joseph Vernet, Greuze, and Fragonard. Situated on an eminence from which one beheld a magnificent view, this square pavilion, with its five windows fronting in every direction, resembled a château of Alcina, the abode of an enchantress. It has a peristyle of four columns in the Grecian style and a Bacchanalian dance of children in low relief. The entrance is by a vestibule which served as a dining-room on great days. This is the room reproduced in the fine water-color of Moreau Jeune, now in possession of the Louvre Museum. The walls are of white marble. Capitals surrounded by gold display the united arms of Louis XV. and the favorite. In front of the vestibule are the tribunes for the Countess’s musicians. This large hall opens on the square salon; the panels of the door were painted by Fragonard. On either side of the grand salon is another smaller one. In that on the right there is a set of four paintings by Vien, representing a symbolic history of love in the heart of young girls; in that on the left, entirely adorned by mirrors which reflect a superb mantelpiece of lapis lazuli in the form of a tripod, Briard has painted on the ceiling the allegory of love in the country.

When Louis XV. comes to Luciennes, he has no apartments separate from those of the Countess, with the exception of his dressing-room. Extremely careful of his person, he needs a private room in which to repair, if necessary, the little disorders of his toilet, and to have more powder put on when his hair requires it.

What a little gem, what a charming trifle, is this marvellous pavilion! Cornices, bas-reliefs, pilasters, bits of jeweller’s work, locks, window fastenings,—each detail is an object of art, a treasure. What refinements of luxury! What caprices, what puerilities, what freaks of ornamentation! Chinese knick-knacks, statuettes in Dresden porcelain, coffers of ebony and ivory, lacquered furniture, screens covered with birds of paradise of sparkling plumage, cages of paroquets, aviaries in gold and silver filigree!

Amidst all these curiosities one perceives a little spaniel, white as snow, a Brazilian monkey, a small flame-colored parrot, and a Bengalese child, of a coppery black, with his brilliant eyes and bizarre accoutrements. This singular negro boy, this living toy, is Zamora, Zamora whom the Countess held at the baptismal font, with the Prince de Conti for the other sponsor, and whom Louis XV. amuses himself by appointing governor of the pavilion of Luciennes, by a decree countersigned by the Chancellor of France. They change this negro’s costume as if he were a doll. Sometimes he is dressed as a savage, with red feathers, variegated garments, necklaces of beads and coral. Sometimes he puts on a green frock coat, braided with gold, and accompanies the runner who, squeezed into a polonaise of sky blue cloth, brandishes, as he runs, a superb cane with a carved head. Sometimes he is in vest and breeches of pink satin, on those brilliant evenings when from the tribunes of the vestibule resound the notes of violin, flute, and hunting-horn; where, amid great ladies in dazzling toilettes and nobles clad in velvet, precious stones, and blue ribbons, crystals, baskets of flowers, and innumerable lights, the Countess Du Barry beams as if in an operatic scene, as in an apotheosis of gallantry and sensual pleasure.

But showy dress is not what best becomes her coquettish and sprightly person. She is still prettier and more piquant when she puts on the half feminine, half masculine uniform of the Queen’s light cavalry. Then Dorat addresses her the following enthusiastic lines:—

“Sur ton double portrait le spectateur perplexe, Charmante Du Barry, veut t’admirer partout; A ses yeux changes-tu de sexe, Il ne fait que changer de goût. S’il te voit en femme, dans l’âme, D’être homme il sent tout le plaisir; Tu deviens homme, et d’être femme Soudain il sent tout le désir.”[56]

At Luciennes, Louis XV. lives like a banker in a small house. The Most Christian King has no longer any majesty. He puts on a simple white vest, and amuses himself, like an honest citizen, in gardening a little. He likes to walk underneath the lindens, and afterwards to sit on the terrace whence he can see at his feet the stream, which, making a double turn, winds like a horseshoe under the hill. On the horizon is Saint-Germain, the cradle of Louis XIV., Saint Denis, the burial-place of kings, whither he will presently go to rejoin his ancestors, and, in the misty distance, Paris, the carping, revolutionary city, which seems to menace him. Tired of Versailles, Louis XV. breathes the free air on this terrace and endeavors to forget: to forget the mistakes of his official and his secret diplomacy, to forget the first partition of Poland which is going on, the injunctions of England which, preventing France from aiding the Swedes or the Poles, forbid her fleets to enter either the Baltic or the Mediterranean; to forget, in fine, his own old age, and another decline not less afflicting, that of the French monarchy. The blasé sovereign casts a glance of disenchantment at the present, a glance of keen anxiety toward the future. But here comes the Countess Du Barry with her arch face, her provoking smile, her rosy mouth which calls for kisses. Louis XV. cheers up in an instant.

Was Madame Du Barry more immoral than Madame de Pompadour? I do not believe it. Was she more detrimental to France? I do not believe that either. Were the beginnings of the Marquise’s favor more noble than those of the Countess? Was the first more truly in love, more disinterested, than the second? For my part, I do not see much difference. Nevertheless, I am tempted to find Madame de Pompadour more culpable than Madame Du Barry. Her husband was the better man of the two. M. Lenormand d’Étioles had not, like M. Du Barry, formed a wretched contract under the pretext of marriage; he loved his wife, he surrounded her with care and attentions; he had done absolutely nothing to merit the unjustifiable abandonment and unexpected treachery of which he was the victim.

M. Du Barry, on the other hand, had willed his own fate. Whatever may be said about it, the Marquise was not in reality more of a grand lady than the Countess. One reflects that the aristocracy thought her vulgar. D’Argenson spoke of her contemptuously; Richelieu saw in her nothing but a misplaced amusement, “which was not adapted to subsist worthily at court”; Voltaire, her regularly appointed flatterer, stigmatized her as a cackler, a grisette created for the opera or the seraglio. The Pompadour was elegant; the Du Barry was not less so. Each of them contrived to talk the language of Versailles, and to wear their clothes as well as the ladies of the highest nobility. D’Aiguillon, the favorite of the Countess, belonged to a family not less ancient than that of Choiseul, the favorite of the Marquise. Both of them obliged the aristocracy to accept their families. If one metamorphosed her brother, Abel Poisson, into the Marquis de Marigny, the other married her nephew, the Viscount Adolphe Du Barry, to the daughter of the Marquis de Tournon, a relative of the Soubises and the Condés. One advantage the Countess certainly had over the Marquise: no one could lay on her the responsibility for any war or for the selection of any general.

The evil passions, hatred and rancor, ambition and cupidity, pride and the love of domination, were infinitely more active in the soul of Madame de Pompadour than in that of Madame Du Barry. One was a commercial, intriguing, calculating woman, mistress of herself, egotistic, haughty, vindictive. The other was a daughter of the people, not virtuous but not malicious, not lofty in sentiment but not spiteful, possessing all the defects of courtesans but also their thoughtlessness, prodigality, playfulness. In the gallery of the women of Versailles I shall place Madame Du Barry unhesitatingly above Madame de Pompadour, because the Countess is credited by all her contemporaries with a quality that was lacking to the Marquise, a quality which expiates many faults, many shames, many vices, and without which no woman whatever can awaken sympathy,—that of good nature.