-Caveat Lector- Euphorian spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.
------- Note from Euphorian: Class comes to Englanderland ... this is interesting considering John Major's minor affair coming to light recently ... AER ------- To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk The mistress with the mostest How Miss Fish from the Paris suburbs became lover to Louis XV and swept in an era of good taste and elegance Philip Hensher Sunday October 13 2002 The Observer Madame de Pompadour - no doubt about it - had class. At a time when the phrase "royal mistress" is most likely to conjure up the name of Camilla Parker-Bowles, and her little salon of intellectuals and writers of the stature of Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope, one ought to remember the woman who first gave the profession some kind of real status. Louis XV's most famous and powerful mistress began life as middle-class little Mlle Poisson; she ended it as one of the most cultured and influential women in Europe. The two exhibitions opening this month at the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection show that the magnetism and intelligence of her personality were not illusions. She left a lot behind. Royal mistresses tend to be remembered fondly, but in brief, anecdotal glimpses. In Britain, Edward IV's mistress Jane Shore is now not much more than a name. Charles II's mistress, Nell Gwyn, is remembered for a little more than that - there is the lovely, saucy image of her selling oranges. There is the King saying "Let not poor Nelly starve" on his deathbed, and her most celebrated bon mot, when she stuck her head out of the window of her carriage and told an enraged, misapprehending London mob: "No, good people, I am the Protestant whore." Still, it's not a great deal to show for years of hard labour in the royal bedchamber. Later royal mistresses, in this country at least, have somehow left a much vaguer impression. Poor Mrs Fitzherbert and Mrs Jordan, the mistresses of George IV and William IV respectively, seem devout and jolly, but didn't leave much trace of their influence - it would be a very well-informed royal historian who could tell you, without prior warning, when either of them died. Edward VII's and Edward VIII's mistresses were queens of society, in a superficial sense. Queen Alexandra recognized the status of one of them when she asked that Mrs Keppel be allowed to pay her respects at the King's deathbed. But none of them has the lasting importance of Louis XV's mistress, Mme de Pompadour. She looms large in both folk history, and serious cultural history. Old ladies used to say of any very toffee-nosed acquaintance that they were "a real little Madame de Pompadour"; the favoured quiff of 1950s teddy-boys was, mysteriously, named after her. And anyone seriously interested in 18th-century Europe will, sooner or later, find themselves investigating the amazing career and court of the woman, and scratching their head over the unprecedented way she turned herself from little Miss Fish from the Paris suburbs into the unacknowledged ruler of France and, acknowledged, the single most important patron of European art and literature. The 18th century was, generally, rational about royal mistresses and irrational about the wives of kings. Anyone reading about the French court of the 17th and 18th centuries will wonder that anyone was found good enough to marry the King. The candidate had to be irreproachably grand, with not a stain of misalliance anywhere in her ancestry. Centuries later, characters in Proust are still complaining about the false step the French royal family made when they married beneath them - they are talking about the Medicis. She had, also, to represent an important and useful alliance, and, naturally, to be irreproachably virtuous. Given those demands, the age universally agreed that it was too much to expect the King to fall in love with his Queen, or even to like her very much. That hardly mattered. In these circumstances, he could be allowed, along with some boring Austrian arch-duchess, to maintain and display a mistress of his own choosing, who would have some kind of official standing. She could, on the surface, be one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, but everyone knew exactly who she was: the woman the King loved, his maîtresse en titre. French history provides a series of extraordinary women who filled this post - Louis XIV's mistresses Mme de Maintenon and Mme de Montespan, or Mme du Barry, to whom Louis XV was faithful in his last years. None of them was as powerful, intelligent or cultured as Mme de Pompadour. Louis XV came to the throne in extraordinary circumstances. When Louis XIV died, he had been predeceased not only by his son, the Dauphin, but by his grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. The heir was his two-year-old great-grandson, the Duc d'Anjou, who ascended the throne as Louis XV. All children believe that they are king of their world; all except one have to be disabused of the notion. Psychologists have made no serious study of what it must do to someone's mind to grow up always knowing themselves to be the King. In Louis XV's case, it turned him into a complete goat. Louis was married off when he was only 15, in 1726, to an irreproachable Polish princess called Maria Leczinska - one of those French queens whose names one has to look up, so unmemorable did she prove. Louis did his duty, and quickly provided the country with an entire troupe of Bourbon princes and princesses, but it was not long before his eye started to wander elsewhere. He was fortunate; to hand was one Mme d'Etiolles, born Mlle Poisson. She would do extremely well. If, in some ways, the civilisation that Mme de Pompadour came into strikes us as a supremely elegant one, in others it is unbelievably peculiar, ruled by odd fads and conventions, interested and entertained by things now very difficult to understand. It was absolutely forbidden, for instance, to applaud in the presence of the King - something Rousseau appreciated when he went to the opera in the King's presence, since, he said, it made it easier to hear the music. What you could wear, what chair, if any, you could take in the King's presence, how many mourners you were permitted when you died - all these were governed by how smart your ancestors were. The food sounds, and almost certainly was, quite disgusting, chosen to be exotic rather than delicious; some of Mme de Pompadour's own menus have survived, and we know that her chef de cuisine, Benoît, served her with such horrors as "turtle doves à l'impromptu" and "stomachs of riverside birds with sand-leek sauce". Nothing now seems odder than the ball in 1745 for the marriage of the Dauphin at which the King seems to have met his mistress-to-be. It was a fancy-dress ball. The King was dressed as a tree; Jeanne-Antoinette was dressed, perhaps more obviously seductively, as a shepherdess. By now, she had made a good marriage, and was Mme d'Etiolles. Poor M d'Etiolles was quickly left far behind by his ambitious wife, soon to be created the Marquise de Pompadour - he is one of the most pathetic figures in all French history, and had to endure years of being addressed as M de Pompadour by unwary neighbours. Swiftly, she had been installed in a position of great power, as maîtresse en titre to the King. There were, of course, difficulties to be overcome. She had to be presented officially to the King and Queen before she could acquire any status, and it was not, at first, easy to find any sponsors. "What prostitute," the Abbé d'Uzerches wondered out loud, "can be capable of presenting such a woman to the Queen?" Fortunately, the perpetually hard-up Princesse de Conti was within earshot. "Say no more, abbé," she said. "I'll do it." Exceptionally, Mme de Pompadour did not waste her position, and the reason two magnificent exhibitions such as these are possible is that she used her power to commission the most daring and brilliant artists, architects and writers of the day. She was a very intelligent woman, who left a substantial library at her death, sponsored such advanced writers as Voltaire, and acted as a patron to that monument to the Age of Reason, the Encyclopedie. She was instrumental in the foundation of the Ecole Militaire, and the porcelain manufacturing at Sèvres will always be associated with her name; indeed, the work that she commissioned from the factory has been fought over by collectors since the moment it was produced. In particular, Mme de Pompadour had the apparent gift when commissioning artists of raising them above their habitual level. Drouet and Boucher are never again such good painters as in their portraits of Mme de Pompadour. Boucher is tempted by her personal charm away from his usual fantasy world of fat cupids into statements of unique poetry and grace. There is something suggestive about the bizarre costumes she and the king wore on their first real encounter. Before her, the French court was addicted to grotesque whimsy, ridiculous and random striking of attitudes and assertions of brute power. Afterwards, everything was a pretence of simplicity and personal charm, inspired by the natural charm of the King's mistress herself. What strikes us about the wonderful and rich visual culture which Mme de Pompadour inspired and commissioned is that it marks a distinct move towards simplicity and intimacy. The furniture of her period, compared to high-period Louis XIV boiseries, is rapturously light and gracious. A piece owned by Mme de Pompadour remains the Holy Grail of furniture collectors. It seems to strike a perfect balance between exuberance, ornamentation and clean simple lines, and between richness and elegance. The best of it seems to glow like jewellery. Like many very powerful people, she controlled her image through the medium of portraiture, and commissioned a series of masterpieces, projecting a particular image. French court portraiture, before her, was largely in the manner of Nattier - an accomplished but preposterous artist whose usual portraits place court ladies in the costumes of Greek goddesses, to nobody's great edification. Michael Levey, in his book Rococo to Revolution, has some fun at the expense of Nattier's Duchesse d'Orléans en Hébé, and "the idea of ladies whose diversion consisted of taming eagles by offering them white wine in cups". Mme de Pompadour commissioned Nattier at first, and he painted her as Diana. But after that, the rapturous series of portraits by Boucher, Maurice Quentin de-la-Tour and Drouais, among many others, often depict her engaged in simple pleasures. However richly she is dressed, her simplicity and personal charm is the point; she sits with a book in the forest, listening to a bird singing; she works cheerfully at her needlework, the most approachable and simple woman in the world. Of course, this is a carefully constructed illusion. Mme de Pompadour was not a simple, modest woman, but one of the most powerful women in Europe. And she was prepared to use that power, sometimes to catastrophic effect. Her involvement in the Seven Years War, for instance, was disastrous for France, which lost pretty well all of its colonial possessions. Her strong personal dislike of Frederick the Great of Prussia played a crucial role here, and everyone since has regarded her as overstepping the mark in a spectacular way. But what the paintings do record is her extraordinarily powerful charm. It was that, more than sex, that kept her in her position until her death in 1764. It is doubtful whether she and Louis had sexual relations after 1750 at all. Louis went on preferring her company. The Queen's idea of conversation, recorded by Casanova, was to remark over dinner that she thought she was eating a fricassée of chicken. The little royal mistresses were not in any way grown-up, intelligent women. Mme de Pompadour hardly put a foot wrong in her taste and judgement. The world was changing fast during Mme de Pompadour's lifetime, and the signs that the game was up for her and her sort were growing visible. When, in 1761, Rousseau published La Nouvelle Heloise, it contained the scandalous remark that "a coalheaver is more worthy of respect than a King's mistress". Louis XVI would keep no official mistress at all; in another generation or two, Carlyle would be referring brutally to Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry and their sort as "harlots". But their culture and intelligence, as commemorated here, were exceptional. They, and Mme de Pompadour above all, despite all the rigid structures of their society, found a way in which a highly intelligent and civilised woman could exercise power and patronage. She slept with the King to do so; that, however, is the absolutely least interesting fact about her. · The Art of Love: Madame de Pompadour is at the Wallace Collection, London W1, until January 5. Details: 020-7563 9500. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from Wednesday until January 12. Details: 020-7747 2885. 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