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forty-two years later as Madame de Pompadour, the most-favored mistress of King Louis XV and European trend-setter/courtesan extraordinaire. Upon her death, the Enlightenment bigwig, Voltaire, mourned her loss, writing, “I was indebted to her and I mourn her out of gratitude.” I’m so sure, Voltaire. Your “gratitude” no doubt comes from not having to shell out for that last fellatio fête, which must have been a frustrating disappointment since the literature indicates Madame de Pompadour wasn’t particularly adept or interesting in the sack. Novelist and public intellectual, Robertson Davies, writes:
Pompadour was not a physically ardent woman, and love-making tired her. After about eight years of their association Louis XV did not sleep with her. . . . But it was to Pompadour that he talked, and it was to Pompadour that he listened.
Even though some French snoots were disgusted with the king for taking a commoner with a new-wave hair do for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, an intrepid self-promoter and working girl, eventually won the country over, and then she helped plunge France into the Seven Years’ War and bankruptcy.
While Louis XV was a handsome chap before smallpox transformed him into an oozing black scab in tights, it only takes a few genetic missteps before you wind up with alarming mutants like Louis’s grandson, Louis XVI, whom Lillian C. Smythe, the editor of the letters written by Comte de Mercy, Austrian ambassador to the court of Versailles, describes as a “ waddling, blinking, corpulent, bungling, incapable imbecile. ”
Join us next week for “Dueling Banjos, Dueling Bourbons: A Homely History of the French Monarchy.”
When young Jeanne was only nine, her mother took her to a fortune teller, who in a moment of uncharacteristic prescience for a soothsayer told the young Jeanne and her mother that someday Jeanne would serve as mistress to the king. Maybe you’re like me: The last time I went to a tarot reader, she told me I smelled like too much wine and gave me “predictions” about the best way to get back on the uptown express. Sure enough, I found my way back uptown, and Madame de Pompadour became a king’s mistress, but I sense that we were the lucky ones.
After the obligatory stop at a nunnery, the gorgeous Jeanne was married off at the age of nineteen to a financier named Charles-Guillame d’Étiolles. She produced a few children, but showed no signs of settling down. She hung out with royalty, networked— owned it. And finally, after finagling an invitation to one of the many costume balls at the Palace of Versailles (where King Louis XV came dressed as some shrubs), Jeanne and the king got to talking, and before you know it the two were appearing together frequently. I should mention that during this scandalous courtship, France was at war with Austria. It’s just like the French to embrace a leader dressed up like a red-tipped photinia and carrying on with a prostitute when there’s a war on.
Madame de Pompadour eventually became heavily involved with domestic and foreign affairs—any kind of affair one could imagine, really. She even managed to befriend that pesky nuisance, the queen. The French people seemed to have a love-hate relationship with Pompadour: They loved her fashion sense, which set the bar for many ladies of the Enlightenment era. However, as is so often the case with celebrity, fame also inspired haters. In a dirty little ditty composed by one Comte de Maurepas, the newly minted Madame de Pompadour (Louis XV procured the title for her) was said to be afflicted with “ fleurs blanches ,” or white flowers:
By your noble and free manner,
Iris, you enchant our hearts.
On our path you strew flowers.
But they are white flowers.
It doesn’t sound very vile, but if you were an even remotely tapped-in and rococo Frenchman back then, you’d have grasped the significance of the white flowers. No, the Comte is not talking about daises, but a vaginal discharge