John Stevens Cabot Abbott - The History of French Revolution

When some one spoke to Madame de Pompadour of this establishment, she replied,

"It is the king's heart that I wish to possess, and none of these little uneducated girls will deprive me of that."

If the king in his rides chanced to see a pretty child who gave promise of unusual beauty, he sent his servants to take her from her parents to be trained in his harem. The parents had their choice to submit quietly at home, or to submit in the dungeons of the Bastille. One incident, related by Soulavie, in his "Anecdotes of the Reign of Louis XV.," illustrates the mode of operation:

"Among the young ladies of very tender age with whom the king amused himself during the influence of Madame de Pompadour or afterward, there was also a Mademoiselle Treicelin, whom his majesty ordered to take the name of Bonneval the very day she was presented to him. The king was the first who perceived this child, when not above nine years old, in the care of a nurse, in the garden of the Tuileries, one day when he went in state to his good city of Paris; and having in the evening spoken of her beauty to Le Bel, the servant applied to M. de Sartine, who traced her out and bought her of the nurse for a few louis. She was the daughter of M. de Treicelin, a man of quality, who could not patiently endure an affront of this nature. He was, however, compelled to be silent; he was told his child was lost, and that it would be best for him to submit to the sacrifice unless he wished to lose his liberty also."

The expense of the Parc aux Cerfs alone, according to Lacretelle, amounted to 100,000,000 francs—$25,000,000.

These were not deeds of darkness. They were open as the day. France, though bound hand and foot, saw them, and exasperation was advancing to fury. An anonymous letter was sent to Louis, depicting very vividly the ruinous state of affairs and announcing the inevitable shock. Madame de Hausset, in her memoirs, gives the following synopsis of this letter:

"Your finances are in the greatest disorder, and the great majority of states have perished through this cause. Your ministers are without capacity. Open war is carried on against religion. The encyclopedists, under pretense of enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations of Christianity. All the different kinds of liberty are connected. The philosophers and the Protestants tend toward republicanism. The philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches, and their efforts will one day lay the tree low. Add to these the economists, whose object is political liberty, as that of others is liberty of worship, and the government may find itself in twenty or thirty years undermined in every direction, and it will then fall with a crash. Lose no time in restoring order to the state of the finances. Embarrassments necessitate fresh taxes, which grind the people and induce toward revolt. A time will come, sire, when the people will be enlightened, and that time is probably near at hand."

The king read this letter to Madame de Pompadour, and then, turning upon his heel, said,

"I wish to hear no more about it. Things will last as they are as long as I shall."

On another occasion, Mirabeau the elder remarked in the drawing-room of Madame de Pompadour,

"This kingdom is in a deplorable state. There is neither national energy nor money. It can only be regenerated by a conquest like that of China, or by some great internal convulsion. But woe to those who live to see that. The French people do not do things by halves."

Madame de Pompadour herself was fully aware of the catastrophe which was impending, but she flattered herself that the storm would not burst during her life. She often said, "Après nous le déluge"—" After us comes the deluge ."

The indications of approaching ruin were so evident that they could not escape the notice of any observing man. Even Louis XV. himself was not blind to the tendency of affairs, and only hoped to ward off a revolution while his day should last.

Lord Chesterfield visited France in 1753, twenty years before the death of Louis XV., and wrote as follows to his son:

"Wherever you are, inform yourself minutely of, and attend particularly to the affairs of France. They grow serious, and, in my opinion, will grow more so every day. The French nation reasons freely, which they never did before, upon matters of religion and government. In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions now exist and daily increase in France."

The great difficulty of raising money and the outrages resorted to for the accomplishment of that purpose alarmed the courtiers. One night, an officer of the government, sitting at the bedside of the king conversing upon the state of affairs, remarked,

"You will see, sire, that all this will make it absolutely necessary to assemble the States-General."

The king sprang up in his bed, and, seizing the courtier by his arm, exclaimed,

"Never repeat those words. I am not sanguinary; but, had I a brother, and did he dare to give me such advice, I would sacrifice him within twenty-four hours to the duration of the monarchy and the tranquillity of the kingdom."

It is not strange that in such a court as this Christianity should have been reviled, and that infidelity should have become triumphant.

"When I was first presented to his majesty Louis XV.," La Fayette writes, "I well remember finding the eldest son of the Church, the King of France and Navarre, seated at a table between a bishop and a prostitute. At the same table was seated an aged philosopher, whose writings had conveyed lustre upon the age in which he flourished; one whose whole life had been spent in sapping the foundation of Christianity and undermining monarchy. Yet was this philosopher, at that moment, the object of honor from monarchs and homage from courtiers. A young abbé entered with me, not to be presented to royalty, but to ask the benediction of this enemy of the altar. The name of this aged philosopher was Voltaire , and that of the young abbé was Charles Maurice Talleyrand."

Nearly all the infidel writers of the day—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert—were men hopelessly corrupt in morals. Many of them were keen-sighted enough distinctly to perceive the difference between Christianity and the lives of debauched ecclesiastics. But most of them hated Christianity and its restraints, and were glad to avail themselves of the corruptions of the Church that they might bring the religion of Christ into contempt. But there were not wanting, even then, men of most sincere and fearless piety, who advanced Christianity by their lives, and who with heroism rebuked sin in high places.

The Bishop of Senez was called to preach before the king. With the spirit of Isaiah and Daniel he rebuked the monarch for his crimes in terms so plain, direct, and pungent as to amaze the courtiers. The king was confounded, but God preserved his servant as Daniel was preserved in the lions' den.

At length Madame de Pompadour died, in 1764, and the execrations of France followed her to her burial. It was a gloomy day of wind and rain when the remains of this wretched woman were borne from Versailles to the tomb. The king had now done with her, and did not condescend to follow her to her burial. As the funeral procession left the court-yard of the palace he stood at a window looking out into the stormy air, and chuckled at his heartless witticism as he said, "The marchioness has rather a wet day to set out on her long journey." This remark is a fair index of the almost inconceivable heartlessness of this contemptible king.

Madame de Pompadour breathed her last at Versailles in splendid misery. She was fully conscious of the hatred of the nation, and trembled in view of the judgment of God. "My whole life," said she, in a despairing hour, "has been a continual death."