When Madame de Pompadour was presented to him, the king was stiffly nervous and muttered only a few words to his mistress. His presentation room had only a moderate attendance, as most of the courtiers had crammed themselves into the next room, eager to see the more interesting face-off between the mistress and the wife. It was an evening presentation, and the plump middle-aged queen, loaded down with ribbons, bows, laces, and sequins, stood silently in the flickering candles’ glow as the fresh-faced young woman approached her. Perhaps she felt Madame de Pompadour’s palpable terror so carefully hidden beneath her impregnable poise and exquisite gown. The worst thing the queen could say—indicating complete disdain of the person presented—was a little remark on the outfit the person was wearing. Breathless, the spectators leaned forward.
Queen Marie smiled and asked after a mutual acquaintance. The mistress, no doubt greatly relieved at the queen’s very public gesture of kindness, whispered, “I have a profound desire to please you, Madame.”34 The two spoke an astonishing twelve sentences—courtiers counted—which ensured Madame de Pompadour’s welcome at court. It was a kindness that would never be forgotten, and one that would serve the queen well for years to come.
Within a few weeks the king suffered a brief attack of jaundice, and Marie requested permission to visit him at his château of Choisy. Louis—who ordinarily would have rebuffed her—replied with unusual enthusiasm. When Marie arrived, he personally showed her the new decorations. At dinner, attended by both the queen and Madame de Pompadour, Louis treated his wife with great respect, and she “showed no desire to leave, but spoke graciously to Madame de Pompadour, who was respectful and not at all forward.”35
The queen knew her husband was kinder to her at the instigation of Madame de Pompadour. The prince de Croy remarked that the mistress was “on good terms with the Queen, having persuaded the King to be nicer to her.”36
Natural kindness aside, Madame de Pompadour knew that the queen’s friendship would be helpful in the snake pit of Versailles. Her respectful consideration of the queen won her the approbation of fair-minded courtiers. The mistress routinely sent Marie bouquets of her favorite flowers, and convinced Louis that he should pay his wife’s debts—most of which were to charities. More astounding, while the court was at Fontainebleau, artists were busy redecorating the queen’s apartments at Versailles. When Marie returned, she found that her dusty old rooms had been transformed into the latest style, replete with regilded mirrors and walls, furniture upholstered in white satin, and a new bed with rich red damask hangings. Even more to the queen’s liking, the walls had been hung with tapestries illustrating biblical scenes. Marie recognized Madame de Pompadour’s exquisite taste behind the new decorations.
The queen was further shocked to receive an expensive New Year’s gift from her husband—the first in years. It was a magnificent snuffbox of enamel and gold, with a small watch mounted on the lid. Fortunately, the queen did not know that Louis had originally ordered the gift for Madame de Pompadour’s mother—who had just died.
But all wives are hurt when their husbands take mistresses. The queen would still have preferred to have Louis all to herself. Sighing, she often said, “Since there has to be one, better she than another.”37
“In tears and lamentations”
Like many kings, Henri IV of France believed a queen’s duty was to oblige her husband in all things, follow his every command, and never complain. This duty included accepting his mistresses, even welcoming them. Henri had the misfortune to marry two women who were less than delighted at such a request.
In the early years of his marriage with Princess Marguerite, Henri, then only king of Navarre, fell in and out of love with a variety of ladies-in-waiting. Ravishing dark-haired Marguerite—who had numerous lovers herself—averted her eyes. She had never wanted to marry Henri, a bandy-legged petty prince with a nose larger than his kingdom, as wits said, and such an aversion to bathing that he smelled like a goat. And then her husband fell in love with Françoise de Montmorency, daughter of the baron de Fosseuse, and known as Fosseuse herself. As Marguerite wrote in her memoirs, “He was fond of the society of ladies, and, moreover, was at that time greatly enamoured with Fosseuse…. Fosseuse did me no ill offices, so that the King my husband and I continued to live on very good terms, especially as he perceived me unwilling to oppose his inclinations.”38
But in 1581 the fifteen-year-old Fosseuse became pregnant and bruited about that Henri had promised to divorce Marguerite and marry her if she gave him a son. Marguerite, who remained childless, felt threatened. She tried to send the girl from court, but Henri, furious, insisted she remain. Henri became “cold and indifferent” to his wife, Marguerite wrote.39 As the girl’s belly expanded, both Fosseuse and the king swore to Marguerite that she was not pregnant.
One morning the royal physician entered the bedchamber and announced to an embarrassed Henri that Fosseuse was in labor. Marguerite awoke to find her shame-faced husband poking his long nose between her bed curtains. “My dear,” he said, peering at her uneasily, “…will you oblige me so far as to rise and go to Fosseuse, who is taken very ill?…You know how dearly I love her, and I hope you will comply with my request.”40
To which the complacent wife replied “that I had too great a respect for him to be offended at anything he should do, and that I would go to her immediately, and do as much for her as if she were a child of my own.”41
Marguerite advised Henri to go hunting, drawing away a large part of the court with him, while she took the girl to a distant part of the palace where no one would hear her cries. When the king returned that evening, he learned that his mistress had produced a stillborn daughter. Crushed at the news, he asked his wife to return to his mistress and console her in her grief. But Marguerite’s wifely patience ended here. She remembered how in previous months Fosseuse had flaunted the king’s attentions, boasting that he would dump Marguerite and marry her if she gave him a son. Exhausted from the day’s exertions, Marguerite flatly refused Henri’s request, pointing out that she had been with the girl throughout her travails and could do no more. Henri was furious at her refusal. “He seemed to be greatly displeased at what I said,” Marguerite wrote, “which vexed me the more as I thought I did not deserve such treatment after what I had done at his request in the morning.”42
The marriage continued to deteriorate. After Marguerite tried to raise a rebellion against her husband, he exiled her to a remote castle. When Marguerite’s brother Henri III died with no sons, Henri of Navarre, a cousin, became king of France, and he eventually divorced Marguerite, who had taken to strong drink, gluttonous eating, and sex with gardeners and stable boys.