According to a contemporary, Madame de Mailly had “a long face, long nose…a large mouth…. [She was] tall, without grace or presence…amusing, cheerful, good-tempered, a good friend, generous and kind.”24
Her scheming younger sister Pauline-Félicité was equally plain but not equally kind. Green with envy that her sister was royal mistress while she stewed in the country, Pauline-Félicité begged for an invitation to Versailles to enjoy court life. As her carriage rattled for days from her country estate over the rutted dirt roads toward the palace, she had ample time to plot and connive how she would steal the king from her sister.
Taller, louder, wittier than her older sister, Pauline-Félicité soon sparkled at the king’s intimate dinner parties. Her adept intrigue, combined with Madame de Mailly’s naïveté, secured her the prize, and Louis soon fell head over heels in love with the younger sister. When she became pregnant with his child, he married her to a nobleman, Monsieur de Ventimille, who was immediately sent to the provinces. Madame de Mailly, though still officially the maîtresse-en-titre, stood awkwardly by wringing her hands as her sister rose in favor. The king visited Madame de Ventimille daily, leaving his official mistress alone in such penury that courtiers noticed her petticoats had holes in them. While the younger sister was given a beautiful château furnished in blue and gold, Madame de Mailly was crammed into two small, cold rooms in Versailles.
A few days after Madame de Ventimille gave birth to the king’s son she went into convulsions and died. Louis, devastated, returned for solace to Madame de Mailly’s arms. For two years she reigned again as undisputed mistress. As naive as ever, Madame de Mailly acceded to another sister’s wish to be summoned to Versailles. Marie-Anne, the widowed marquise de La Tournelle, schemed to throw off her widow’s weeds and take Versailles—and the king—by storm. Armed with a cunning intelligence, she was the most beautiful of all the Mailly-Nesle girls, with wide blue eyes and a ravishing figure.
Madame de La Tournelle used all her wiles to attract Louis away from her sister and soon succeeded. But she would never suffer Madame de Mailly to mope about the palace in her shredded petticoats still clinging to the title of maîtresse-en-titre. Before she relinquished her honor to the king, Madame de La Tournelle demanded that he send away the tiresome Madame de Mailly, and he complied. Her second demand was to be created a duchess, and he made her the duchesse de Châteauroux. Only then, when the act of love had been prepaid with the cold clanking of coins and the hollow braying of trumpets, did the newly minted duchess welcome the king into her soft white bed.
The cunning Madame de Châteauroux brought along yet another sister, Madame de Lauragais, fat and jolly. But she knew that this sister would be no true rival. While the king did sleep with Madame de Lauragais now and then, it was Madame de Châteauroux who ruled the roost. Amused at Louis’s fascination for the Mailly-Nesle sisters, court pundits asked whether it was inconstancy or fidelity when a man chose all his mistresses from the same family.
Madame de Châteauroux’s success was as brief as it was spectacular. After only two years at the pinnacle, she succumbed to a sudden fever. Unwilling to cede her position even to death, Madame de Châteauroux continued to walk the marble halls of Versailles as a ghost, seen by no less a personage than the queen herself. And poor Madame de Mailly, banished from court, replaced in her lover’s bed by all three sisters, wore a hair shirt the rest of her life and haunted cold marble altars on bruised and bleeding knees.
Having run through all four Mailly sisters, Louis suddenly found himself with no royal mistress at all and began actively seeking a suitable replacement. His choice fell on Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etioles, whom he created the marquise de Pompadour. And so Madame de Pompadour had the luck to start off her career as royal mistress by appearing on an empty stage, rather than having to force another leading lady off the boards.
But if, at the beginning, Madame de Pompadour’s only rival was a ghost, the field was soon teeming with women of flesh and blood. These rivals became more alarming when, after seven or eight years as royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour’s dewy beauty had faded and her increasing frigidity prevented her from having sexual relations with the king. She continued to meet the king’s every other need and subcontracted the sexual services to others by establishing a tiny bordello called Le Parc aux Cerfs on the edge of Versailles. Here one or two teenagers at a time—taken from the gutters and scrubbed with soap and water—would be ready to receive the king.
“All these little uneducated girls would never take him from me,” she said of the Parc aux Cerfs girls.25 But her greatest fear was being supplanted by a worthy rival. Madame de Pompadour once told her maid that she was engaged in “perpetual warfare”—like a weary gladiator in the ring, fighting off an unceasing stream of challengers, forced to thrust and parry until her dying day.26 Her fear of rivals caused her to paint over her pallor and leave her sickbed countless times during her nineteen years as maîtresse-en-titre. For Louis XV had little patience with illness, and Madame de Pompadour worried he might turn to another woman to lift his spirits if she allowed herself a long recuperation.
Should the king die or dismiss her, Madame de Pompadour kept as her refuge a sumptuous Paris mansion—which currently serves as home of the president of France. She would have loved to relax there a few weeks each year, outside the “tissue of malice.”27 But she rarely visited it for fear of leaving the king alone. And with good reason. Younger, prettier candidates popped up like mushrooms in the king’s path. One ambitious rival caused Madame de Pompadour particular concern. Marie-Anne de Coislin was a cousin of the Mailly family, and Madame de Pompadour well knew that the king had an irresistible fascination for Mailly women.
One evening Madame de Pompadour returned to her Versailles apartments and, throwing down her muff, told her lady’s maid, Madame du Hausset, “I never saw such insolence as that of Madame de Coislin. I was at the same table as her for a game of brelan this evening; and you can’t imagine what I suffered. The men and women seemed to take turns looking us over. Once or twice Madame de Coislin looked at me and said, ‘I take the lot!’ in the most insulting manner. And I thought I would faint when she said triumphantly, ‘I have a hand full of kings.’ I wish you could have seen her curtsey when she left me.”28
Madame du Hausset asked, “And the King, did he greet her warmly?” Madame de Pompadour replied, “You don’t know him, my dear. If he was going to move her into my apartment tonight, he would treat her coldly in public and be extremely friendly with me.”29
But Madame de Coislin made a strategic error. According to Madame de Pompadour’s friend, the writer Charles Duclos, “she could have succeeded but instead of leading her lover by degrees to the final conquest, which would have meant the downfall of her rival, instead of inviting his desires by withholding herself, she surrendered so quickly that she extinguished the desires of the King; she gave herself like a whore, and was taken and abandoned like a whore.”30
One of Madame de Pompadour’s best advisers was Madame de Mirapoix, who told her, “It is your staircase that the King loves; he has grown accustomed to going up and down it. But if he found another woman to whom he could talk of hunting and business, it would all be the same to him after three days.”31