WE CAN ONLY WONDER HOW WOMEN’S LOT IN WESTERN SOCIETY would have improved during the past four thousand years had Genesis blamed seductive Adam for tempting innocent Eve with a banana. But since it was Eve who gave Adam the apple, Sinful Woman became a fair target for tempting Virtuous Man from the straight and narrow path with her sexual wiles.
This was doubly true for a royal mistress. Whereas most women conducted their illicit affairs hidden from public view, maintaining an outward image of chaste propriety, by virtue of her very position the royal mistress was known by all the world to be having sex with a man not her husband. Moreover, however dissatisfied a nation may have been with its king, it was treason to speak so, and the mistress was a far likelier target of wrath among the people and discontent at court.
Often a royal mistress could not win in the stern court of public opinion no matter what she did. If she bore the king children, she was a harlot bringing expensive bastards into the world. If she did not, she was even worse—a barren harlot. If she was beautiful, her beauty was a gift from the devil to inflame the hapless monarch. If she was plain, the king deserved better. If she lived opulently, she was selfishly spending the poor people’s taxes. If she lived simply, she was detracting from the king’s glory.
Mistresses from powerful noble families often meddled in politics and turned their relatives into a political faction, causing strife at court. For this reason, some kings avoided the snares of lovely countesses and breathtaking duchesses and sought out mistresses born as commoners. Such women were far more grateful for blessings bestowed and less adept at intrigue. Commoners usually applauded the rise of one of their own, but those born with blue blood pulsating nobly through purple veins turned green with jealousy when an outsider invaded the Holy of Holies.
Native-born mistresses were better tolerated than imports, who were often, and sometimes rightly, suspected as foreign spies. In 1736, when George II insisted on bringing over a German mistress, his English subjects wanted to know why he couldn’t content himself with an English whore. After all, they said, “There are enough of them to be had and they are cheaper.”1
“Königs Hure! Hure!”
Louis XIV’s brilliant mistress Madame de Montespan was disliked by court and populace alike for her vainglorious spending and imperious attitude. She encouraged the king to build palaces, create gardens, and give lavish entertainments. The court, and French life that aped the court, buzzed with music, dancing, fireworks, gambling, the rustle of colorful silks, and the sparkle of priceless gems.
During her thirteen-year tenure, this Red Whore of Babylon was considered a drain on the royal treasury, a burden on the backs of the working poor. Hearing of her sordid reputation, German troops marching past her in a military parade shouted, “Königs Hure! Hure!”2 Unable to understand German, Madame de Montespan asked another spectator what the soldiers were yelling and was informed that they had been calling her the “king’s whore.” Unfazed, later that evening she told the king that while she had enjoyed the parade she wished the Germans were not so painfully precise in calling everything by its proper name.
Once she was dismissed, Louis secretly married the pious Madame de Maintenon, who had all the virtues the French disliked and none of the vices they admired. Suddenly public opinion veered back in Madame de Montespan’s favor. The French wanted their king, and their court, to dazzle the world. They missed the balls, fetes, masquerades. To follow the new fashions, many courtiers traded in dice for rosaries and romance novels for Bibles, but it didn’t mean they liked it. As Louis XIV’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte, the duchesse d’Orléans, wrote of Madame de Maintenon, “Not all the King’s mistresses together did as much harm as she!”3
“If I die it will be of grief”
Madame de Pompadour, despite her generosity and encouragement of French art and industry, was the subject of harsh lampoons and barbed poems throughout her tenure. Many courtiers were simply jealous that Louis XV had chosen a woman of the middle class for the honor, and they poked cruel fun at her background and her maiden name, Poisson, which means “fish” in French. She once found under her napkin at her dining table a poem accusing her of having venereal disease. Away from the poisoned elegance of court, the French populace enjoyed poking fun at her in taverns and tacking up nasty verses on the lampposts.
Upon her arrival at Versailles, the nobles looked down their long aristocratic noses at her and sniffed. “She is excessively common,” the comte de Maurepas wrote, “a bourgeoise out of her place, who will displace all the world if one cannot manage to displace her.”4 Similarly, the duc de Luyne scoffed, “She will probably be just a passing fancy and not a proper mistress.”5
Her enemies at court delighted in spreading word among the common people of Madame de Pompadour’s extravagance, wildly inflating the money she spent. When she set up a tiny theater in Versailles for the king’s amusement, word got out in Paris that it had cost an exorbitant sum wrung from them in the form of taxes. When she visited Paris—her childhood home and a place she far preferred to Versailles—her carriage was pelted with eggs and mud, and she was hissed and booed and even threatened with death.
But it was not until Madame de Pompadour took charge of running the Seven Years’ War beginning in 1757 that she was truly reviled. Some two hundred thousand Frenchmen were killed or wounded, the national treasury was bled dry, taxes were raised. Madame de Pompadour found herself the recipient of frequent death threats, some mysteriously appearing on the mantelpiece of her apartment.
The detested royal mistress slipped into a profound depression and suffered from insomnia, which she deadened with drugs. When peace was declared in 1763, France lost most of its possessions. The French people did not blame King Louis the Well-Beloved for the devastating losses, but his devilish mistress. Madame de Pompadour, whose health had never been robust, suffered greatly from the barbs and pricks of her unpopularity. “If I die,” she sighed, “it will be of grief.”6 She died the following year.
Parisians greeted her death with a jeering verse:
“An indecent pitch of luxury as to insult the poverty of the people”
Madame de Pompadour’s successor, Jeanne du Barry, started off her career as royal courtesan with a dreadful handicap—she had been an infamous Parisian prostitute with whom many of the king’s ministers and courtiers had had sex.
To become maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry had to be presented officially at court by a noblewoman. And here was the difficulty—no noblewoman would be caught dead facilitating the prostitute’s intrusion into their privileged sphere. Finally the king convinced the impoverished comtesse de Béarn to accept the job by paying off her debts and promoting her sons serving in the armed forces.
The day of the presentation ceremony, however, the well-bribed comtesse de Béarn lost her nerve, knowing that if she went through with it no one at court would ever speak to her again. Limping pitifully, she claimed to have sprained her ankle so badly she could hardly walk. Many thought that if she had in fact hurt herself, the injury had been intentional. The ceremony was canceled, to the delight of Versailles courtiers and the French populace.