Madame de Pompadour (Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson), mistress of King Louis XV (reigned 15-1715). She played an official role in the affairs of the kingdom in France, and was seen by most of her contemporaries as having great influence.
From 1745 to 1764, the year of her early death, she extended her influence to all areas of royal policy: court patronage and domestic and foreign affairs, and served unofficially as Minister of Culture. Her achievements were all the more remarkable considering that after 1750 her sexual relations with the king ceased.
A woman every man wants as a mistress
The Marquise de Pompadour was a multifaceted personality and her influence was extremely complex. This Parisian “bourgeoisie” reinvented herself as an aristocratic lady, a promoter of financial interests in the affairs of the kingdom, and, in addition, managed to create alliances with most of the ancient and prestigious families of France.
She created a cult of submissive loyalty to her royal lover and indulged in private pleasures, but she vigorously supported large-scale cultural projects in the kingdom. The image of the Marquise was a crucial part of her essence; a mixture of propaganda and public relations that resembled the techniques in which Louis XIV He was a wizard.
She was represented in painting, sculpture, and other media by renowned artists of her time such as François Bouche, Jean-Marc Natié, Charles-André Vanellope, Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, and others, as well as a team of artists from the field of decorative arts.
From the beginning of her adult life, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, born in 1721 (from 1745 known as the Marquise de Pompadour), left her mark on men who met her. She was, as the courtier Dufort de Cheverny (1731-1801) later recalled, “a woman whom every man wanted as a mistress.” He continued: “She had an oval face, quite regular features, wonderful skin, quite wonderful hands and arms, eyes that were very beautiful although they could be hard, and there was an intelligence and brilliance in them that was never seen in any other woman.”
She greatly impressed President Charles-Jean-François Hénault. He told the salonnière Madame du Deffand that he had met at the opera “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen,” adding that “she understands music perfectly, sings with all the gaiety and incredible good taste, knows a hundred songs by heart, and takes part in plays (which were staged in her private home). The Austrian ambassador Kaunitz (1711–1794) was also charmed, while Louis XV maintained that his mistress was “the most charming woman in France.”
It should be noted that the role of royal mistress included much more than beauty and grace. Over the two decades until her death at the age of 43, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson expanded the role of royal mistress to include the roles of royal mistress, close friend, personal confidante, policy advisor, political and ministerial assistant, as well as patron of the arts and cultural impresario.
In doing so, she redefined the status and power of the royal concubine and made herself indispensable to the king. But she did not do it alone – at every stage of her life, she was accompanied by powerful men who gave her support. Her success involved endless work, and the constant rebuilding of her image, a process in which her tools – seductive charm and considerable beauty – greatly assisted her.
The Marquise de Pompadour was not a plebeian as court gossip liked to suggest. Her background was bourgeois, and not as conventional as a name accompanied by scandal. Her father, François Poisson (1684-1754), worked in the service of the four Pâris brothers who rose from humble beginnings in the last years of the reign of Louis XIV (14-1643) and became a powerful financial “powerhouse.”
In 1718 Poisson married Louis Madeleine de la Motte (1699-1745). Poisson's work involved extensive travel, and from Adam Poisson acquired a number of lovers, including Jean Pâris de Montmartel (1690-1766), the younger of the brothers. Paris, bishop, minister, valet de chambre of the king and especially Charles-Francois Lenormant de Tournehem (1684-1751), one of the most important bankers who was responsible for collecting royal taxes.
When Jeanne Antoinette was born to Madame Poisson on 29 December 1721, it was uncertain who the child's father was; Turnham took it upon himself to protect the family as François Poisson had been involved in serious financial trouble in 1727 and had been forced into exile. Madame Poisson lived in Paris with her son Abel-François (1721–1781) while Jeanne-Antoinette was placed in a convent.
After leaving the convent, Tourneham gave her a valuable private education in Paris: the art of speech, poetry, manners and dancing. The young Jeanne-Antoinette began to appear in the most cultured Parisian circles. In the literary salon of Madame de Tencin (1682-1749) she met important figures from the world of literature of Paris: Fontenelle, Motesquieu, l'abbé Prévost, Marivaux, Piron, Duclos, Helvétius and apparently also the painters François Bouche (with whom she was associated in a blessed artistic collaboration), Le Tour, Nétia and Drois, as well as others.
A worthy marriage partner
Turnham's patronage, and the cultural education he gave to Jeanne Antoinette, shaped his protégé's identity, and made her a worthy marriage partner. On 9 March 1741, Jeanne-Antoinette married Charles-Guillaume Lenormunt d'Etiolles (1717–1799), whom the wealthy and distinguished Turnham had carefully selected as his heir.
Her husband's father and grandfather had received titles of nobility, though they lacked the prestige of the old nobility, and these were also valid for the new Madame d'Etiola. Jeanne-Antoinette gave birth to a son in December 1741, but the baby died shortly afterwards, and in March 1744 she gave birth to a daughter, Alexandrine. The child was given to a wet nurse.
In Paris, the Étioles lived with Turnham at his house on the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, but Jeanne Antoinette also lived in the family palace at the Étioles, about twenty miles from Paris. Turnham encouraged her to develop her own salon there, which attracted figures she had met at Madame de Tensin's (Fontanel, Carbillon, Montesquieu) as well as Voltaire, the most impressive literary figure of the early Enlightenment, and the scientist and mathematician Maupertuis.
Her patron, Turnham, set up a theatre for her in his house, said to rival the Paris Opera in size. Here she developed her singing and acting skills, performing for her salon guests, who included local nobility.
Close to the Etiola were woodlands where the king, a keen hunter, could come. It seems that the king had been able to catch a glimpse of the attractive lodger in the early 1740s. She may have had ambitions in this regard. Turnham was said to have said that even though she had married his nephew, she was still “un morceau du Roi” (a piece fit for the king).
Such arrangements for obtaining a concubine for the king were valuable, and the Tournai-Etiola faction was certainly not the only group that aspired to this, and Jeanne-Antoinette was not the only one to hope for the king's favor.
Madame de Pompadour
Everyone agreed that the king needed a cheerful companion. Because King Louis XV was very melancholic. As the Duc de Choiseul said, he was constantly interested in “burials, illnesses, deaths and operations.” In September 15, the king married Marie Leszczynska (1725-1768), daughter of Stanisław Leszczynski, who had ruled as King-elect of Poland from 1703 to 1704 before being dethroned and spending the rest of his life wandering around Europe.
Mary gave birth to ten children between 1727 and 1737, including a male heir in September 1729; but the marriage soon cooled, and Louis began to live a dissolute bachelor life, surrounded by mistresses and busy with hunting expeditions.
It is said that Jeanne-Antoinette was courting the king, and she was invited to a masquerade ball held inVersailles On 25 February 1745, on the occasion of the Dauphin's marriage to the Spanish Infanta Marie-Raphaël. The ball was held in the Grand Gallery of the Palace of Versailles, and was the culmination of a lavish celebration. In one of the works produced, the king is shown chatting with a beautiful young huntress to the right of the scene while on the left appears a shepherdess, believed to be Jeanne Antoinette, surrounded by several Turkish courtiers. A few days later, Jeanne Antoinette became the king's mistress, "and thus began the adventures of Madame d'Etiola".
Few courtiers expected the relationship to last; but the king soon placed Jeanne Antoinette in Madame de Stroud's former apartments and listened sympathetically to his new mistress's request for a formal separation from her husband, who was not happy with it. In July, when the king led his armies on the border against the Austrians, she received the title of Marquise de Pompadour, along with the property in Limousin that belonged to her.
Thus she came to a position that for the next two decades was hers without question. Madame de Pompadour spent the summer of 1745 away from her new lover, who was on a military campaign in Flanders, receiving daily messages from the king, each signed in a daub with the words “restraint and loyalty”; her role during the summer was to ensure that her relationship with the king would be more than a passing affair.
Unlike Pompadour, other official mistresses had previously been drawn from the royal court or the high nobility. Among her virtues, de Pompadour was very learned: Voltaire said that “she read more at her age than any old lady of Versailles”. She was later one of the enthusiastic subscribers to the multi-volume edition of the writings of Madame de Maintenon. The abbot de Bernis, who had been invited to visit the Étiquette in the summer of 1745, and Voltaire, assisted the Marquise, providing her with information and knowledge that would help her when she was introduced to the court.
Voltaire and de Bernis had Pompadour's formal presentation to the court in mid-September, a long and agonizing ceremony of forced amiability in which all eyes would be on her to see if she made any mistakes. In theory, only the most senior nobility had the right to be represented at court, although there were ways around this when the king so desired. The new Marquise passed the test with flying colors.
An excellent example of her establishment at court - Turnham was appointed to a significant administrative position, which allowed him control over the sphere of public life, and the possibility of regular meetings with the king, a favor enjoyed by important ministers and courtiers. Her brother Abel, however, gained direct access to the king, and François Poisson, Pompadour's father, was the clear winner. The portraitist Jean-Marc Nétiel (1685-1766), depicted Pompadour as Diana hunting; the huntress topos was accepted, and seemed appropriate to de Pompadour, who received the land with the trees where she and the king first met,
Madame de Pompadour and the Queen
Queen Marie Leszczynska, whose portrait was painted by Tenthia in 1748, had become, in the mid-1740s, the center of a group of devout believers who hated the control of financial interests in the politics of the kingdom. Marie requested to be depicted in bourgeois dress. Marie's refusal to conform to Tenthia's artistic idiom was almost a rejection of the values that would be represented by de Pompadour's audience.
Pompadour was intelligent enough not only to accept the queen's anger towards her but also to understand that if she wanted to stay in her place, especially with a lover shrouded in guilt, she had to find a way to reach the woman as the husband had asked. Pompadour attempted to charm the hostile queen. She persuaded the king to pay the queen's 40,000 écus gambling debt, and sought additional funding for Catholic charities.
Pompadour had the queen's wings in the palaces of Choisy and Fontevrault, which were in poor condition, decorated and modernised. She showed great respect for the queen in court life and encouraged the king to develop a warm relationship with his daughters. She managed to obtain entrées to the queen's chamber (the right to visit her wings) and, at the end of 1746, permission to ride in her carriage. The royal children still looked down on de Pompadour, but the queen responded fondly to the mistress's kindness.
Companion
Her intelligence and Pygmalion-like upbringing made the beautiful Madame d'Etiola the perfect courtesan and charming companion of whom the king was clearly proud. The key to Pompadour's success was her ability to adapt to the king. Louis demanded that his private life be kept hidden and protected from the hustle and bustle of the court.
He also felt a constant need to be busy with a wide range of activities. Political chronicler Edmond Barbier noted that Louis “had a great tendency to be bored wherever he was. It was the great art of Madame de Pompadour to try to dispel this mood.” As a result, Pompadour had to remain close and available to the king, and to be as discreet as he appreciated.
A private staircase connected Pompadour's apartments (which she had lavishly refurnished in 1748) with those of the king, which were one floor above. A keen gardener herself, Pompadour encouraged Louis to do the same. De Croy notes that he was impressed by the menagerie that Pompadour had established for her and the king's pleasure at Versailles.
She also worked with Louis on the planning and design of the palace where they spent more and more time. She also took an interest in war and public affairs, as she understood that he needed support and encouragement, and would appreciate advice from someone he felt he could trust. De Pompadour, the Marquis d'Argenson noted wryly, "amused the king so much that he had no time to think."
One of Louis' favorite pastimes was amateur dramas. Pompadour would often take on the starring role in the productions. The rehearsals and performances also allowed a new cast of fellow performers to gather outside the ceremonial confines of the court, and she could forge new friendships and alliances.
One of the successes of 1750 was Houdard de La Motte's play Issé. Issa, the shepherd, loves a shepherdess without her realizing that he is Apollo, the sun god, in disguise. Bouche painted the stage sets, and in 1750, he was commissioned to paint a canvas on the theme. His “Apollo and Issa” is generally understood to present the face of Pompadour in the form of Issa.
The relationship between the king and his mistress was particularly close. Everyone felt that Pompadour had proven to herself and others that she had succeeded in making herself a significant figure in Louis’s life; but this came at a price. “We are always on the road,” she told the Comtesse de Lutzelbourg in February 1749, referring to the busy schedule of visits to palaces and country houses to which she accompanied the king. Court life was clearly tiring. “The more I live at court, the more I hate it. Apart from the happiness of being with the king,” she wrote to her brother, “everything is full of disgust, superficiality.”
Madame de Pompadour died at the age of 43, on April 15, 1764, from tuberculosis.
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And it is not in vain that her memory remains to this day and beyond, for hundreds of years. Indeed, she is influential and has the ability to leave her mark on the world, something that many try to do but without success. An instructive article.
She was undoubtedly worthy of a queen, and in my eyes a much more courageous woman than Marie Antoinette. To see a concubine reach a position where she was the king's right-hand man was a miracle in those times. She took care of everyone who was close to the king, creating a safe environment around Louis XV and also in the palace itself. It's a shame that the porcelain series created under her design was not mentioned, which, if I'm not mistaken, is the most prestigious porcelain ever created. Not only was she beautiful, but she also had excellent taste in interior design, right in the Rococo era and how much I identify with her in many areas. A very interesting article that briefly reviews her life's work, the soldier's wife, perhaps even the real queen of France at that time (: