A young bride had become the gossip of the rich merchant society of Paris—that class that was ousting the old noblesse from power. She was a beautiful, a remarkable woman; her wit was repeated in the drawing-rooms, she had all the accomplishments; her charming name—Madame Lenormant d’Etioles.

Draw aside the curtains of the past and we discover our little Jeanne Poisson—grown into this exquisite creature. It has come about in strange fashion enough. The father—a scandalous fellow—having fingered the commissariat moneys in ugly ways to his own use, had been banished for the ugly business. Nor is Jeanne’s mother any better than she should be; and the wags wink knowingly at the handsome and rich man of fashion, Monsieur Lenormant de Tournehem, who has been the favoured gallant during the absence of the light-fingered Poisson. And, of a truth, Lenormant de Tournehem takes astonishing interest in the little Jeanne—watching over her up-growing and giving her the best of education at the convent, where she wins all hearts, and is known as “the little queen.” The truth spoken with wondrous prophecy, if unthinkingly, as we shall see. Complacent Poisson came home, and took the rich and fashionable, bland and smiling Lenormant de Tournehem to his arms. Has he not wealth and estates? therefore as excellent a friend for Poisson as for Madame Poisson. The girl Jeanne leaves the convent to be taught the accomplishments by the supreme masters of France, the wits foregather at Madame Poisson’s, and the brilliant Jeanne is soon mistress of the arts—coquetry not least of all; has also the most exquisite taste in dress. Under all is a heart cold as steel; calculating as the higher mathematics. She has but one hindrance to ambition—her mean birth. Lenormant de Tournehem rids her even of this slur by making his nephew, Lenormant d’Etioles, marry her, giving the young couple half his fortune for dowry, and the promise of the rest when he dies—also he grants him a splendid town-house, as splendid a country seat. And consequential self-respecting little Lenormant d’Etioles is lord of Etioles, amongst other seignories. So Jane Fish appears as Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, seductive, beautiful, accomplished, to whose house repair the new philosophy, the wits, and artists. She has a certain sense of virtue; indeed openly vows that no one but the king shall ever come between her and her lord. But, deep in her heart, she has harboured a fierce ambition—that the king shall help her to keep her bond. She puts forth all her gifts, all her powers, to win to the strange goal; confides it to her worldly mother and “uncle,” Lenormant de Tournehem; finds keen allies therein to the reaching of that strange goal. The death of the ChÂteauroux clears the way. At a masked ball the king is intrigued as to the personality of a beautiful woman who plagues him with her art; he orders the unmasking. Madame Lenormant d’Etioles stands revealed, drops her handkerchief as by accident; the whisper runs through the Court that “the handkerchief has been thrown!” The king stoops and picks it up. A few evenings later she is smuggled into the “private apartments.” She goes again a month later; in the morning is seized with sudden terror—she daren’t go back to her angry lord lest he do her grievous harm; he will have missed her. The king is touched; allows her to hide from henceforth in the secret apartments; promises the beautiful creature a lodging, her husband’s banishment, and early acknowledgment as titular mistress—before the whole Court at Easter, says the pious Great One. But he has to join the army to play the Conqueror at Fontenoy; and it is later in the year (September) before Madame d’Etioles is presented to the Court in a vast company and proceeds to the queen’s apartments to kiss hands on appointment. Thus was Jeanne Poisson raised to the great aristocracy of France in her twenty-third year as Marquise de Pompadour.

Boucher had been one of the brilliant group of artists of the d’Etioles’ circle. That the Pompadour’s influence had much effect upon his position at Court for a year or two is unlikely; for she had to fight for possession of the king day and night, as the ChÂteauroux had done, against the queen’s party and the unscrupulous enmity of Maurepas. To set down Boucher’s favour at Court to her is ridiculous. He was painting for the queen’s apartments at thirty-one when the Pompadour was a school-girl of twelve. But in the year following her rise to power, Boucher painted four pictures for the large room of the Dauphin, which were “placed elsewhere”; and, the year after that, he was at work upon two pictures for the bedroom of the king at the castle of Marly. It is likely enough that the Pompadour directed this order. She had almost immediately secured the office of the Director-General of Buildings, which covered the direction of the royal art treasures, for “uncle” Lenormant de Tournehem, who was also a friend of the artist. And from this year it is significant that Boucher paints no more for the opposing camp of the Queen and Dauphin.

He was now giving all his strength to the “Rape of Europa” that he painted for the competition ordered by the Academy at the command of Lenormant de Tournehem in the king’s name, in which ten chosen Academicians were to paint subjects in their own style for[Pg 59]
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[Pg 62] six prizes and a gold medal, to be awarded in secret vote by the competing artists themselves. Boucher won, by his amiable nature, the good-will of them all by proposing that they should so arrange as to share the prizes equally, and thus prevent any sense of soreness inevitable in the losers.

But greatly as he won the good-fellowship of his fellow-artists by it, this picture caused a murmur to rise amongst the critics who, aforetime loud in his praise, now began to complain of his “abuse of rose tints” in the painting of the female nude. The fact was that Diderot and the men of the New Philosophy were turning their eyes to the whole foundations upon which France was built, art as well as society, and were beginning to demand of art “grandeur and morality in its subjects.” They were soon to be clamouring for “the statement of a great maxim, a lesson for the spectator.” Diderot, with bull-like courage, picked out the greatest, and turned upon Boucher, blaming him for triviality.

The nations, weary of war, concluded the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in the October of 1748. No sooner was peace concluded than Louis relapsed into his old habit of dandified indolence and profligate ease; and, putting from him his duties as the lord of a great people, he gave himself up to shameless intrigues. He allowed the Pompadour to usurp his magnificence and to rule over the land. He yielded himself utterly, if sometimes sulkily, to her domination; and for sixteen years she was the most powerful person at Court, the greatest force in the state—making and unmaking ministers, disposing of office, honours, titles, pensions. All political affairs were discussed and arranged under her guidance; ministers, ambassadors, generals transacted their business in her stately boudoirs; the whole patronage of the sovereign was dispensed by her pretty hands; the prizes of the Church, of the army, of the magistracy could be obtained solely through her favour and good-will. Her energy must have been prodigious. Possessed of extraordinary talents and exquisite tastes, she gave full rein to them, and it was in the indulgence of her better qualities that Destiny brought Boucher into the friendship of this wonderful woman. She became not only his patron but his pupil, engraving several of his designs.

But this, her sovereignty over the king, easy and light in its outward seeming, was a haggard nightmare to the calculating woman who had so longed for it. She knew no single hour’s rest from the night she won to the king’s bed. She had to fight her enemies, secret and open, for possession of the king’s will, day and night; and she fought—with rare courage. She won by consummate skill and unending pluck. She made herself an essential part of the king’s freedom from care. The Court party fought her for power with constant vigilance. Maurepas brought all his unscrupulous art, all his ironic mimicry, all his vile jibes and unchivalrous hatred to bear against her. He had made himself a necessity to the king; and he never slept away a chance of injuring her. He knew no mercy, no nobility, no pity. He made her the detested object of the people. With his own hands he penned the witty verses and epigrams that were sung and flung about the streets of Paris.

But she had an enemy more subtle than any at the Court—hour by hour she had to dispute the king with the king’s boredom. And it was in the effort to do so that she created her celebrated theatre in the private apartments, calling Boucher and others to her aid in the doing of it. Here the noblest of France vied with each other to obtain the smallest part to play, an instrument in its orchestra, an invitation to its performances.

Boucher left the Opera to become its decorator in 1748, and did not return until her death. For her, he also decorated her beautiful rooms at Bellevue. She bought at high prices many of his greatest masterpieces.

The Pompadour’s power so greatly increased that she openly took command of the king’s will; dared and succeeded in getting his favourite Maurepas banished; and herself took to the use of the kingly “we.” Her rascally father was created Lord of Marigny; her brother, whom the king liked well and called “little brother,” was created Marquis de VandiÈres; her only child, Alexandrine, signed her name as a princess of the blood royal, and would have been married to the blood royal had she not caught the small-pox and died. She amassed a private fortune, castles, and estates such as no mistress had dreamed of; and into them she poured art treasures that cost the nation thirty-six millions of money. She created the porcelain factory of SÈvres, kept keen watch over the Gobelins looms, and founded the great Military School of St. Cyr amidst work that would have kept several statesmen busy, and of deadly intrigues at Court that would have broken the spirit of many a brilliant man.

It was in her hectic desire to keep the king from being bored that she stooped, and made Boucher stoop, to the employment of his high artistry in the painting of a series of indecent pictures wherewith to tickle the jaded desires of Boredom, and thereby gave rise to the widespread impression that Boucher’s art was ever infected by base design. But Boucher was, at his very worst, but a healthy animal; and even in these secret works for the king he did not reach so low as did many an artist of more pious memory who painted with no excuse but his own pleasure.

As a matter of fact, the Pompadour has been blamed too much for this evil act, and too much forgotten for her splendid patronage of the man who, under it and during these great years of his forties, produced a series of masterpieces that place him in the foremost rank of the painters of his century. It is impossible to reckon the number of the pastorals and Venus-pieces that his master-hand painted and loved to paint, during these the supreme years of his genius. It is significant that they were painted during the years that saw the Pompadour in supreme power.

Boucher was so firmly established in 1750, his forty-seventh year, that he moved into a new house in the Rue Richelieu, near the Palais Royal. Disappointed in not receiving a studio and apartments at the Louvre, he was allowed to use a studio in the king’s library. He was now making money so easily that he was able to collect pictures and precious stones and the gaily coloured curiosities that appealed to his tastes.

The critics were becoming more and more censorious; and one of them hits true with the comment that in his pastorals his shepherdesses look as if they had stepped over from the Opera and would soon be off again thereto.

In his forty-eighth year Boucher’s art was at its most luminous stage—his atmosphere clear and subtle and exquisitely rendered; his yellows golden; his whites satin-like and silvery; his flesh-tones upon the nude bodies of his goddesses unsurpassed by previous art. The beauty of it all was not to last much longer.

Lenormant de Tournehem died suddenly in the November of 1751; the Pompadour’s brother, Abel Poisson de VandiÈres, was appointed Director-General in his stead at the age of twenty-five—and soon afterwards, on the death of his father, created Marquis de Marigny—a shy, handsome youth, a gentleman and an honourable fellow, whom the king liked well, and against whom his sister’s sole complaint was that he lacked the brazen effrontery of the courtiers of the day. No man did more for the advancement of the art of his time. A pension of a thousand livres falling vacant, the young fellow secured it for Boucher; and almost immediately afterwards, a studio becoming vacant at the Louvre owing to the death of Coypel, first painter to the king, Boucher came to his coveted home, eagerly moving in with his family as soon as its wretched state could be put into repair.

The decoration of the new wing to the palace at Fontainebleau brought the commis[Pg 69]
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[Pg 71]sion for the painting of the ceiling and the principal picture in the Council Chamber to Boucher, who had already decorated the Dining-Room. This was the period of his painting the “Rising” and the “Setting of the Sun” for the Pompadour, now in the Watteau collection, two canvases that were always favourites with the painter, bitterly as they were assailed by the critic Grimm.

He was turning out so much work that it was impossible to give as much care to his pictures as he ought. For he refused sternly, his life long, to raise his prices; by consequence he had to create a larger amount of work in order to meet his expenditure. It was about this time that Reynolds, passing through Paris, went to visit him and found him painting on a huge canvas without models or sketches. “On expressing my surprise,” writes Reynolds, “he replied that he had considered the model as necessary during his youth until he had completed his study of art, but that he had not used one for a long time past.”

He soon had not the time, not only to paint from nature but even to give his pictures the work necessary to complete them. The feverish haste which took possession of him in his frantic endeavour to meet the vast demand for his pictures, and the eager efforts of his engravers to satisfy the public call for engravings after his works, gave him less and less leisure to joy in their doing. And his eyesight began to fail. His flesh-tints deepened to a reddish hue; and he stands baffled before his work, suspecting his sight, since what every one cries out upon as being bright vermilion, he only sees as a dull earthy colour. Boucher has topped the height of his achievement; he has to “descend the other side of the hill.” Boucher begins to grow old.

In Boucher’s fifty-first year an ugly intrigue of the queen’s party at Court to sap the Pompadour’s influence over the king by drawing away the king’s affections towards Madame de Choiseul-Romanet, a reckless young beauty of the Court, brought about a strange alliance. The Count de Stainville, one of the Pompadour’s bitterest enemies, was shown the king’s letter of invitation to his young kinswoman; and he, deeply wounded in his pride that his kinswoman should have been offered to the king, went to the Pompadour and exposed the plot. A close alliance followed; and De Stainville thenceforth became her chief guide in affairs of state. It was at her instance that the king called him to be his Prime Minister, raising him to the Duchy of Choiseul—a name he made illustrious as one of the greatest Ministers of France.

In his fifty-second year Boucher was appointed to the directorship of the Gobelins looms, to the huge delight of the weavers and all concerned with the tapestry factory. This was the year of his painting the famous portrait of the Pompadour, to whom he several times paid this “tribute of immorality.” For the Gobelins looms he produced many handsome designs; and he was painting with astounding industry. But his hand’s skill began to falter. His art shows weariness in his sixtieth year, and sickness fell upon him, and held him in servitude now with rare moments of respite. The critics, notoriously Diderot, were now attacking him with shameless virulence. Boucher passed it all by; but he felt the change that was taking place in the public taste. The ideas of the New Philosophy were infecting public opinion; the Man of Feeling had arisen in the land; and France, humiliated in war, and resenting the follies and the greed of her shameless privileged class, was openly resenting it and all its works. Choiseul had planted his strength deep in the people’s party, and was come near to being its god. His masterly mind had checked Frederick of Prussia to the North; and the nations, exhausted by the struggle, signed the Peace of Paris in 1763. Choiseul, with France at peace abroad, turned to the blotting out of the turbulent order of the Jesuits at home. Their attempt to end the Pompadour’s relations with the king made this powerful woman eager to complete his design; the chance was soon to come, and the Order was abolished from France and its vast property seized by the state.

The Pompadour lived but a short while to enjoy her triumph. Worn out by her superhuman activities, assailed by debt, she fell ill of a racking cough, dying on the 15th of April, 1764, in her forty-second year, keeping her ascendancy over the king and the supreme power in France to her last hour. Death found her transacting affairs of state. Louis, weary of his servitude, had only a heartless epigram to cast at the body of the dead woman as she passed to her last resting-place.