Madame de Pompadour Read Online Free PDF Page A

Last, but not least, she was a superlative housekeeper. Abel, too, was taught everything considered necessary to a rich young man of the day. More important perhaps than lessons, the Poisson children were brought up among people of excellent taste, who had knowledge of and a respect for art in all its forms; honest bourgeois who, when they patronized an artist, paid for what they ordered. Both the children profited in later life from this example.
    From the earliest days Reinette was a charmer. She charmed her ‘stepfather’ Tournehem; she charmed the nuns at the convent, who loved her tenderly, and took an interest in her long after she had left them; her father, mother and brother worshipped the ground she trod on. She grew up endowed with every gift a woman could desire but one, her health was never good. Without being a regular beauty, she was the very acme of prettiness, though her looks, which depended on dazzle and expression rather than on the bone structure, were never successfully recorded by painters. Her brother always said that not one of her many portraits was really like her; they are certainly not very much like each other. We recognize the pose, the elegance, but hardly the face. More informative are the descriptions by various contemporaries, written in private journals and memoirs, which did not see the light for many years after her death.
    Dufort de Cheverny, himself of bourgeois origin, always deeply jealous of her brother, says: ‘Not a man alive but would have had her for his mistress if he could. Tall, though not too tall; beautiful figure; round face with regular features; wonderful complexion, hands and arms; eyes not so very big, but the brightest, wittiest and most sparkling I ever saw. Everything about her was rounded, including all her gestures.
    ‘She absolutely extinguished all the other women at the Court, although some were very beautiful.’
    The Duc de Luynes, a dry old member of the Queen’s set, rather fond of dwelling on the physical appearance of Court ladies in the most denigrating terms – their cheeks too flat, their noses too fat, their figures almost deformed and so on – is obliged to admit that she is
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. The Prince de Croÿ, who disapproved of her, says over and over again that it would not be possible to be prettier. Président Hénault, the Queen’s greatest friend, writes: ‘One of the prettiest women I ever saw.’ An honest, rather unimaginative soldier, the Marquis de Valfons, writes: ‘With her grace, the lightness of her figure, and the beauty of her hair, she resembled a nymph.’
    Le Roy, a gamekeeper at Versailles, after praising all her features, her figure and her beautiful light brown hair, goes on: ‘Her eyes had a particular attraction, perhaps owing to the fact that it was difficult to say exactly what colour they were; they had neither the hard sparkle of black eyes, nor the dreamy tenderness of blue, nor the special delicacy of grey; their indeterminate colour seemed to lend them to all forms of seduction and shades of expression. Indeed her expression was always changing, though there was never any discordance between her various features; they all unfolded the same thought, which presupposes a good deal of self control, and this applied to her every movement. Her whole person was half way between the last degree of elegance and the first of nobility.’
    Finally, the Marquis d’Argenson, who hated her so terribly that his whole diary is really written with the aim of destroying her in the eyes of posterity, finds nothing worse – at the beginning – to say than: ‘She is snow white, without features, but graceful and talented. Tall, rather badly made.’
    By the time she was of marriageable age, she was already spoken of in Paris society as fit for a king; and she herself had lived in a dream of love for the King ever since her visit to the fortune-teller, a dream which was most unlikely to come true, since it was impossible for a