Madame Guillotine

Few women in history have been as accomplished or as powerful as Madame de Pompadour, born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson on the 29th December 1721. Her origins sound uninspiring – a loose moralled but charming mother and a general lack of certainty about the identity of her real father, who may or may not have been her mother’s husband, François Poisson, but was more likely to have been a rich financier or banker.

Madame Poisson may not have been chaste but she was clearly a shrewd woman nonetheless – which is probably why so many successful business men were drawn to her. She realised very quickly that her pretty, clever little daughter had potential and, with the assistance of her gentlemen friends acquired for her an excellent education, which not only nurtured her formidable intelligence but also fostered talents in art, singing, music and drama.

In 1741, one of Madame Poisson’s protectors arranged for her charming daughter, who was nicknamed Reinette in tribute to her manifold graces and attractions, to marry his nephew, Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d’Étoilles – overcoming any scruples that the young man might have had by providing Jeanne-Antoinette with a splendid dowry and buying the couple a pretty little country estate at Étoilles, which lay alongside the King’s hunting forest at Sénart.

Everything started very well for the Le Normant d’Étoilles couple. As a married woman, Jeanne-Antoinette was now free to create her own salon, drawing around herself all the most intellectual and talented people in Paris – she had a decided taste for writers and philosophers and even Voltaire, with his vinegary nature became a close friend. Her personal life was happy and contented as well – her husband loved her and she produced two children – a boy who died while still a baby and a daughter, Alexandrine who was as lovely as her mother.

However, Jeanne-Antoinette, with her wide ranging intellect and the coquettish ways of her mother was not destined to remain content for long. It is said that as a little girl she had been taken by her mother to see a fortune teller, who had prophesied that she would one day reign over a king and from that moment on she had had but one ambition: to be loved by the King of France.

Luckily for Jeanne-Antoinette, the current King was Louis XV – a handsome, rather diffident man with dark eyes, a rueful smile and charming manners. Even more luckily, he had the infamous Bourbon libido and had already been entangled with a series of aristoratic mistresses – most notoriously four of the Nesle sisters.

As an aside, you have to feel sorry for Hortense-Felicité de Mailly, Marquise de Flavacourt, who was the only one of the five Nesle sisters to become Louis’ mistress. How mortifying that must have been at Versailles!

Jeanne-Antoinette had already done everything she could to put herself in front of the King and had been honoured with the occasional nod and smile and gift of game from his shoots, however when his latest Nesle mistress, the pretty, plump and avaricious Marie Anne de Mailly, Duchesse de Chateauroux suddenly died on the 8th December 1744, she seized her opportunity, aided and abetted by her friends and family (including her husband who appears to have wearily resigned himself to the inevitable).

No doubt strings were pulled to get the pretty but undeniably middle class Madame Le Normand d’Étoilles an invitation to the prestigious masked ball that was to be held at Versailles on the 25th of February 1745, one of the great parties that were thrown at court to celebrate the marriage of the Dauphin Louis, the King’s only son to the redheaded Infanta Maria-Teresa of Spain.

Jeanne-Antoinette dressed up as a shepherdess for the ball and we can imagine how her heart thudded as she pushed her way around the crammed, candlelit Hall of Mirrors, looking at the masks worn by the enormous chattering crowd and wondering when her moment was to come. She had been told that the King and his closest friends had decided to attend in the rather novel disguise of a group of clipped Yew trees and so she must have peered closely at each topiaried bush as it danced past, wondering which one was the King until finally one came to a halt in front of her and removed his mask, revealing the monarch’s laughing dark eyes.

By March she had left her old life behind and was installed as the King’s official mistress at Versailles. She was officially separated from her husband by May and in June, her lover had procured for her the title of Marquise de Pompadour, the name by which she was to be known for the rest of her life.