A Fan for Pompadour

MADAME DE POMPADOUR (324 pp.) Nancy Mitford-- Random House ($4.75).

When the mob marched on Versailles in the French Revolution, palace guards ran to close the massive iron gates. They tugged in vain: the gates were rusted fast into the open position from which they had not been moved for a century. Throughout that time the French public had wandered freely in and out of the great palace where their "Father" the King, had dwelt "like a man in a glass house." Louis XIV had patiently endured this goldfish life. His successor. Louis XV who became King when he was only five years old, rebelled before he was out of his teens. He built into Versailles a private snuggery known as "the little apartments" (a scant 50 rooms and seven bathrooms), and when this, in turn, became too public, Louis chopped it into smaller and smaller hideouts. In these "rats' nests" (as one courtier contemptuously described them), the King's absolute power lay hidden like the germ in a seed of wheat. The bulk of the palace was no more than a magnificent husk.

The King woke every morning in a private bedroom and proceeded to dress after lighting his own fire ("so as not to wake the servants"), and work in his private study. But at the appointed hour, he hastily undressed again, scurried into his gorgeous State Bedroom, and allowed himself to be officially roused from sleep by his Gentlemen. Nobody thought there was anything extraordinary about this sham ritual, for it was an exact copy of the method by which France was ruled. Just as Louis XV had a State Bedroom in which to lie down officially, so had he "Parlements" and a "Conseil d'Etat"--Bourbon equivalents of the modern dictator's "Soviets"--to lay down officially the laws which he created.

It is the great merit of this biography by Novelist Nancy Mitford that it excels in depicting both these worlds--the brilliant, romantic showcase and the recessed secret world of power.

The Beautiful Bluestocking. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, daughter of a well-to-do businessman and created Marquise de Pompadour by her royal lover, arrived in the "rats' nests" in 1745, stayed at the court 20 years until her death at 42. Her figure seemed to be made wholly of nymphish curves: her skin was "snow-white," her eyes "the brightest, wittiest and most sparkling." She could act dance and sing, play the clavichord "to perfection," paint, draw, engrave precious stones, and spout about gardening, botany and natural history--"a more accomplished woman," says Author Mitford, "has seldom lived." The only interesting thing about her childhood comes from an account book, where she records payment of 600 livres to a fortune teller "for having predicted, when I was nine, that I would be the King's mistress."

Jeanne-Antoinette never doubted the prediction for a moment. Her skeptical family laughingly nicknamed her "Reinette" (little queen) and married her off to a respectable and loving husband. She often said "that she would never leave him--except, of course, for the King."

Firmly, calculating, she worked her way into the King's arms by making her salon a favorite with the most brilliant of France's intellectuals--Philosophers Montesquieu, Helvetius, the great Voltaire himself. The decisive meeting of the King and the beautiful bluestocking occurred at the splendid "Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees," when 35-year-old Louis and his courtiers masked themselves with headdresses of yew branches. One poor lady of the court allowed herself to be seduced by a right-royal-looking "yew tree"--only to find on her return to the ballroom that she had barked up the wrong one. "The real King . . . was engaged in a laughing conversation" with the future Marquise de Pompadour.

Projects of a Mistress. Today's visitor to Versailles can "still see what she saw from her little balcony . . . the fountains of mermaids and cupids, the avenue of trees . . . We still hear the great clock on the parish church, the organ in the palace chapel . . . But we do not hear the King's hunt in the forest, the hounds and the horns . . . The rooms, so empty today, so cold with their northern light, were crammed to bursting point when she lived in them; crammed with people, animals and birds . . . furniture, stuffs, patterns . . . plans, sketches, maps, books . . . embroidery . . . letters . . . cosmetics: all buried in flowers, smelling like a hothouse ..."

Normally closefisted, Louis showered money on her innumerable "projects"--the porcelain factory of Sevres, paintings, sculptures, villas, rewards and pensions for artists and builders--a grand total, it is said, of 36 million livres. "He doesn't mind signing for a million," she told her maid, "but he hates to part with little sums out of his pocket."

The burghers of France had reason to detest La Pompadour. The flowers in her many gardens "were renewed every day, as we renew them now in a room" (the greenhouses at Trianon alone held 2,000,000 pots). At her town house in Paris, she thought nothing of taking "a big bite into the Champs Elysees for her kitchen garden" (it would have been much bigger if Parisians had not burst out in a storm of rage). The secret police were in her pocket. In affairs of state, "nothing was decided without her knowledge"; in the Seven Years' War (in which France lost her Canadian colony and most of her money), La Pompadour was responsible, as Critic Cyril Connolly says, for "aligning her country with all that was reactionary in Europe against all that was progressive."

Unlike other historians, Author Mitford believes that "sincere et tendre Pompadour" (Voltaire's description) did all she did for love of the King, not because she was ambitious. Her weakness--a terrifying one for a royal mistress--was that she was "constitutionally incapable of passion." "She tried to work herself up to respond to the King's ardors by every means known to quackery"--diets of vanilla, truffles and celery, "elixirs" guaranteed to "heat the blood." Nobody knows how far she succeeded, but Louis adored her even when he had turned for his pleasure to what Author Mitford solemnly calls "a modest little private brothel, run on humane and practical lines."

The Salon-Type Author. This biography is the first major historical effort by Nancy Mitford (in private life the Hon. Mrs. Peter Rodd), author of six novels, two of which--The Pursuit of Love and The Blessing--are the brightest light-weight novels to come out of Britain since her friend Evelyn Waugh raised enough poundage to join the heavies. While her husband goes about his business ("Mr. Rodd's business is sailing small boats on the Mediterranean," she says), tall, handsome Author Mitford, 50, lives un-Pompadourishly in Paris' shabby, aristocratic Faubourg St. Germain--"a perfect specimen," said a recent visitor, "of that vanishing breed, the salon-type lady author." She wrote Madame de Pompadour mainly, she says, because no other English-language writer had done the job to her satisfaction before.

Gruff historians will take as big bites into her biography as Madame de Pompadour took into the Champs Elysees. But none will quarrel with Author Mitford's flair for period color and conversation. No historian writing in English has given a better pen-picture of Versailles in its heyday, none has shared so generously with the reader her personal passion for the stuffs, jewels and decorations that made the palace a wonder. By the end, readers will know, on the one hand, what the French Revolution was all about, and on the other, why Louis XV at 54 (with ten years still to reign) chose to stand "in the bitter wind . . . without coat or hat" to see his mistress' coffin pass by, and then to turn away, "tears pouring down his cheeks," saying: "That is the only tribute I can pay her."

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