Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online Page A

– fish, as Lent was in progress, fresh salmon, and soles, and pâté of trout – and then went back to the Galerie des Glaces, clutching plates and glasses. The prophecy of Nostradamus, that the floor would give way and only the King and the thirty people near him would be saved, was gallantly disregarded.
    For a long time, royalties, including the King, were sought in vain; none had yet appeared. At last, one of the looking-glass doors was thrown open, and in came the Queen; she was unmasked, her dress was covered with bunches of pearls and the two famous diamonds, the Régent and the Sancy, sparkled on her head. She was followed by the Dauphin and his bride, dressed as a gardener and flower-seller, and the Duc and Duchesse de Chartres. All the other royalties present were masked; they included Prince Charles Edward of England, so soon to embark on his disappointing adventure. Time went on, and still no sign of the King. The Chartres vanished from the party; they were so fond of making love that they could hardly bear to take any time off; when they dined out they generally asked for the use of the hostess’s bed during the course of the meal; at Versailles they had their own to go to. The Princesse de Conti, mother of the Duchesse de Chartres and a grand-daughter of Louis XIV, removed her mask in the supper room imagining that somebody would spring up to give her a chair; nobody recognized her, nobody budged; she stumped away furiously muttering that she had never, in a long life, seen such impossible people.
    The Dauphine danced with a Spanish grandee who knew all the gossip of Madrid and was clearly of great importance; he refused to reveal his identity although she begged him to do so. Presently the Marquis de Tessé, himself a grandee of Spain, had a long talk with him, found him absolutely delightful and invited him to dinner; the Spaniard never unmasked, and presently he vanished. Next day M. de Tessé’s Spanish cook confessed to him that the mysterious hidalgo had been none other than himself. This story went all round Versailles and was thought particularly enjoyable because of the Dauphine’s character. Like all the Spanish royal family she was extremely stiff, penetrated with the sense of her own importance. The French never liked her. She made it quite clear that she thought many of their customs too common for words, the use of rouge, for instance, and their passion for jokes. She was never seen to laugh at a joke, either with friends or at the play, and made it quite clear that she would not tolerate them from her ladies-in-waiting. The King put himself out for her to a touching extent, trying, in a hundred little ways, to make her feel at home; she was always most disagreeable to him, possibly from shyness but more likely, it was thought, because she disapproved of him. M. de Luynes, to whom anybody royal appeared in rather a rosy light, says that she would have been pretty had it not been for her red hair, white eyelashes, and an enormous nose which seemed to grow straight out of her forehead without any roots. She was, however, elegant and a beautiful dancer; the Dauphin, uxorious like all his family, had fallen in love with her at once.
    At last, the door leading to the Œil-de-Bœuf, ante-chamber to the King’s apartment, was opened; everybody pressed forward. A very curious procession lurched blindly into the ballroom; eight yew trees, clipped like those in the garden outside, in the shape of pillars with vases on them. The King had made up his mind that, for once, he would be unrecognizable. In the print by Cochin of the scene in the great gallery, lit by eight thousand candles, many fancy dresses can clearly be made out and the yew trees are mingling with the crowd. Presently one of them went off with pretty Présidente Portail to a dark and solitary corner of the palace. She thought he was the King, and nestled happily among the twigs; but when she returned to the ballroom what was her fury to