Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (21 page)

D
usk, January 5, 1757. The French countryside where King Louis XV was visiting his daughter, Madame Victoire, was bitter cold and dark. The weather suited the political climate and the treacherous events that were about to unfold.

The Protestants in the south of France, led by Pastor Rabaut and even more so stoked by Jean-Louis Gibert, had become increasingly rebellious. King Louis XV’s decision to dispatch musketeers to arrest his most vocal critics in the
parlement
alienated more of its members. Whether because of calculated politics or sincere compassion, more and more the magistrates were taking the side of the Huguenots. Protestant sympathizers in the
parlement
were led by the likes of Guillaume-François Joly de Fleury, who had suggested that the Catholic Church allow the Crown to at least acknowledge Protestant marriages as legal civil unions, without religious sanction. Versailles was not interested in the suggestion. Paris was rife with rumors that the Prince de Conti was covertly fermenting a spirit of revolution among the Protestants in the south.

King Louis kissed his daughter adieu just before 6 p.m. on
that January 5. He made his way through his entourage of guards and servants to his royal coach, which would transport him back into that tempest in Paris. As the king approached his carriage, a man pushed his way through the crowd. With one hand, he grabbed the king, and with the other he plunged a dagger into Louis XV’s side.

Among the commotion of the gasps and screams, guards took the assassin into custody: Robert-François Damiens, a servant. Within the hour, royal doctors determined the king’s wound was not a fatal one. Within the month, the trial was under way.

In the context of the tensions coursing through the Paris streets, the royal court—really, just about everyone—reasonably speculated that the
domestique
did not act alone in his attempted regicide. With no question of Damiens’s guilt, the trial became more of an inquisition, run by a commission composed of more than sixty members the king deemed “loyal” councilors. One of the men Louis XV assigned to the panel was the Prince de Conti.

One way to interpret Conti’s appointment to the panel is that it was evidence the king dismissed the rumors insinuating the worst of the prince, and that the king instead chose to believe the best of his cousin. It had always been that way.

Ever since they were children, Louis XV had held his older cousin in high regard. Even when Louis-François seemed to have stepped into the darkest of shadows, the king had seen the prince in only the most flattering light. Time and again, Louis-François proved that the king’s trust in him was well placed.

As a teen, when Louis-François fatally shot one of his Jesuit tutors, Louis XV, who was then not much more than a child, believed it to be a terrible accident, a belief later confirmed by
investigators. When Louis-François spent his way into a debt of 1.6 million francs, the king bailed him out, believing it was an investment in his cousin’s true character, which shortly thereafter Louis-François seemed to demonstrate on the battlefield. Never mind the high point of Louis-François’s military career occurred only after he had ignored one of his cousin-king’s decrees.

In 1742, despite a royal order banning princes of the royal blood from taking part in the military, the prince attached himself to a French regiment that marched into battle in the Piedmont. But the king could not fault his cousin. A report Louis XV received of the battle was that “the only talk is of the brilliant success which the Prince de Conti has had there and which very far surpasses all hopes that been formed from it.” Upon his return, the king toasted Louis-François, saying, “
de mon cousin le grand Conti
.”

In his role on the panel in the Damiens matter Conti impressed many as being the one who more than all the others was interested in pursuing the facts to wherever and whomever they might lead. During the two-months-long proceeding there came a point, on February 19, 1757, where there was a theory that the Jesuits might have played a role. Addressing his fellow judges, members of the royal court, and other spectators in and outside the chamber, Conti urged the panel to explore the possibility. Speaking directly to his fellow judges with great rhetorical flair, he said, “Remember that the judges would have terrible remorse if the criminal, at the point of death or during torture, reproached their inaction by indicating accomplices in an area where reason alone was saying to look for them. I would succumb to deep grief into which another assassination would take me, born of a principle I would have left unrevealed and still existing.”

The panel voted against investigating the Jesuits, one of several moments when the prince described those dissenting judges as “slaves of the court.”

In the court of public opinion, Conti’s apparent pursuit of justice on the stage of the Damiens trial served to bolster his standing with the French
citoyens
. According to a newspaper account published in the final days of the hearings, Conti’s intelligence and integrity were now as undeniable as the bravery and commitment he had demonstrated in war:

Not quite three months after the attempted assassination, Damiens was executed by a method that had not been witnessed in France for more than 150 years. He was tied to a stake and set on fire. While still alive, breathing, though barely, his charred, melting body was thrown onto the ground and each of his four limbs were tied to horses that were ridden until Damiens quite literally and grotesquely was torn into pieces. The spectacle played out over two hours on a cold, damp night in Paris town center, before a crowd of horrified spectators.

If the Madame de Pompadour, who was then thirty-six years old, had had her way, the Prince de Conti would have been executed right alongside the treasonous domestic.

It would not be entirely accurate to say that Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson slept her way to the top; however, it would be revisionism to deny that it was the foundation of her strategy.

She was born on December 29, 1721, in Paris, into ignoble circumstances that would foreshadow her life. Her birth came with the rumor that she was the spawn of infidelity. Officially, as much as it can be described as such, her parents were Louise-Madeleine de La Motte and François Poisson. That her mother was Louise-Madeleine there is no doubt. As to François being the father, that was a subject of gossip and debate.

François’s status was firmly middle-class. Shortly after he and Louise-Madeleine married, they moved into the Hôtel des Invalides, which served as a home and hospital for injured and impoverished war veterans. A bureaucrat assigned to the War Ministry, Monsieur Poisson was in charge of the invalids’ food service, in particular, meat rations. In 1719 he was deployed to staff one of France’s military engagements.

Louise-Madeleine was a gorgeous woman. A brunette with porcelainlike skin, according to one of her contemporaries, she was “one of the most beautiful women in Paris.” Her beauty was matched by her cunning. Another record of Louise-Madeleine describes her as “clever as four devils.” She had married François because he was the best option at the time, but she felt she deserved better than the commanding officer of a military
boucherie
, and she was never one to go without.

While François was deployed, Louise-Madeleine shared the
company of many men, noblemen mostly—dozens, according to the gossip of the times. When François returned and held his daughter at her baptism, few believed the child was in the arms of her biological father. Shortly thereafter, the couple had a son, Abel-François. A few years of normalcy, then François took off, fleeing charges of corruption and embezzlement linked to illegal speculating on wheat, all of it linked to a famine in Paris.

While Louise-Madeleine figured out what to do next, she sent five-year-old Jeanne-Antoinette off to school at the convent of Ursulines of Poissy. Five years later, Louise-Madeleine brought her daughter home and began to give her a wholly different curriculum than the one the good sisters could, or in good conscience would ever allow themselves to provide. In the words of Marcelle Tinayre, a neighbor and close friend of the Poissons, Madame Poisson gave her daughter the “education of a superior courtesan.”

Louise-Madeleine saw a reflection of her life and beauty in her daughter. She believed that her daughter’s natural endowments were the key to Jeanne-Antoinette securing a better life than the one Louise-Madeleine had had. Having experienced life with a lowlife butcher and then sampling the lifestyle of some of the noblemen she entertained, Louise-Madeleine determined that her little “Reinette,” as she called Jeanne-Antoinette, could become, if she worked hard and put herself in the right circumstance, the mistress of the king.

As Tinayre would describe it in her eighteenth-century account, Louise-Madeleine gave her Jeanne-Antoinette “an education, which aims at enhancing all the seductiveness of a woman. The sciences, literature, music are turned to uses both of ornament and strategy. Madame Poisson knew the value of beauty, but she knew, too, that beauty, if it draws the man, does not suffice to hold
him; that there are hours of melancholy or fatigue in which the fairest face is powerless, if not irradiated by an inward light; in a word, that man demands variety and that that woman will keep him who can satisfy this unconscious claim, native to the most faithful of his sex.”

Jeanne-Antoinette learned the harpsichord, dance, and elocution. She and her mother talked openly about putting her in a place to catch the king’s eye, to scale “the Olympus of Versailles.”

They networked her into the circuit of refined gatherings in Parisian drawing rooms. Along the way, she was spotted by a banker, Charles-Guillaume Lenormant.

In March 1741, at the age of twenty, she married Monsieur Lenormant. He had a country home in Étoiles, a house in Paris, an impressive salary, and most important, his was a social circle that overlapped with royalty, a world where ladies would take coaches out to watch the gentlemen and nobles hunt foxes in the Forest of Sénart. It was at one of these hunts, in 1744, three years into her marriage, that Jeanne-Antoinette at last caught Louis XV’s eye.

Reinette made sure her coach was positioned in his eyeline. As Tinayre recorded it:

How could Louis XV not notice this vision? When his carriage passed by, his eyes found her and lasciviously lingered. He was thirty-four, and here was this twenty-three-year-old flower, so clearly in full bloom. Their connection was so immediately apparent that over in the carriage that held his current mistress, the Duchesse de Châteauroux, and her friend, the Madame Chevreuse, they could not help but notice. Chevreuse remarked that the “little d’Étoiles woman was looking even prettier than usual.” In response, right there in the carriage, the Duchesse Châteauroux kicked her friend until Chevreuse was unconscious.

Within weeks the king arranged for the butcher’s daughter and her husband to attend a costume party at Versailles. That evening he arranged for the husband and wife to be separated and for the wife to join him in his private chamber. Jeanne-Antoinette, more or less, never left. She was ensconced at Versailles. The king compensated the banker for the returns on the investment that he had made in his wife.

Aware that a name change would be required to erase the awkward residue of her now former common life, Jeanne-Antoinette changed her title to the Marquise de Pompadour. Within the year, in May 1745, according to the protocol necessary to be recognized as a member of the royal court, Madame de
Pompadour was presented to the court, and more specifically, to Louis’s wife, the queen.