Louis the Well-Beloved (49 page)

The Marquise was at Bellevue supervising the decorations.

She was supremely happy, for ever since the dismissal of Maurepas she had felt great confidence. She loved the King dearly and she knew that the affection he had for her went very deep, so deep that she did not believe he would ever desert her.

If the time came when she was unable to satisfy him she would not reproach
him
. She would give herself entirely to contributing to his pleasure. She already had a plan. She would find others to supply what she could not – not clever women, but pretty little girls, young girls preferably, with perfect bodies and blank minds.

It was a plan for the future – not to be acted on until the need arose – but she would be watchful and prepared for the moment when it came.

She would be the King’s dearest friend and companion, his confidante, the person at Court in whom he knew he could place absolute trust – never complaining, never demanding, always charming, always ready to sacrifice herself to administer to his pleasure.

Thus she would hold her place; and, if Madame de Pompadour was not known as the First Lady of France, what did it matter as long as her power was complete?

Now for the entertainment.

How proud she was of this delightful château, and how interested he would be. They would sit side by side at this brilliant table decorated with flowers and candlesticks of gold and silver. Between them there would be that intimacy which all others envied and marvelled at.

One of her women came to her as she stood inspecting the table. The woman appeared agitated.

‘What is it?’ asked the Marquise with a smile, for she was rarely anything but charming, even to the most humble.

‘Madame,’ said the woman, her teeth chattering, ‘the people are gathering in Paris. They are talking about Bellevue and the money that was spent on it; and they are comparing it with the price of bread. It is said that they mean trouble.’

‘Trouble? Oh, not tonight. The King will be here. You know how they love the King. The fact that he is here will please them.’

‘Madame, they say the crowd is very ugly.’

‘Oh, these Parisians! So excitable!’

Madame de Pompadour leaned forward and re-arranged a bowl of flowers.

‘Sire,’ said Richelieu, ‘they say the people of Paris are restive tonight.’

‘Why so?’ asked Louis languidly.

‘They have been growing more and more angry as Bellevue was being built.’

‘What concern of theirs is Bellevue?’

‘They think it has some connexion with the price of bread. It is these ideas that have been circulating in the cafés.’

‘We will take no notice of them.’

‘But Sire, it would seem that tonight they plan to take notice of us. They are massing in the squares. I have just heard that their leaders are planning a march to Bellevue,’ Richelieu found it difficult to hide the malicious glee in his voice. ‘Sire, might it not be wise for you to remain at Versailles tonight? Let the Marquise have her entertainment without you.’

Louis looked surprised. ‘The Marquise expects me.’

‘Sire, the people love you, but they do not love . . . Bellevue. Do you not think, in the circumstances, you should remain at Versailles? The people can be wild when they are in a mass.’

‘But you would seem to forget,’ said Louis, ‘that I have promised the Marquise.’

When the King’s carriage arrived at Bellevue the shouts of the people could be heard in the distance. They sounded angry and ominous. It was true. The mob was on the march and its objective was the château of Bellevue.

The Marquise was suddenly frightened, not for her safety that night – and she knew that the people hated her beyond anyone else in the Kingdom – but because it was the construction of Bellevue which had infuriated them, and Bellevue was her creation. So if anything happened tonight she would be blamed.

Nothing must happen.

Louis had come because he had promised. But there must be no regrets in their relationship. Everything that she brought to him must be desirable in his eyes. She must never plunge him into unpleasantness. Unpleasant! The mob could be dangerous. And who knew, in the horror of an attack on Bellevue, they might forget that Louis was their well-beloved King.

She turned to Louis. ‘I am afraid for your safety,’ she said, ‘so I am going to cancel everything I have arranged. I pray you put no obstacle in my way. If you should suffer the slightest pain tonight through the disaffection of these wild people of Paris, I should never forgive myself.’

Louis pressed her hand. He was grieved to see her so upset. Moreover he was extremely anxious to avoid an unpleasant scene.

‘You must do as you wish, my dear,’ he said.

She gave the order.

‘We are leaving the château,’ she told her guests. ‘We shall take supper in a cottage which is at the end of the gardens. All lights will be extinguished in the château so the mob will realise that no one is there. Now . . . there is no time to lose.’

Thus it was that the grand entertainment at Bellevue was cancelled; there was no play, no fireworks, no ball.

The guests crowded into the little house, where a picnic supper was served instead of the grand banquet, with guests sitting on the floor and crowding every room.

The King was charming as he always was during these more intimate parties and did not seem to mind in the least that the grand affair at the château had been cancelled.

Here again, said the Court, this showed his deep regard for the Marquise. They seemed as happy together in the modest cottage as they did in the state apartments of Versailles.

Meanwhile the angry mob had marched to the château only to find it in darkness.

They had been misled, they grumbled. There was no banquet tonight. They would not have the pleasure of storming the place and helping themselves to the food which had been prepared for the noble guests.

Many of them were wishing they had not made the journey from Paris. They were not yet ready to hate the King. For the moment they still saw him as a young man misled by favourites, extravagant because he had never been taught to be otherwise. The legend of the well-beloved took a long time to die.

So while the intimate supper party went on in the little house in the grounds, the people straggled back to Paris, as disgruntled with the leaders of the march as they were with the châtelaine of Bellevue.

Discontent rumbled throughout the capital, and one summer’s day serious riots broke out.

The child of a working woman, who lived in the Faubourg St Antoine, went out into the streets to buy bread for his mother and he never returned.

The frantic mother ran into the streets, searching for him, and when he was not to be found she continued to run through the streets calling out her misfortune, tearing at her hair and her clothes, and shouting that her child had been kidnapped.

The people gathered. What was this story of a missing boy? Taxes. Starvation. And now were their children to be taken from them!

The Comte d’Argenson had put forward a plan to clean up the city and remove the many beggars and vagabonds who infested it. These people were homeless and destitute and, as colonists were needed in the Empire, it was decided that they should be shipped either to Louisiana or to Canada to work on the silkworm farms which French colonists were setting up there.

The beggars grumbled. There was no liberty in France any longer, they declared; but as the people were glad to see their city rid of these wandering beggars, no significant protest was made.

It was a different matter when a child belonging to a decent woman was stolen.

The people gathered about the stricken mother offering sympathy, some declaring that they had heard stories of missing children – little boys and girls who were sent out to shop for their parents and never returned.

Rumour grew and the stories became fantastic.

‘The police kidnap the children and then ask payment for them. There was a woman in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel who was forced to work for weeks in order to pay the ransom demanded for her child!’

‘They are taking our children to ship them to the Colonies.’

‘They are robbing the people, not only of their food, but of their children!’

Wilder grew the rumours, and the wildest of all was born in the St Antoine district and quickly swept through Paris.

‘Ship them to the colonies? Not they! There is a person . . . let us not mention the name. A very highly placed person. He – or she, shall we say – suffers from a dreadful disease, and it is only possible to preserve life by bathing in the blood of children.’

So that was what was happening to their children! They were being slaughtered that some highly placed person of the Court might take daily baths in their blood!

‘A hundred children are missing,’ they said in the cafés.

‘A thousand children have been stolen!’ was the cry in Les Halles.

‘People of Paris, guard your children,’ was the admonition of the agitators on the street corners. ‘Those selfish monsters who have priced our grain so high that we cannot afford our bread, those who demand the
vingtième
, now ask for the blood of your children.’

The mob was on the march.

Several gendarmes were killed in the streets when the crowd fell upon them with clubs because someone had said they had seen them talking to children. One policeman ran for shelter into a house in the Rue de Clichy, and in a very short time that house was wrecked. In the Croix-Rouge a restaurant keeper had been said to be on very friendly terms with the police who often drank wine in his shop. His restaurant was mobbed and destroyed.

It was necessary to call in the Guards and musketeers to restore order. Proclamations were read in the streets. There had never been orders to arrest children. If the police were guilty of kidnapping children, such cases would be investigated if the parents would come forward and make their accusations. Any who had suffered would receive compensation.

Those who had led the revolt were arrested, tried, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to public hanging in the Place de Grève.