And what of my new husband? What of him? He did not look at me once that evening in Compiègne and made his excuses and left as soon as he could. I do not understand it at all. Everyone else here seems to think that I am pretty so why doesn’t he? I really want to talk to him but don’t know how.
Madame de Mailly was very kind when she prepared me for bed last night and whispered that the King admires me very much and she heard him say several times how pleased he is with both my looks and my behaviour.
‘Tell me about him,’ I said, with a nervous look at Madame de Noailles, who was thankfully not close enough to hear our conversation. ‘I find him somewhat perplexing and not at all how I imagined he would be.’
The pretty Comtesse rolled her dark eyes and laughed. ‘Oh, I know what you mean. The King is a very complicated man and I believe that Madame de Pompadour is the only person to have ever truly understood him.’ She lowered her voice as she said the name of the now deceased favourite as of course it is considered the height of bad manners to mention the dead at court.
‘What was she like?’ I recollected the lovely presents that she had sent to Carolina and remembered also that along with Choiseul she had been instrumental in arranging my marriage. ‘Did the King love her? Does he miss her now?’
Madame de Mailly cast a cautious look at the Comtesse de Noailles who was busy reprimanding the maids at the other side of the room. ‘She was very pretty, really quite charming and extremely witty.’ She sighed. ‘She really loved that man.’
I felt suddenly breathless, imagining some sort of mystery. ‘What happened to her?’
As usual the truth turned out to be utterly commonplace, even banal. ‘Oh nothing! She had been ill for a long time and then one day she went to bed and didn’t get up again. The King was inconsolable when she died.’
‘He always looks so sad,’ I said now remembering the way that he had looked at the Dauphin and I in the carriage earlier. ‘Sad and disappointed.’
Madame la Comtesse shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘He has had much in his life to make him sorrowful,’ she said. ‘He once told me that he believed himself born to be unhappy as his grandmother was the daughter of the English Princesse Henriette and that like all Stuarts he has a melancholy, even morbid turn of mind.’ She laughed. ‘They also have a tendency to lose their heads.’
I do symphatise with MA regarding her clumsy and aloof husband….. something that would torment her for a long time!
I do not know much about Louis XV except that he was a libertine, so thank you for this wonderful insight on his character!
He is really difficult to write about as he was so complicated – on one hand a real libertine and on the other a very shy, reserved man with a turn for morbidity. To a British person like myself he seems like a typical Stuart in personality and so I factored that in a bit.