May 16, 2023 • 46 mins
TW: This episode contains discussions of violence towards children that might be disturbing for some listeners.
For decades, one woman was the heart and soul of Versailles: Madame de Pompadour. Dana speaks with Jennifer Wright (author of Madame Restell) about the courtier's rise to the King's Mistress and her strengths as a diplomat and great party guest.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hello, this is Danish Schwartz and this is a very
special episode of Noble Blood because I am joined by
my very good friend, the incredibly talented, truly brilliant writer
Jennifer Wright.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Jana, I am so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Jennifer, you are just an incredible history writer. You've written
a few of my favorite books, get Well Soon, which
is a book about.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
History's worst plagues and the heroes that fought.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Really, I was going to say a very topical pre
pandemic subject.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Yeah, in retrospect, I should not have leaked the Wuhan virus. Yeah,
it was too much viral marketing. Yeah, in my part, I.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Was going to say, but it did probably boost book sales.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah. Also, just to be clear that that was a joke.
That's not how anyhing actually happened.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Jennifer is a little human being who is not involved
in anything COVID related. You wrote the book It ended Badly,
thirteen of the worst historical breakups. Yes, one of my
favorite books because it covers one of my favorite historical couples.
Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I was going to say, I remember years ago talking
about Carolyn Lamb chopping off for pubic hair and sending
it to Lord Byron to try to win him back.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It's that move. What I relate to so profoundly is
when you're so in love with someone who clearly is
not interested, but you're like, you keep having to up
the stakes to get their attention.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You've got to go for broke. You've got to chop
off all your pubic hair and send it to them
in the mail.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's the equivalent. If I could show you some of
the emails I wrote to like a boy when I
was like twenty two, stopped responding to my text Like,
some of the emails that I wrote are just like
I never want to see them again. I hope that
they are the equivalent of pubic hair. Oh.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I wrote like multi thousand word emails to people i'd
just broken up with, just trying to like break down
every part of our relationship but also get back together.
Why did I think that would work?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah? That's always the secret is they want a well
written email.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
That's what they want, A really long email.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That is the equivalent. But I'm so excited. Your most
recent book is Madame Marstelle, and it's a story that,
to be totally honest, I had no idea what it
was who she was until I started talking.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well, that is because I think she has been very
deliberately written out of history. She was a very successful
female abortionist operating in mid nineteenth century America, and when
she started performing abortions in the eighteen thirties, it was
still classified as a misdemeanor if you performed the abortion
before the fourth or fifth month, and by the end
(02:46):
of Madame Marstelle's life in the eighteen seventies, the Comstock
Acted passed and the Comstock Act forbade sending anything obscene
through the mail, which included say, written descriptions of birth
control abortion, to say nothing of actually sending birth control
medication through the mail. And sadly, that is something we
(03:08):
are seeing revive now today.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Another sadly topical book. You're like the history, Cassandra at
this point.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, I swear the next one is just going to
be about parties or something like. It's gonna be about
how everybody is nice and gets along.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It would be so nice, can you I know, we're
going to move on to the subject of the main
subject of the podcast, which is a fascinating figure of
the French Versailles culture. But can you tell us a
little bit about Madame Morstelle, even though she's not a noble.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
You can tell everything about Madam Moistelle. There is indeed
a whole book about it. But you know, Madamistelle began
her life in written She was born antrou in eighteen
twelve in Painswick, England, and she came from a very large,
very poor family. She was a mate of all work
for a butcher, which meant that she would have been
(03:59):
doing pretty back breaking work, doing things like fetching any
water from the well and dumping out the chamber pots,
and beating all the rugs to make sure they were clean,
and cleaning out the fireplaces. And that was also a
time where if you were a maid, you were open
to a horrifying number of sexual advances from any man
(04:20):
in the house. Jonathan Swift Actley wrote advice to maids,
saying that you have to beware of the eldest son,
because you're going to get nothing from him but a
big belly in the clap at least you can get
money from the master of the house. So I think
that may have been one of the reasons that Madame
Ristelle always worked on a sliding scale when she charged
(04:42):
people later, and why she tended to charge servants less.
And in when she was sixteen, she married a taylor.
The tailor was unfortunately an alcoholic.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Is this where she got the name Restelle?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Oh? No, the tailor was unfortunately an alcoholic, and she
took over his work very quickly. And this is a
running trend in Madame Moistelle's life. She kind of meets
a man, sees how he does his job, and then
figures out how to do it better. Ye, but she
convinced him to move with their newborn daughter to America
so they could become rich. Then she gets to the
(05:17):
Lower East Side, her alcoholic husband dies almost immediately and
she is now a single mother on the Lower East
Side of New York. If you've seen Gangs of New York,
that's not accurate, but keep that picture in your mind.
That's where Madame Ristelle is.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And I remember a detail in your book that seamstresses
was like they were literally a down diamond.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yes, yes, it made me understand I've read so many
novels from this period where the main character will be like,
I have thousands of dollars of debts to my dressmaker,
and I've always thought them, Why is your dressmaker still
making you dresses? She should have cut you off ages ago.
It's because there are so many of them that you
have to operate on even the hope of payment.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So, yeah, it's a time. A prostitution is everywhere because
working in a factory means working sixteen hour days, and
if you have a child, then you don't have enough
money for childcare. The factory doesn't pay enough. Women would
drug their children with laud of them so they would
sleep while they were at work. In one especially horrifying
(06:19):
Dickensian note that I found, there was a woman who
was a single mother worked in a factory, had a
four year old and a newborn, and she told the
four year old to take care of the newborn while
she was at work. And when she came back, the
four year old and if you have a toddler, you
can imagine how proudly the four year old would say this,
said that the baby had been crying but they had
(06:41):
stopped him, and the mother praised him, and then she
went to see the baby and he had stopped him
by beating him over the head with a hammer until
he died. Oh so, so this was a terrible dime
to be a single mother or have an unplanned pregnancy
of any kind. And Madame Restelle really might have fallen
(07:02):
into this situation very easily. But she lived down the
street from a pill compounder named doctor Evans, and doctor
Evans provided all manner of pills. There was no oversight.
You could smash any herbs together and say this will
cure your headaches, or this it might give it a shop.
What have you got to lose? And he probably also
(07:25):
provided birth control pills. But Madame Rostelle started making what
must have been incredibly effective birth control pills. She was
using ingredients like tansy oil and turpentine and mixing them together.
And those are unbelievably dangerous ingredients. You should never ever use.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Some although paint center in your like paint centner.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yes, unfortunately, they still do get used. In the nineteen seventies,
doctor said turpentine is a harrowing motif into it yourself abortions.
So these are things that will work. They will just
also kill their female patient. And Madame Roselle is pretty
remarkable in that she mixed them together without killing people's.
(08:07):
People in the neighborhood started saying that they had had
five abortions this way and they were coming back for more.
She could also perform surgical abortions with a sharpened piece
of whalebone. Now if her hand slipped, she could punch
her a woman's bladder and kill her. Another amazing thing
is that, despite a lot of people trying very hard
(08:27):
to prove that Madame Ristelle was killing people, there are
no records that indicate that she ever killed a patient. Oh,
so Restelle must have had a very steady hand and
a real genius for mixing ingredients. Around this time she
met her second husband, Charles Lowman, who was a printer,
and he was really familiar with the bombastic personalities that
(08:49):
advertised in newspapers, and together they came up with this
persona of Madame Rostelle, and they talked about how she
was and her grandmother was a famous mid wife, and
she had been training in Paris and bringing her skills
to America. And this was a time when medical innovation
was happening in Paris. In a way it wasn't in America.
(09:12):
So this was a great persona to craft. It's glamorous, man,
it's glamorous.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
If anyone came and said that her grandma was a
famous parish and.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
His wife, exactly, it sounds sexy too. People thought that
French people were more sexually sophisticated in addition to having
better medical skills. So that's how this persona of Madame
Riistelle was born.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
And someone rich people, doctor Muter. This is my my
anatomy research shelf down there. Doctor Mutter, who was has
If you've been to Philadelphia, there's a Muter music.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I'm dying to go.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I mean too, we should go together to go girls.
He trained for in French surgeries. That's where all the
surgery was was.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Exactly, yes, go to France. One of the reasons that
they drove female midwives out of business in America is
because they started trying to open up schools for doctors
in America. But they were terrible. You couldn't walk the
hospitals the way you could in France. So they would
rent out a lecture hall, charge young men like fifty
(10:13):
dollars and in six months if you showed up to
most of the classes where you would never see an
actual patient. Usually there was just like a skeleton or
a box of bones. At the end, you got your diploma.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
And as a result, it's estimated that in the mid
eighteen hundreds there were suddenly four times as many doctors
as pounds needed, and they had to find a new
source of income, and that is one of the reasons
that they started pushing in on midwives trade.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Wow, And I do love I think like the interest
of like when midwiffery became obcentrics and like more male
dominated doctors is fascinating to me because I love the
story of how Princess Charlotte of Wales in the early
eighteen hundreds, who's a character in Immortality, but she in
real life was pregnant and it was very fashionable to
(11:07):
have a male doctor. At this time.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
They were worse, you know, they were there right there, died.
There was an average of one us in two hundred
was a female midwife in this period, and it was
ten to twenty times higher if you had a male doctor.
They were so much worse.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They were so much worse, and she died and it
was just considered fashionable to have a male doctor because
she was a princess. She had to do it.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
And she died and it was bad yep.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
And the American Medical Society made such a big deal
out of how midwives are barbaric relics, and of course
midwives hands were actually clean, whereas doctors were digging them
into a corpse and then pulling them out and then
sticking them into a woman's birth canal.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, they would treat an infected abscess and then be
like perfect, but inside.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Of it, oh my gosh, the one that killed me
the most. I'm sorry. I know we have to talk
about nobility because this is noble blood. Please. But after
Ignat Similfies, oh God bless him, God may he rest
in peace. But after Ignacemolies suggested that maybe the reason
so many women are dying are because doctors need to
wash their hands. And by the way he tested this,
(12:14):
he found out that it worked. He could bring the
death rate for female patients down on par with mid
talk and Charles Miggs replied that this was absurd because
quote unquote, doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen have clean hands.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
It's the ego on them.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
I'm so furious about it. I'm furious two hundred years
later about.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
How many women had unnecessary death.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yes, yeah, well, speaking of one day for bird control
in America, you got.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Luckily that it's not something we need to deal with anymore.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
But if we're talking about women in positions of power
that I think sometimes people think are anachronistic, like women
didn't have any power or influence in the seventeen hundreds.
One of my favorite figures, and I think a figure
that you love is Madame de Pompadour.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
I am so happy to talk about her. No one
as the pretty prime Minister at the Court of Versailles.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So for someone who has no idea who she is
outside perhaps of a single Doctor Who episode, there.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Is a Doctor Who episode, really good one. It's the
only one I've seen.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, it's nice.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, it's sweet.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
I don't like the robots. I like where it's just
about Madame Pompadour.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
That is also kind of my I I've watched a
little bit more Doctor Who. I've fallen off a little bit.
I like when it's like historical characters and fine, I like.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
When they meet Vincent Bengo. Yeah, I like it if
it was just some people meeting Vincent, I love.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I love when they just meet historical figures too. I
don't need a distant planet.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
No, I don't. I sorry. I know people love it.
It's a good show. I get it. I know it's
very special to people.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, but there's a wonderful Madame de Pompadour episode. But
for people who maybe have only seen that episode or nothing,
who was the pretty Prime Minister?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
The pretty Prime Minister was Louis the fifteenth Mistress, and
she was one of the most famous mistresses of this
era because she was the mistress at Versailles for about
twenty years.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
When you say mistress you mean the official position, I.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Mean the official mistress.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yes, for context, in case you're less familiar, Mistress in
this case doesn't just mean, you know, was having a
sexual relationship with a king. Mistress was a court position.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Mistress was a court position, and it was a very
important court position. The queen was really just there to
provide children. Louis the fifteenth had a very lovely wife,
Queen Marie Lesinka. She produced children, but she was also
very religious. She was very retiring. She did gamble, but
(14:56):
she played a game, but nobody liked l She had
a hard time getting people to play her very old
fashioned gambling game.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Ian doesn't like to play scrabble with me because I
always beat him.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh hurtful. I know Daniel and I to play scrabble
every night. That sounds so nice. Do we watch a movie,
we play scrabble?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I love I would love that.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's a lovely way to end the desk.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Ian has taken to refusing to play scrabble with me
because I'll be like a hundred points up and have
done with this.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Well, I mean, you've got to know all the two
letters got zaw key gi like those winners. Guys, Well
that's it.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I play for strategy, he plays for showman.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
What qt Yeah yeah, work that in. But anyhow, Queen
Marie out there trying to get people to play Letlers
of Katan with her every night. And uh, Louis the
fifteen that had a bit of a more bomb vivent personality.
He was prone to boredom, but he was also somebody
who really enjoyed consistency. I think something that you see
(15:56):
with Louis the Fifteenth is that Madame Pompadour essentially became
his wife.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I mean, the mistress for twenty years and then like
friend to the king that years after fascinating to me,
So can we begin with the beginning of her life?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Of course, Madame Pompadour, and it's something that differed her
a lot from other royal mistresses was born to the bourgeois.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Class, so she was wealthy but not noble.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
She was wealthy but not noble. Her father was a
financier who had been exiled for fraud. Her mother had
a sparkling personality, which, reading between the lines on Saint
Nancy Metford's biography of Madame Pompadour, meant that her mother
was sleeping around a lot. A lot of people felt
that they could not receive Madame Pompadour's mother, but everybody
(16:45):
loved Madame Pompadour pretty much from birth. Her mother's special
friend helped finance her education. She spent two years with nuns,
who said that she charmed everyone at the abbey. She
was just such a delight. And then she returned home
and she was educated in all the arts of the day,
(17:05):
in art, in dancing, in playing music. She was a
successful harpist so she was this delightful person and everybody
was also really nice to her, which is one of
the reasons that I really enjoyed reading her story, because
usually you read stories about these people and it will
(17:26):
be a story about like she was first raped by
her stepfather at the age of seven. After that, her
mother died of smallpox, and Mina Popadour is just hanging
out with her somewhat licentious, extended family, plenty of money,
playing the harp. Everybody loves her, Everybody says she's great.
Her mother's special friend like doats on her and talks
(17:47):
about how wonderful she is. And when she was about ten,
her mother took her to visit a fortune teller and
the fortune teller told her that she was not going
to be queen, but almost queen.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
She freaking nailed it.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
She nailed it. Madame Pompadour sent her money much later
life for nailing it so well, and everyone in her
family started calling her Raynette, which means little Queen, and
Madame Pompadour fully fully believed this.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Reynette is a great name for a cat.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
It is, yeah, she fully believed that, all right, I
am going to be the royal mistress, we are going
to do it, and her family was kind of on
board with that. It kind of seemed like, yeah, sure,
you're going to be an astronaut, do it. Why not
do it now. At the time, bourgeois women weren't royal mistresses.
The king would select somebody from court, and court had
(18:40):
become unbelievably important under the reign of Louis fourteen Louis
the fourteenth, because nobles had been feuding so much and
for so long that Louis fourteenth Louis the fourteenth really
figured out, all right, you keep them all at court,
you give them an ingless round of plays, and you
(19:00):
gamify every aspect of their lives. There was a special
ballot court for women who had a good cook. So
I guarantee you if there were like that many little
things I could win on as somebody who thinks of
themselves as only mildly competitive, I would need to have
the best cook. It would become like a dominating thought
(19:22):
that I had on a day to day basis. So
everybody was gathered at court and it was an incredibly
ritualized society. It was a society where you know, every
tiny move could be interpreted the wrong way. And it
was really thought that if you just grew up in
(19:43):
wealthy Parussian society, you could never understand the rules of
this world. But of Madame Pompadour, you know, married a
very nice, wealthy man, her mother's I don't want to
say stepfather, I keep calling him a special friend.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
A friend.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Her mother's special friend helped arrange the marriage, and it
was a young man who had not wanted to marry.
He definitely didn't like the idea of marrying this woman
who had kind of a vaguely scandalous family, and supposedly
the first day he met her, he fell completely in
love with her. And this was actually really hard for
(20:21):
Madame Pompadour, because she made it clear to him that
she was going to leave him when she got an
opportunity to sleep with the king. And she wrote about
how actually it's very hard to be the beloved in
a relationship with somebody that you are not in love with.
Because and I think that's interesting, we don't we hear
(20:42):
a lot about the pain of unrequited love, but we
don't hear about the kind of day to day discomfort
of being the object of unrequited love, especially when you
are in a marriage with that person.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Very sweet that she let him know up friends.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I think he thought she was joking. I think he
did not think that this was ever actually going to happen.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
He's like, okay, sweetheart.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, of course, yes, when you meet an astronaut, Yes,
it was like I am okay house with George Clooney.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, she had a hall pass liston.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
It was like Brad Pitt the King King, Yah perfectly. Yeah. Yeah.
So her poor husband desperately in love with her but
providing a very nice life for her, at which point
she gets to start a salon. She becomes friends with
Voltaire and Diderot and other thinkers of the day, and
(21:35):
she is going to help them a lot once she's
at court. And one of the big advantages of her
marriage is her husband has a hunting lunch that is
near where the king likes to hunt. So while the
king is hunting, Meda and Pompadour does this cool thing
where she drives by in a beautiful pink dress in
a blue carriage or a blue dress in a pink carriage,
(21:58):
and the king to send her some venison, of course,
and also an invitation to a masked ball at the
court of their side.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
So you know your dress and carriage made an impression.
When you get venison and a party invite.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
You do. Yeah. So Madame Pompadour goes to this ball
and it's a ball where Louis the fifteenth has dressed
up as a U Tree along with eight of his
male friends because he doesn't want people to immediately know
who he is, and everybody is very invested in figuring
(22:32):
out who the king is at a mass ball that
is part of the fund. But he's one of eight
U Trees. Meanwhile, Madame Pompadour dressed as Diana the Huntress, Yeah,
as a little reminder of her hunting excursions. And they
sleep together for the first time on that night, and
(22:55):
Madame Pompadour essentially never leaves.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
She figured out which U Tree he was, Oh, he
revealed it to it.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Yeah, he was. He was in. One of the things
that I do think is sad is her husband uncharacteristically
wrote her this letter just begging her to come back,
saying that all was forgiven, like he didn't even care
if she was sleeping with other people. Just come back.
And she showed up to Louis the fifteenth like, haha,
isn't this funny, And Louis the fifteenths got really serious
(23:24):
and said, your husband seems like he's a very decent man. Yeah. Yeah,
he was a very decent man. Now, Louis the fifteenth says, also,
I'm sure you've talked about him on Noble Blood, but
he ends up being a king that I have a
lot of tenderness for.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
He is in case. I mean, we haven't covered him
specifically on Noah Bleass. We've covered tangents, but he is
Louis the sixteenth aka Marie Antoinette's husband's grandfather.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
And he was the great grandson of Louis the fourteenth,
so he was never expected to be king except when
he was five, he's entire family died of measles, and
he was saved by his governess, who sequestered him away.
And one of the reasons that was important was not
just because measles can kill you, thank God for vaccines,
(24:14):
but because the doctors were letting blood out of all
his brothers, and they let out so much blood that
it worn't their health and killed them. So his governess
probably saved his life by hiding him away. But when
he emerged his entire family was dead and he was
going to be the new king of France. And one
(24:35):
of the things I like about Louis fifteenth is that
it's so clear that he worked so hard Louis the fourteenth.
I think it's hard to argue that Louis the fourteenth
was at least a short term genius.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yes, strategy, strategy genius.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
I think ultimately the notion of keeping every single noble
at court destroyed the French countryside, and I think that
was already happening by Louis the fifteenth reign. People thought
that being exiled from Versailles was a fate as bad
as death. Yeah. There was one noble woman whose husband
came to her to reveal that they were being exiled
(25:14):
back to their massive, beautiful estate in the country, and
she started crying as soon as she saw him, and
she explained that that was because from the look on
his face, she assumed that their son had died. So
it was very, very bad to have to leave Versailles.
But that did mean that the farmlands were not being
(25:37):
taken care of in France. People were starting to starve
to death because nothing was being farmed.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
You need a leader there you need.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Somebody there, just kind of reminding people that they do
have to farm. Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously you don't
actually need that. In modern society, democracy is the way
to go. Please don't let's return any of this. But
at the time it did not make for a fundcational
country side. So Louis the fifteenth did not really have
(26:04):
any of his grandfather's short term genius. So but he
started sitting in meetings from the time he was five.
He would take his pet cat along with him, and
he explained to everybody that his pet cat was his
special advisor, and he would like whisper little notes to
his cat while she was listening, and just tried really
(26:25):
hard to keep up with it. They talk about how
one of the times he started crying in one of
the meetings was when they revealed to him who he
was going to be married to, and he realized that
he was never going to get to marry for love,
and overall just like a guy who was trying pretty hard,
guy trying his best, guy trying his best. One of
(26:47):
the other facts that I've always liked about him is
that there was an appointed time when the king would
rise at their sih and other nobles would have the
privilege of helping the king wake up in order of rain,
in order of rank. Yes, yes, so it would be
a very special thing to get to and the king
like a towel on his face in the morning. And
(27:10):
what Louis the fifteenth would do was he would wake
up two hours before that, light his own fire, get
his own room ready, try to take care of paperwork
so he could get a jump on the day, then
extinguish everything and pretend to go back to bed. And
he would do the same thing late at night, where
nobles would put him to bed, and then he would
(27:31):
have to get up again. It's like, I'm so sleepy,
was so great everybody night night. So I've always found
that a very I guess I find hard work kind
of likable pace.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
The other thing he was doing at night was slipping
off to see his mistress the bud for the first
seven at least seven years of his marriage. I think
it was longer than seven years. I think you might have. Yeah,
you would have. Okay, hold on, I'm going to check
on Louis.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
The fourteenth married. Yeah, because Louis the fifteenth, Louis the fifteenth. Sorry,
it's so interesting the way that that ritualized court structure
forces even the people that benefits the most, which is
the kings, into.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
The most restrictive roles. It's like you have all the power,
but you're still on a very limited track for what
your daily existence is.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
So there's some debates on the number, but people estimate
that for around ten years at least he was totally
loyal to his wife. He married Queen.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Marie, Marie with her last name and.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Sisa, I'm so sorry, I said, no, it's Polish. But
he married Queen Marie, tried very hard to be loyal
to her. She was again. She was very religious and
always trying to get people to play the eighteenth century
equivalent of settlers of Katan. So it sounds like fun Marie. No,
(28:56):
for sure, Yeah, how bad could it be? But eventually
Louis the fifteenth did want somebody with a more dynamic personality,
and he had a few mistresses before Madame Pompadour. But
Madame Pompadour really starts bringing things to court life that
nobody was bringing. She started a theater. She's friends with
(29:18):
Voltaire and Didero and other great writers of the time.
She started having special dinners for Louis the fifteenth and
all of her artist friends. And it's interesting to me
that Louis the fifteenth loved being seated by artists at
dinner and talking to them about art, but he did
not love being seated by writers. She knew they might
(29:39):
write about him, and he did not want to drink
with these people and say something that they were immediately
going to write in published.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It's so funny. It's also how rich people love surrounding
themselves with creatives his traditionally and historically, Yes, absolutely, because
it's the one thing money can't buy.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
It is and Madame Pompadour opened up a theater at Versailles.
I think it was Le Teatra dept Cabinet, and she
preferred formed all of the main female roles, of course,
and she but it was incredibly competent to get to
act in the theater because they would have professional actors
(30:18):
come and help the nobles. It would be like being
in your high school play, but nobles would bend over
backwards to get like a tiny, tiny speaking role.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean, it sounds really fun.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
It does sound really fun. Or they would ribe Madame
Pompadour's maid to get them an invitation so they could
go and see one of these performances.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Truly, if we were all like living at versa summer
camp and there was like a play going on, and
like professional actors were coming in to help you and
do it, like that sounds so fun.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Yes. Madame Pompadoor also had this huge list of rules
for rules for being in the play, and there are
things like you have to make every single rehearsal, like
you cannot turn down any role even if you think
that role is I'm flattering, and they're taking it really seriously. Yeah, now,
this was one of the things that started in raging
the commoners of why are we paying for them to
(31:12):
do theater summer camp at Versailles. That seems unnecessary to
everyone who is increasingly facing food shortage. Yes, so that
was one of the things that people immediately started getting
angry about the idea of this royal mysteries is bankrupting us.
But at the same time, Madame Pompadour was a huge
(31:36):
patron of the arts, so she was patronizing the idea
of china being made at Sevre's instead of getting your
china from places like Germany. At the time, she was
also commissioning every famous artist from this period. She's really
responsible for the movement from the Baroque to the rope
(32:00):
Coco period, and so you're going from kind of if
you sort of know the difference between those periods. I'm
going to oversimplify it, but this sort of dark, heavy, heavy,
biblical biblical imagery to girl girl, It's it's sexy, it's fun,
(32:23):
it contains elements of frivolity, it's more feminine. And she
also made pink popular feminine color that people wanted to wear.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
And I'm going to embarrass myself in case this is
a one of those historical misconceptions. Did the Pompadour come
from her?
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yes? Yes, So there are so many things that she
was doing. She learned how to cut gemstones when she
was at Versa. I I would love.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
To be a rich person with just infinite time.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
She started engraving. Now, the only problem here is that
Madame Pompadour was also in fairly frag file health. She
had pretty much chronic bronchitis, and Louis the fifteenth was
coming to her for sex up to nine times a day.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Can we also say, just to point out that this
like girl with a million cool hobbies. He's an artistic
bohemian in ill health. Is really manic pixie drinks.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Oh, she's very manic pixie gers.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
She might have originated it. She has bronchitis, she's coughing.
She's coughing all the top.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
She is not in great health. And Louis the fifteenth
has a massive sexual appetit nine times a day. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Now.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
At one point she started trying to subsist on a
diary of vanilla truffles and celery because she had heard
that those were all things that would increase her libido.
But a friend of hers fortunately told her that this
is going to kill you, and it will not make
you more able to have sex.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Eating only those things I don't think would make me
feel sexy.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I mean, I like truffles, Yeah, I don't know that
would be cool eddie truffles. But she started exercising, which
seemed to help a little bit. But I think somewhat
fortunately for Pompadour, who could not keep up with this.
After five years, the sexual relationship ended, but she was
kept on at Versailles as a friend to the king.
(34:18):
And I think it's very funny that when they made
her this sort of new official title. She changed all
of the imagery in her room from being like cupids
and depictions of love to depictions of beautiful friendship. And
she gave a statue to the king. But if it
is a statue I'm thinking of it's a statue that
(34:39):
represents the spirit of friendship. But the spirit of friendship
has both of its breasts exposed, and she's coppying them
as friends, as friends like you do with your buddies.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, sometimes you show your friends pictures of your boobs
to be like, how do my boobs like that?
Speaker 3 (34:51):
They look great? Right, See how I'm copying them for you. Yeah.
Around this time, Louis the fifteenth didn't ever really take
on on the the full time mistress. He had a
hunting lodge where he would keep young women who he
was having sex with, and I think it was called
the Parko Serf.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
So it's like, he's not going to fall in love
with these girls.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
And that was Madame Pompadour's comment at the time that
she wasn't afraid that some young girl with no education
was going to take him away, but she was afraid
that he would fall in love with another noble lady
at the court.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So better he'd be getting his physical needs met just
by exact Yes.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
One of the things that's so interesting is that this
is also very similar to what happened to the Queen.
And the Queen said, was Madame Pompadour, if there has
to be a raw mistress, better her than any other.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
And I think I remember even reading that Madame de
Pompadour was very nice and kind to the Queen.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Oh, Madame Pompadour was thirsty for Queen's approval. She was
desperate for the Queen to like her. It's so interesting
because you see her handle Louis the fifteenth with the
just kind of a plum like it's going well. She
you know, she wants him to love her very very much.
Some of her detractors said that her sickness was because
(36:11):
keeping up an attitude of being madly in love every
single day is exhausting on the human body. But she
did love the king, but when it comes to the Queen,
you see her just bending over her backwards to like
invite the Queen to every single performance that she's having
at the theater, and the Queen like kind of shows
up sometimes.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, I was like, look, I know what's going on here.
I'll be a good spool.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. She was always like picking out
special gifts for the Queen And the reason that she
was so nice to her was because the Queen was
supposed to acknowledge the royal mistress at some point, and
usually queens were incredibly bitchy about this.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
I understand them.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
With when Marie Antoinette met Madame du Berry, uh, she
had to say something to her, and she just kind
of snidely said, well, there are a lot of people
at court today.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, and at this time, just for context, Louis the sixteenth,
Marie Antoinette's husband never actually took a mistress, which is
why it's sometimes. I had one professor in college actually
couldn't get it up. Dan Well, it took it for
his real sexual job. But I had a professor in
college point out that arguably it damaged Marie Antoinette because
(37:27):
there was no other woman to serve as a lightning
rod for gossip and attention.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
And Madame Pompadour was that lightning rod for this is
the woman who was bankrupting friends.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yes, and Madame de Berry was Louis the fifteenth's next mistresses,
but Marie Antoinette was just the princess. But since she
outranked her, Madame de Berry couldn't even say hi unless
Marienoinnette said something.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
First, exactly. Yeah. So when it was Madame Pompadour's time
to meet Queen Marie, there was very little for them
to talk about because Madame Pompadour, as everybody kept pointing out,
was she didn't know anybody at court. What were they
possibly going to say to each other? And the Queen
really nicely had one friend in common with Madame Pompadour
(38:09):
and asked if Madame Pompadour had seen that friend lately,
because she'd seen her at court and she was wondering
how she was doing. And Madame Pompadour, I imagine, responded
about how a friend was doing, but immediately afterwards fell
to her knees and said that she was so grateful
that she had such a kind and gracious queen, that
she was going to do anything she could in this
(38:30):
life to make the queen happy. And she never went
back on this promise, and I honestly think it got
to be a little bit much for the queen.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
She was the object of the unrequitted was the object
of the unrequited affection.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
And it was a little uncomfortable for but that's very sweet.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
I respect that. Madame de Pompadour is like, look, I
get that, this is the awkward situation.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
I am your just so you know I loved you. Yeah,
just so you know you're all my performances forever, right, bestie.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I would write, if I had to be a French mistress,
I would rather be friends with the queen absolutely, Yeah,
makes your life so much Well, the Queen was treated.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Very badly by Louis the fifteenths prior mistresses, and it
was probably stupid on their part because you know, you
would think that because you're sleeping with the king and
he loves you, you have some advantage over this like
quiet religious woman who's just having children, But you don't.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
She's seen them come and go.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
She's seen them come and go.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
So what happened towards the end of Madame de Pompador's.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Life, Oh, unfortunately, Madame Pompadour was probably very responsible for
the Seven Years War, which was a disastrous war. Oh no, France,
And it may be apocryphal, but Madame Pompadour became very
good friends with Austrian diplomats and sort of forged an
alliance between France and Austria.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Where's the Prime Minister things?
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, which led to them engaging against Britain and Prussia
in the Seven Years War and just getting smashed. But
they say that one of the reasons that she personally
hated Prussians was because Frederick the Great referred to his
dog as his Pompadour. That's mean, it is mean, it
(40:20):
is mean. So so yeah, that's not a good enough
reason to fortunate alize with another country and then go
to war. No, it doesn't end well for and it
does not end well for France. And then at forty two,
Madame Pompadour passed away of pneumonia and Louis the fifteenth
(40:43):
in that episode of Doctor who sees her carriage going
away in the rain, but he cannot attend his funeral.
And one of the things that they do not incorporate
into that Doctor who is him turning around and showing
his courtiers tears streaming down his face and saying, this
is the only respect I am allowed to pay her.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Wait, he wasn't allowed to go to her funeral?
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Why rules of hers.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I but he's the king, you know. But she it
would have been an embarrassed real yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Uh yeah, but she you know, she lived out her
life at Versailles. I think one of the lovely things
is that she and Louis the fifteenth, even if you
know he's also sleeping with younger girls towards the end
of their relationship, really did have this meeting of minds.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
They were ethically non monogamous.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
They were, I mean, like many ethically non anonymous relationships.
It seems like the man got to be a lot
more ethically non monogamous than the woman, who was just
kind of going along with this.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
But at least she was aware of it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
She was, she was definitely aware of it. There were
very cruel rumors at the time that she was orchestrating
all of this.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
For oh yeah, that she was sort of being at madam,
yeah exactly, that she was procuring these young girls.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
I don't think it was that difficult to procure.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Young women who wanted to sleep with the king your advantage.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
And yes, power exactly. Yeah, but they got to have
like these nice little dinner parties at their home. Louis
the fifteenth would make the coffee himself. They got to
talk to interesting people and she got to have this
very creative life where she brought a lot of art
and spirit to Versailles. That is what we associate with
(42:28):
it now.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
And I also I think I remember reading that she
was very interested in gardening. She was, which is such
a Nancy Meyer's hobby.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Madame Pumpter was interested in everything. I think it's also
one of the things that I'd like about her where
I think now we live in this era of kind
of cool girls who were just like, like, to be
a sexy girl is like to never smile, and I
love that Madame Pumpter thing was like today, I'm going
to learn to be a gem cutter.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Honestly, if there was some girl on Instagram with a
cool haircut who was like carving, carving gems, carving joms,
I'd be like, oh my god, that's so cool.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
If you are a gem carver listening to this podcast,
please do you mean?
Speaker 3 (43:08):
I love that if you're a gem carver who's also
started like a very highly ranked theater that you're forcing
people to perform in, and the Queen will show up
for sometimes if she's not busy playing her sad card game. Yeah, yeah,
I love. The thing that was about feeling about Madame
Pompadour was that she did seem to have a passion
(43:30):
and an interest in everything.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
She seems like exactly the type of person you would
want to invite to your parties. She seems really fun,
really good at parties.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
She seems really good at parties. She seems like somebody
who also, maybe this is unfair, but like she's really smart. Yeah,
and Louis the fifteenth the nice guy. But nobody thinks
that Louis the fifteenth is a genius.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
No, I've never heard that characterization.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
No, okay, And I love the longest relationship of his
life was with this woman who was really smart, except
for the seven years worse. She should not have gotten
them into that one terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Yeah, she tried her best. So, Jennifer, where can the
good people find you if they want to hear more
about you or anything you're writing?
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Well? I used to be on Twitter at jen ashley Wright,
but not really anymore. It doesn't seem like a fun
place to be. But you can find me on my
website at Jenshleywright dot com, or you can buy Madame
Miristelle in your local bookshop or on Amazon.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
You should absolutely buy Madame Miristelle and Jennifer's other books.
This is a personal recommendation from me, Jennifer. Thank you
so much.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Oh, this was such a pleasure. Will you come back
soon anytime?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and
Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted
by me Dana Shwarts, with additional writing and researching by
Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zuick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.
The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and
(45:16):
rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive
producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hello, this is Danish Schwartz and this is a very
special episode of Noble Blood because I am joined by
my very good friend, the incredibly talented, truly brilliant writer
Jennifer Wright.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Jana, I am so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Jennifer, you are just an incredible history writer. You've written
a few of my favorite books, get Well Soon, which
is a book about.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
History's worst plagues and the heroes that fought.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Really, I was going to say a very topical pre
pandemic subject.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Yeah, in retrospect, I should not have leaked the Wuhan virus. Yeah,
it was too much viral marketing. Yeah, in my part, I.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Was going to say, but it did probably boost book sales.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah. Also, just to be clear that that was a joke.
That's not how anyhing actually happened.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Jennifer is a little human being who is not involved
in anything COVID related. You wrote the book It ended Badly,
thirteen of the worst historical breakups. Yes, one of my
favorite books because it covers one of my favorite historical couples.
Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I was going to say, I remember years ago talking
about Carolyn Lamb chopping off for pubic hair and sending
it to Lord Byron to try to win him back.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It's that move. What I relate to so profoundly is
when you're so in love with someone who clearly is
not interested, but you're like, you keep having to up
the stakes to get their attention.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You've got to go for broke. You've got to chop
off all your pubic hair and send it to them
in the mail.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's the equivalent. If I could show you some of
the emails I wrote to like a boy when I
was like twenty two, stopped responding to my text Like,
some of the emails that I wrote are just like
I never want to see them again. I hope that
they are the equivalent of pubic hair. Oh.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I wrote like multi thousand word emails to people i'd
just broken up with, just trying to like break down
every part of our relationship but also get back together.
Why did I think that would work?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah? That's always the secret is they want a well
written email.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
That's what they want, A really long email.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That is the equivalent. But I'm so excited. Your most
recent book is Madame Marstelle, and it's a story that,
to be totally honest, I had no idea what it
was who she was until I started talking.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well, that is because I think she has been very
deliberately written out of history. She was a very successful
female abortionist operating in mid nineteenth century America, and when
she started performing abortions in the eighteen thirties, it was
still classified as a misdemeanor if you performed the abortion
before the fourth or fifth month, and by the end
(02:46):
of Madame Marstelle's life in the eighteen seventies, the Comstock
Acted passed and the Comstock Act forbade sending anything obscene
through the mail, which included say, written descriptions of birth
control abortion, to say nothing of actually sending birth control
medication through the mail. And sadly, that is something we
(03:08):
are seeing revive now today.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Another sadly topical book. You're like the history, Cassandra at
this point.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, I swear the next one is just going to
be about parties or something like. It's gonna be about
how everybody is nice and gets along.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
It would be so nice, can you I know, we're
going to move on to the subject of the main
subject of the podcast, which is a fascinating figure of
the French Versailles culture. But can you tell us a
little bit about Madame Morstelle, even though she's not a noble.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
You can tell everything about Madam Moistelle. There is indeed
a whole book about it. But you know, Madamistelle began
her life in written She was born antrou in eighteen
twelve in Painswick, England, and she came from a very large,
very poor family. She was a mate of all work
for a butcher, which meant that she would have been
(03:59):
doing pretty back breaking work, doing things like fetching any
water from the well and dumping out the chamber pots,
and beating all the rugs to make sure they were clean,
and cleaning out the fireplaces. And that was also a
time where if you were a maid, you were open
to a horrifying number of sexual advances from any man
(04:20):
in the house. Jonathan Swift Actley wrote advice to maids,
saying that you have to beware of the eldest son,
because you're going to get nothing from him but a
big belly in the clap at least you can get
money from the master of the house. So I think
that may have been one of the reasons that Madame
Ristelle always worked on a sliding scale when she charged
(04:42):
people later, and why she tended to charge servants less.
And in when she was sixteen, she married a taylor.
The tailor was unfortunately an alcoholic.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Is this where she got the name Restelle?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Oh? No, the tailor was unfortunately an alcoholic, and she
took over his work very quickly. And this is a
running trend in Madame Moistelle's life. She kind of meets
a man, sees how he does his job, and then
figures out how to do it better. Ye, but she
convinced him to move with their newborn daughter to America
so they could become rich. Then she gets to the
(05:17):
Lower East Side, her alcoholic husband dies almost immediately and
she is now a single mother on the Lower East
Side of New York. If you've seen Gangs of New York,
that's not accurate, but keep that picture in your mind.
That's where Madame Ristelle is.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And I remember a detail in your book that seamstresses
was like they were literally a down diamond.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yes, yes, it made me understand I've read so many
novels from this period where the main character will be like,
I have thousands of dollars of debts to my dressmaker,
and I've always thought them, Why is your dressmaker still
making you dresses? She should have cut you off ages ago.
It's because there are so many of them that you
have to operate on even the hope of payment.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So, yeah, it's a time. A prostitution is everywhere because
working in a factory means working sixteen hour days, and
if you have a child, then you don't have enough
money for childcare. The factory doesn't pay enough. Women would
drug their children with laud of them so they would
sleep while they were at work. In one especially horrifying
(06:19):
Dickensian note that I found, there was a woman who
was a single mother worked in a factory, had a
four year old and a newborn, and she told the
four year old to take care of the newborn while
she was at work. And when she came back, the
four year old and if you have a toddler, you
can imagine how proudly the four year old would say this,
said that the baby had been crying but they had
(06:41):
stopped him, and the mother praised him, and then she
went to see the baby and he had stopped him
by beating him over the head with a hammer until
he died. Oh so, so this was a terrible dime
to be a single mother or have an unplanned pregnancy
of any kind. And Madame Restelle really might have fallen
(07:02):
into this situation very easily. But she lived down the
street from a pill compounder named doctor Evans, and doctor
Evans provided all manner of pills. There was no oversight.
You could smash any herbs together and say this will
cure your headaches, or this it might give it a shop.
What have you got to lose? And he probably also
(07:25):
provided birth control pills. But Madame Rostelle started making what
must have been incredibly effective birth control pills. She was
using ingredients like tansy oil and turpentine and mixing them together.
And those are unbelievably dangerous ingredients. You should never ever use.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Some although paint center in your like paint centner.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yes, unfortunately, they still do get used. In the nineteen seventies,
doctor said turpentine is a harrowing motif into it yourself abortions.
So these are things that will work. They will just
also kill their female patient. And Madame Roselle is pretty
remarkable in that she mixed them together without killing people's.
(08:07):
People in the neighborhood started saying that they had had
five abortions this way and they were coming back for more.
She could also perform surgical abortions with a sharpened piece
of whalebone. Now if her hand slipped, she could punch
her a woman's bladder and kill her. Another amazing thing
is that, despite a lot of people trying very hard
(08:27):
to prove that Madame Ristelle was killing people, there are
no records that indicate that she ever killed a patient. Oh,
so Restelle must have had a very steady hand and
a real genius for mixing ingredients. Around this time she
met her second husband, Charles Lowman, who was a printer,
and he was really familiar with the bombastic personalities that
(08:49):
advertised in newspapers, and together they came up with this
persona of Madame Rostelle, and they talked about how she
was and her grandmother was a famous mid wife, and
she had been training in Paris and bringing her skills
to America. And this was a time when medical innovation
was happening in Paris. In a way it wasn't in America.
(09:12):
So this was a great persona to craft. It's glamorous, man,
it's glamorous.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
If anyone came and said that her grandma was a
famous parish and.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
His wife, exactly, it sounds sexy too. People thought that
French people were more sexually sophisticated in addition to having
better medical skills. So that's how this persona of Madame
Riistelle was born.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
And someone rich people, doctor Muter. This is my my
anatomy research shelf down there. Doctor Mutter, who was has
If you've been to Philadelphia, there's a Muter music.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
I'm dying to go.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I mean too, we should go together to go girls.
He trained for in French surgeries. That's where all the
surgery was was.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Exactly, yes, go to France. One of the reasons that
they drove female midwives out of business in America is
because they started trying to open up schools for doctors
in America. But they were terrible. You couldn't walk the
hospitals the way you could in France. So they would
rent out a lecture hall, charge young men like fifty
(10:13):
dollars and in six months if you showed up to
most of the classes where you would never see an
actual patient. Usually there was just like a skeleton or
a box of bones. At the end, you got your diploma.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
And as a result, it's estimated that in the mid
eighteen hundreds there were suddenly four times as many doctors
as pounds needed, and they had to find a new
source of income, and that is one of the reasons
that they started pushing in on midwives trade.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Wow, And I do love I think like the interest
of like when midwiffery became obcentrics and like more male
dominated doctors is fascinating to me because I love the
story of how Princess Charlotte of Wales in the early
eighteen hundreds, who's a character in Immortality, but she in
real life was pregnant and it was very fashionable to
(11:07):
have a male doctor. At this time.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
They were worse, you know, they were there right there, died.
There was an average of one us in two hundred
was a female midwife in this period, and it was
ten to twenty times higher if you had a male doctor.
They were so much worse.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They were so much worse, and she died and it
was just considered fashionable to have a male doctor because
she was a princess. She had to do it.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
And she died and it was bad yep.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
And the American Medical Society made such a big deal
out of how midwives are barbaric relics, and of course
midwives hands were actually clean, whereas doctors were digging them
into a corpse and then pulling them out and then
sticking them into a woman's birth canal.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, they would treat an infected abscess and then be
like perfect, but inside.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Of it, oh my gosh, the one that killed me
the most. I'm sorry. I know we have to talk
about nobility because this is noble blood. Please. But after
Ignat Similfies, oh God bless him, God may he rest
in peace. But after Ignacemolies suggested that maybe the reason
so many women are dying are because doctors need to
wash their hands. And by the way he tested this,
(12:14):
he found out that it worked. He could bring the
death rate for female patients down on par with mid
talk and Charles Miggs replied that this was absurd because
quote unquote, doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen have clean hands.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
It's the ego on them.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
I'm so furious about it. I'm furious two hundred years
later about.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
How many women had unnecessary death.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yes, yeah, well, speaking of one day for bird control
in America, you got.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Luckily that it's not something we need to deal with anymore.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
But if we're talking about women in positions of power
that I think sometimes people think are anachronistic, like women
didn't have any power or influence in the seventeen hundreds.
One of my favorite figures, and I think a figure
that you love is Madame de Pompadour.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
I am so happy to talk about her. No one
as the pretty prime Minister at the Court of Versailles.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So for someone who has no idea who she is
outside perhaps of a single Doctor Who episode, there.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Is a Doctor Who episode, really good one. It's the
only one I've seen.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, it's nice.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, it's sweet.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
I don't like the robots. I like where it's just
about Madame Pompadour.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
That is also kind of my I I've watched a
little bit more Doctor Who. I've fallen off a little bit.
I like when it's like historical characters and fine, I like.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
When they meet Vincent Bengo. Yeah, I like it if
it was just some people meeting Vincent, I love.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I love when they just meet historical figures too. I
don't need a distant planet.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
No, I don't. I sorry. I know people love it.
It's a good show. I get it. I know it's
very special to people.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, but there's a wonderful Madame de Pompadour episode. But
for people who maybe have only seen that episode or nothing,
who was the pretty Prime Minister?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
The pretty Prime Minister was Louis the fifteenth Mistress, and
she was one of the most famous mistresses of this
era because she was the mistress at Versailles for about
twenty years.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
When you say mistress you mean the official position, I.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Mean the official mistress.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yes, for context, in case you're less familiar, Mistress in
this case doesn't just mean, you know, was having a
sexual relationship with a king. Mistress was a court position.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Mistress was a court position, and it was a very
important court position. The queen was really just there to
provide children. Louis the fifteenth had a very lovely wife,
Queen Marie Lesinka. She produced children, but she was also
very religious. She was very retiring. She did gamble, but
(14:56):
she played a game, but nobody liked l She had
a hard time getting people to play her very old
fashioned gambling game.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Ian doesn't like to play scrabble with me because I
always beat him.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh hurtful. I know Daniel and I to play scrabble
every night. That sounds so nice. Do we watch a movie,
we play scrabble?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I love I would love that.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
It's a lovely way to end the desk.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Ian has taken to refusing to play scrabble with me
because I'll be like a hundred points up and have
done with this.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Well, I mean, you've got to know all the two
letters got zaw key gi like those winners. Guys, Well
that's it.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I play for strategy, he plays for showman.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
What qt Yeah yeah, work that in. But anyhow, Queen
Marie out there trying to get people to play Letlers
of Katan with her every night. And uh, Louis the
fifteen that had a bit of a more bomb vivent personality.
He was prone to boredom, but he was also somebody
who really enjoyed consistency. I think something that you see
(15:56):
with Louis the Fifteenth is that Madame Pompadour essentially became
his wife.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I mean, the mistress for twenty years and then like
friend to the king that years after fascinating to me,
So can we begin with the beginning of her life?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Of course, Madame Pompadour, and it's something that differed her
a lot from other royal mistresses was born to the bourgeois.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Class, so she was wealthy but not noble.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
She was wealthy but not noble. Her father was a
financier who had been exiled for fraud. Her mother had
a sparkling personality, which, reading between the lines on Saint
Nancy Metford's biography of Madame Pompadour, meant that her mother
was sleeping around a lot. A lot of people felt
that they could not receive Madame Pompadour's mother, but everybody
(16:45):
loved Madame Pompadour pretty much from birth. Her mother's special
friend helped finance her education. She spent two years with nuns,
who said that she charmed everyone at the abbey. She
was just such a delight. And then she returned home
and she was educated in all the arts of the day,
(17:05):
in art, in dancing, in playing music. She was a
successful harpist so she was this delightful person and everybody
was also really nice to her, which is one of
the reasons that I really enjoyed reading her story, because
usually you read stories about these people and it will
(17:26):
be a story about like she was first raped by
her stepfather at the age of seven. After that, her
mother died of smallpox, and Mina Popadour is just hanging
out with her somewhat licentious, extended family, plenty of money,
playing the harp. Everybody loves her, Everybody says she's great.
Her mother's special friend like doats on her and talks
(17:47):
about how wonderful she is. And when she was about ten,
her mother took her to visit a fortune teller and
the fortune teller told her that she was not going
to be queen, but almost queen.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
She freaking nailed it.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
She nailed it. Madame Pompadour sent her money much later
life for nailing it so well, and everyone in her
family started calling her Raynette, which means little Queen, and
Madame Pompadour fully fully believed this.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Reynette is a great name for a cat.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
It is, yeah, she fully believed that, all right, I
am going to be the royal mistress, we are going
to do it, and her family was kind of on
board with that. It kind of seemed like, yeah, sure,
you're going to be an astronaut, do it. Why not
do it now. At the time, bourgeois women weren't royal mistresses.
The king would select somebody from court, and court had
(18:40):
become unbelievably important under the reign of Louis fourteen Louis
the fourteenth, because nobles had been feuding so much and
for so long that Louis fourteenth Louis the fourteenth really
figured out, all right, you keep them all at court,
you give them an ingless round of plays, and you
(19:00):
gamify every aspect of their lives. There was a special
ballot court for women who had a good cook. So
I guarantee you if there were like that many little
things I could win on as somebody who thinks of
themselves as only mildly competitive, I would need to have
the best cook. It would become like a dominating thought
(19:22):
that I had on a day to day basis. So
everybody was gathered at court and it was an incredibly
ritualized society. It was a society where you know, every
tiny move could be interpreted the wrong way. And it
was really thought that if you just grew up in
(19:43):
wealthy Parussian society, you could never understand the rules of
this world. But of Madame Pompadour, you know, married a
very nice, wealthy man, her mother's I don't want to
say stepfather, I keep calling him a special friend.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
A friend.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Her mother's special friend helped arrange the marriage, and it
was a young man who had not wanted to marry.
He definitely didn't like the idea of marrying this woman
who had kind of a vaguely scandalous family, and supposedly
the first day he met her, he fell completely in
love with her. And this was actually really hard for
(20:21):
Madame Pompadour, because she made it clear to him that
she was going to leave him when she got an
opportunity to sleep with the king. And she wrote about
how actually it's very hard to be the beloved in
a relationship with somebody that you are not in love with.
Because and I think that's interesting, we don't we hear
(20:42):
a lot about the pain of unrequited love, but we
don't hear about the kind of day to day discomfort
of being the object of unrequited love, especially when you
are in a marriage with that person.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Very sweet that she let him know up friends.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I think he thought she was joking. I think he
did not think that this was ever actually going to happen.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
He's like, okay, sweetheart.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, of course, yes, when you meet an astronaut, Yes,
it was like I am okay house with George Clooney.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, she had a hall pass liston.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
It was like Brad Pitt the King King, Yah perfectly. Yeah. Yeah.
So her poor husband desperately in love with her but
providing a very nice life for her, at which point
she gets to start a salon. She becomes friends with
Voltaire and Diderot and other thinkers of the day, and
(21:35):
she is going to help them a lot once she's
at court. And one of the big advantages of her
marriage is her husband has a hunting lunch that is
near where the king likes to hunt. So while the
king is hunting, Meda and Pompadour does this cool thing
where she drives by in a beautiful pink dress in
a blue carriage or a blue dress in a pink carriage,
(21:58):
and the king to send her some venison, of course,
and also an invitation to a masked ball at the
court of their side.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
So you know your dress and carriage made an impression.
When you get venison and a party invite.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
You do. Yeah. So Madame Pompadour goes to this ball
and it's a ball where Louis the fifteenth has dressed
up as a U Tree along with eight of his
male friends because he doesn't want people to immediately know
who he is, and everybody is very invested in figuring
(22:32):
out who the king is at a mass ball that
is part of the fund. But he's one of eight
U Trees. Meanwhile, Madame Pompadour dressed as Diana the Huntress, Yeah,
as a little reminder of her hunting excursions. And they
sleep together for the first time on that night, and
(22:55):
Madame Pompadour essentially never leaves.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
She figured out which U Tree he was, Oh, he
revealed it to it.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Yeah, he was. He was in. One of the things
that I do think is sad is her husband uncharacteristically
wrote her this letter just begging her to come back,
saying that all was forgiven, like he didn't even care
if she was sleeping with other people. Just come back.
And she showed up to Louis the fifteenth like, haha,
isn't this funny, And Louis the fifteenths got really serious
(23:24):
and said, your husband seems like he's a very decent man. Yeah. Yeah,
he was a very decent man. Now, Louis the fifteenth says, also,
I'm sure you've talked about him on Noble Blood, but
he ends up being a king that I have a
lot of tenderness for.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
He is in case. I mean, we haven't covered him
specifically on Noah Bleass. We've covered tangents, but he is
Louis the sixteenth aka Marie Antoinette's husband's grandfather.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
And he was the great grandson of Louis the fourteenth,
so he was never expected to be king except when
he was five, he's entire family died of measles, and
he was saved by his governess, who sequestered him away.
And one of the reasons that was important was not
just because measles can kill you, thank God for vaccines,
(24:14):
but because the doctors were letting blood out of all
his brothers, and they let out so much blood that
it worn't their health and killed them. So his governess
probably saved his life by hiding him away. But when
he emerged his entire family was dead and he was
going to be the new king of France. And one
(24:35):
of the things I like about Louis fifteenth is that
it's so clear that he worked so hard Louis the fourteenth.
I think it's hard to argue that Louis the fourteenth
was at least a short term genius.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yes, strategy, strategy genius.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
I think ultimately the notion of keeping every single noble
at court destroyed the French countryside, and I think that
was already happening by Louis the fifteenth reign. People thought
that being exiled from Versailles was a fate as bad
as death. Yeah. There was one noble woman whose husband
came to her to reveal that they were being exiled
(25:14):
back to their massive, beautiful estate in the country, and
she started crying as soon as she saw him, and
she explained that that was because from the look on
his face, she assumed that their son had died. So
it was very, very bad to have to leave Versailles.
But that did mean that the farmlands were not being
(25:37):
taken care of in France. People were starting to starve
to death because nothing was being farmed.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
You need a leader there you need.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Somebody there, just kind of reminding people that they do
have to farm. Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously you don't
actually need that. In modern society, democracy is the way
to go. Please don't let's return any of this. But
at the time it did not make for a fundcational
country side. So Louis the fifteenth did not really have
(26:04):
any of his grandfather's short term genius. So but he
started sitting in meetings from the time he was five.
He would take his pet cat along with him, and
he explained to everybody that his pet cat was his
special advisor, and he would like whisper little notes to
his cat while she was listening, and just tried really
(26:25):
hard to keep up with it. They talk about how
one of the times he started crying in one of
the meetings was when they revealed to him who he
was going to be married to, and he realized that
he was never going to get to marry for love,
and overall just like a guy who was trying pretty hard,
guy trying his best, guy trying his best. One of
(26:47):
the other facts that I've always liked about him is
that there was an appointed time when the king would
rise at their sih and other nobles would have the
privilege of helping the king wake up in order of rain,
in order of rank. Yes, yes, so it would be
a very special thing to get to and the king
like a towel on his face in the morning. And
(27:10):
what Louis the fifteenth would do was he would wake
up two hours before that, light his own fire, get
his own room ready, try to take care of paperwork
so he could get a jump on the day, then
extinguish everything and pretend to go back to bed. And
he would do the same thing late at night, where
nobles would put him to bed, and then he would
(27:31):
have to get up again. It's like, I'm so sleepy,
was so great everybody night night. So I've always found
that a very I guess I find hard work kind
of likable pace.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
The other thing he was doing at night was slipping
off to see his mistress the bud for the first
seven at least seven years of his marriage. I think
it was longer than seven years. I think you might have. Yeah,
you would have. Okay, hold on, I'm going to check
on Louis.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
The fourteenth married. Yeah, because Louis the fifteenth, Louis the fifteenth. Sorry,
it's so interesting the way that that ritualized court structure
forces even the people that benefits the most, which is
the kings, into.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
The most restrictive roles. It's like you have all the power,
but you're still on a very limited track for what
your daily existence is.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
So there's some debates on the number, but people estimate
that for around ten years at least he was totally
loyal to his wife. He married Queen.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Marie, Marie with her last name and.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Sisa, I'm so sorry, I said, no, it's Polish. But
he married Queen Marie, tried very hard to be loyal
to her. She was again. She was very religious and
always trying to get people to play the eighteenth century
equivalent of settlers of Katan. So it sounds like fun Marie. No,
(28:56):
for sure, Yeah, how bad could it be? But eventually
Louis the fifteenth did want somebody with a more dynamic personality,
and he had a few mistresses before Madame Pompadour. But
Madame Pompadour really starts bringing things to court life that
nobody was bringing. She started a theater. She's friends with
(29:18):
Voltaire and Didero and other great writers of the time.
She started having special dinners for Louis the fifteenth and
all of her artist friends. And it's interesting to me
that Louis the fifteenth loved being seated by artists at
dinner and talking to them about art, but he did
not love being seated by writers. She knew they might
(29:39):
write about him, and he did not want to drink
with these people and say something that they were immediately
going to write in published.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It's so funny. It's also how rich people love surrounding
themselves with creatives his traditionally and historically, Yes, absolutely, because
it's the one thing money can't buy.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
It is and Madame Pompadour opened up a theater at Versailles.
I think it was Le Teatra dept Cabinet, and she
preferred formed all of the main female roles, of course,
and she but it was incredibly competent to get to
act in the theater because they would have professional actors
(30:18):
come and help the nobles. It would be like being
in your high school play, but nobles would bend over
backwards to get like a tiny, tiny speaking role.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean, it sounds really fun.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
It does sound really fun. Or they would ribe Madame
Pompadour's maid to get them an invitation so they could
go and see one of these performances.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Truly, if we were all like living at versa summer
camp and there was like a play going on, and
like professional actors were coming in to help you and
do it, like that sounds so fun.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Yes. Madame Pompadoor also had this huge list of rules
for rules for being in the play, and there are
things like you have to make every single rehearsal, like
you cannot turn down any role even if you think
that role is I'm flattering, and they're taking it really seriously. Yeah, now,
this was one of the things that started in raging
the commoners of why are we paying for them to
(31:12):
do theater summer camp at Versailles. That seems unnecessary to
everyone who is increasingly facing food shortage. Yes, so that
was one of the things that people immediately started getting
angry about the idea of this royal mysteries is bankrupting us.
But at the same time, Madame Pompadour was a huge
(31:36):
patron of the arts, so she was patronizing the idea
of china being made at Sevre's instead of getting your
china from places like Germany. At the time, she was
also commissioning every famous artist from this period. She's really
responsible for the movement from the Baroque to the rope
(32:00):
Coco period, and so you're going from kind of if
you sort of know the difference between those periods. I'm
going to oversimplify it, but this sort of dark, heavy, heavy,
biblical biblical imagery to girl girl, It's it's sexy, it's fun,
(32:23):
it contains elements of frivolity, it's more feminine. And she
also made pink popular feminine color that people wanted to wear.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
And I'm going to embarrass myself in case this is
a one of those historical misconceptions. Did the Pompadour come
from her?
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yes? Yes, So there are so many things that she
was doing. She learned how to cut gemstones when she
was at Versa. I I would love.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
To be a rich person with just infinite time.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
She started engraving. Now, the only problem here is that
Madame Pompadour was also in fairly frag file health. She
had pretty much chronic bronchitis, and Louis the fifteenth was
coming to her for sex up to nine times a day.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Can we also say, just to point out that this
like girl with a million cool hobbies. He's an artistic
bohemian in ill health. Is really manic pixie drinks.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Oh, she's very manic pixie gers.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
She might have originated it. She has bronchitis, she's coughing.
She's coughing all the top.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
She is not in great health. And Louis the fifteenth
has a massive sexual appetit nine times a day. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Now.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
At one point she started trying to subsist on a
diary of vanilla truffles and celery because she had heard
that those were all things that would increase her libido.
But a friend of hers fortunately told her that this
is going to kill you, and it will not make
you more able to have sex.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Eating only those things I don't think would make me
feel sexy.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I mean, I like truffles, Yeah, I don't know that
would be cool eddie truffles. But she started exercising, which
seemed to help a little bit. But I think somewhat
fortunately for Pompadour, who could not keep up with this.
After five years, the sexual relationship ended, but she was
kept on at Versailles as a friend to the king.
(34:18):
And I think it's very funny that when they made
her this sort of new official title. She changed all
of the imagery in her room from being like cupids
and depictions of love to depictions of beautiful friendship. And
she gave a statue to the king. But if it
is a statue I'm thinking of it's a statue that
(34:39):
represents the spirit of friendship. But the spirit of friendship
has both of its breasts exposed, and she's coppying them
as friends, as friends like you do with your buddies.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, sometimes you show your friends pictures of your boobs
to be like, how do my boobs like that?
Speaker 3 (34:51):
They look great? Right, See how I'm copying them for you. Yeah.
Around this time, Louis the fifteenth didn't ever really take
on on the the full time mistress. He had a
hunting lodge where he would keep young women who he
was having sex with, and I think it was called
the Parko Serf.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
So it's like, he's not going to fall in love
with these girls.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
And that was Madame Pompadour's comment at the time that
she wasn't afraid that some young girl with no education
was going to take him away, but she was afraid
that he would fall in love with another noble lady
at the court.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So better he'd be getting his physical needs met just
by exact Yes.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
One of the things that's so interesting is that this
is also very similar to what happened to the Queen.
And the Queen said, was Madame Pompadour, if there has
to be a raw mistress, better her than any other.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
And I think I remember even reading that Madame de
Pompadour was very nice and kind to the Queen.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Oh, Madame Pompadour was thirsty for Queen's approval. She was
desperate for the Queen to like her. It's so interesting
because you see her handle Louis the fifteenth with the
just kind of a plum like it's going well. She
you know, she wants him to love her very very much.
Some of her detractors said that her sickness was because
(36:11):
keeping up an attitude of being madly in love every
single day is exhausting on the human body. But she
did love the king, but when it comes to the Queen,
you see her just bending over her backwards to like
invite the Queen to every single performance that she's having
at the theater, and the Queen like kind of shows
up sometimes.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, I was like, look, I know what's going on here.
I'll be a good spool.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. She was always like picking out
special gifts for the Queen And the reason that she
was so nice to her was because the Queen was
supposed to acknowledge the royal mistress at some point, and
usually queens were incredibly bitchy about this.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
I understand them.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
With when Marie Antoinette met Madame du Berry, uh, she
had to say something to her, and she just kind
of snidely said, well, there are a lot of people
at court today.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, and at this time, just for context, Louis the sixteenth,
Marie Antoinette's husband never actually took a mistress, which is
why it's sometimes. I had one professor in college actually
couldn't get it up. Dan Well, it took it for
his real sexual job. But I had a professor in
college point out that arguably it damaged Marie Antoinette because
(37:27):
there was no other woman to serve as a lightning
rod for gossip and attention.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
And Madame Pompadour was that lightning rod for this is
the woman who was bankrupting friends.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yes, and Madame de Berry was Louis the fifteenth's next mistresses,
but Marie Antoinette was just the princess. But since she
outranked her, Madame de Berry couldn't even say hi unless
Marienoinnette said something.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
First, exactly. Yeah. So when it was Madame Pompadour's time
to meet Queen Marie, there was very little for them
to talk about because Madame Pompadour, as everybody kept pointing out,
was she didn't know anybody at court. What were they
possibly going to say to each other? And the Queen
really nicely had one friend in common with Madame Pompadour
(38:09):
and asked if Madame Pompadour had seen that friend lately,
because she'd seen her at court and she was wondering
how she was doing. And Madame Pompadour, I imagine, responded
about how a friend was doing, but immediately afterwards fell
to her knees and said that she was so grateful
that she had such a kind and gracious queen, that
she was going to do anything she could in this
(38:30):
life to make the queen happy. And she never went
back on this promise, and I honestly think it got
to be a little bit much for the queen.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
She was the object of the unrequitted was the object
of the unrequited affection.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
And it was a little uncomfortable for but that's very sweet.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
I respect that. Madame de Pompadour is like, look, I
get that, this is the awkward situation.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
I am your just so you know I loved you. Yeah,
just so you know you're all my performances forever, right, bestie.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I would write, if I had to be a French mistress,
I would rather be friends with the queen absolutely, Yeah,
makes your life so much Well, the Queen was treated.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Very badly by Louis the fifteenths prior mistresses, and it
was probably stupid on their part because you know, you
would think that because you're sleeping with the king and
he loves you, you have some advantage over this like
quiet religious woman who's just having children, But you don't.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
She's seen them come and go.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
She's seen them come and go.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
So what happened towards the end of Madame de Pompador's.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Life, Oh, unfortunately, Madame Pompadour was probably very responsible for
the Seven Years War, which was a disastrous war. Oh no, France,
And it may be apocryphal, but Madame Pompadour became very
good friends with Austrian diplomats and sort of forged an
alliance between France and Austria.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Where's the Prime Minister things?
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Yeah, which led to them engaging against Britain and Prussia
in the Seven Years War and just getting smashed. But
they say that one of the reasons that she personally
hated Prussians was because Frederick the Great referred to his
dog as his Pompadour. That's mean, it is mean, it
(40:20):
is mean. So so yeah, that's not a good enough
reason to fortunate alize with another country and then go
to war. No, it doesn't end well for and it
does not end well for France. And then at forty two,
Madame Pompadour passed away of pneumonia and Louis the fifteenth
(40:43):
in that episode of Doctor who sees her carriage going
away in the rain, but he cannot attend his funeral.
And one of the things that they do not incorporate
into that Doctor who is him turning around and showing
his courtiers tears streaming down his face and saying, this
is the only respect I am allowed to pay her.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Wait, he wasn't allowed to go to her funeral?
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Why rules of hers.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I but he's the king, you know. But she it
would have been an embarrassed real yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Uh yeah, but she you know, she lived out her
life at Versailles. I think one of the lovely things
is that she and Louis the fifteenth, even if you
know he's also sleeping with younger girls towards the end
of their relationship, really did have this meeting of minds.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
They were ethically non monogamous.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
They were, I mean, like many ethically non anonymous relationships.
It seems like the man got to be a lot
more ethically non monogamous than the woman, who was just
kind of going along with this.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
But at least she was aware of it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
She was, she was definitely aware of it. There were
very cruel rumors at the time that she was orchestrating
all of this.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
For oh yeah, that she was sort of being at madam,
yeah exactly, that she was procuring these young girls.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
I don't think it was that difficult to procure.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Young women who wanted to sleep with the king your advantage.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
And yes, power exactly. Yeah, but they got to have
like these nice little dinner parties at their home. Louis
the fifteenth would make the coffee himself. They got to
talk to interesting people and she got to have this
very creative life where she brought a lot of art
and spirit to Versailles. That is what we associate with
(42:28):
it now.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
And I also I think I remember reading that she
was very interested in gardening. She was, which is such
a Nancy Meyer's hobby.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Madame Pumpter was interested in everything. I think it's also
one of the things that I'd like about her where
I think now we live in this era of kind
of cool girls who were just like, like, to be
a sexy girl is like to never smile, and I
love that Madame Pumpter thing was like today, I'm going
to learn to be a gem cutter.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Honestly, if there was some girl on Instagram with a
cool haircut who was like carving, carving gems, carving joms,
I'd be like, oh my god, that's so cool.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
If you are a gem carver listening to this podcast,
please do you mean?
Speaker 3 (43:08):
I love that if you're a gem carver who's also
started like a very highly ranked theater that you're forcing
people to perform in, and the Queen will show up
for sometimes if she's not busy playing her sad card game. Yeah, yeah,
I love. The thing that was about feeling about Madame
Pompadour was that she did seem to have a passion
(43:30):
and an interest in everything.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
She seems like exactly the type of person you would
want to invite to your parties. She seems really fun,
really good at parties.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
She seems really good at parties. She seems like somebody
who also, maybe this is unfair, but like she's really smart. Yeah,
and Louis the fifteenth the nice guy. But nobody thinks
that Louis the fifteenth is a genius.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
No, I've never heard that characterization.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
No, okay, And I love the longest relationship of his
life was with this woman who was really smart, except
for the seven years worse. She should not have gotten
them into that one terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Yeah, she tried her best. So, Jennifer, where can the
good people find you if they want to hear more
about you or anything you're writing?
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Well? I used to be on Twitter at jen ashley Wright,
but not really anymore. It doesn't seem like a fun
place to be. But you can find me on my
website at Jenshleywright dot com, or you can buy Madame
Miristelle in your local bookshop or on Amazon.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
You should absolutely buy Madame Miristelle and Jennifer's other books.
This is a personal recommendation from me, Jennifer. Thank you
so much.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Oh, this was such a pleasure. Will you come back
soon anytime?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and
Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted
by me Dana Shwarts, with additional writing and researching by
Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zuick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.
The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and
(45:16):
rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive
producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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