e and manage
Versailles, please and captivate the king, make allies, win over the
highest officials and keep control of them, put her own friends in
office, attach to her favor every man of prominence,--princes and
ministers,--keep in touch with the court, appease, humor, and win the
honor of the courtiers, "attach consciences, recompense capitulations,
organize about the mistress an emulation of devotion and servility by
means of prodigality of the favors of the king and the money of the
state; but what was a more burdensome task,--she must occupy the king,
aid and agitate him, fight off constantly, from day to day and hour to
hour, ennui."

This terrible ennui, indifference, enervation, this lazy and splenetic
humor of the king, she succeeded in distracting, in soothing, and
amusing. She understood him perfectly--therein lie the great secret
of the favor of Mme. de Pompadour and the great reason of her long
domination which only death could end. She had the patience and
genius to soothe the many ills of the monarch, possessing an intuitive
understanding of his moral temperament, and a complete comprehension
of his nervous sensibility; these gifts were a science with her and
enabled her to keep alive his taste for and enjoyment of life. Mme.
de Pompadour is said to have taken possession of the very existence of
Louis XV.

"She appropriates and kills his time, robs him of the monotony of
hours, draws him through a thousand pastimes in this eternity of ennui
between morning and night, never abandoning him for a minute, not
permitting him to fall back upon himself. She takes him away from
work, disputes him to the ministers, hides him from the ambassadors.
In his face must not be seen a cloud or the slightest trace of care of
affairs; to Maurepas, in the act of reading some reports to the king,
she says: 'Come now, M. de Maurepas, you turn the king yellow....
Adieu, M. de Maurepas'; and Maurepas gone, she takes the king, she
smiles upon the lover, she cheers the man."

In 1747, two years after her installation, she interested the king in
a theatre, and inaugurated the famous representations at the Theatre
des Petits Appartements; she herself was one of its best actresses,
singers, and musicians. All the members of the nobility vied with one
another in procuring admission to these performances, as auditors or
actors. Her contemporaries say that she was without a rival in acting,
for in that art she found opportunity to