d men of letters
were invariably better received than the titled courtiers of France;
while many of the nobility were truly lords-in-waiting, the two Vanloos,
De la Tour, Boucher, and Cochin, had never to remain in the antechamber.
The account of her first and only interview with Crebillon is
interesting. Some one had informed her that the old tragic poet was
living in the Marais, surrounded by his cats and dogs, in a state of
poverty and neglect. "What say you!" she exclaimed; "in poverty and
neglect?" She ran to seek the king, and asked for a pension for the poet
of one hundred louis a-year from her privy purse. When Crebillon came to
Versailles to thank her, she was in bed. "Let him come in," she
exclaimed, "that I may see the gray-headed genius." At the sight of
the fine old man--Crebillon was then eighty years of age--so poor and yet
so proud, she was affected to tears. She received him with so touching a
grace that the old poet was deeply moved. As he leaned over the bed to
kiss her hand, the king appeared. "Ah, madame," exclaimed Crebillon, "the
king has surprised us! I am lost!" This sally amused Louis XV. vastly;
Crebillon's success was decided.

Madame de Pompadour passed her last days in a state of deep dejection. As
she was now in the decline both of her favor and of her reign, she no
longer had friends; even the king himself, though still submitting to her
guidance, loved her no more. The Jesuits, too, whom she had driven from
court, overwhelmed her with letters, in which they strove to depict to
her the terrors of everlasting punishment.[E] Every hour that struck
seemed to toll for her the death-knell of all her hopes and joys. On her
first appearance at court, proud of her youth, her beauty, and her
brilliant complexion, she had proscribed rouge and patches, saying that
life was not a masked ball. She had now reached that sad period of life
when she would be compelled to choose between rouge or the first wrinkles
of incipient old age. "I shall never survive it," she used to say,
mournfully,

[Footnote E: The fear of losing her power, and of becoming once more a
_bourgeoise_ of Paris, perpetually tormented her. After she had succeeded
in suppressing the Jesuits, she fancied she beheld in each monk of the
order as assassin and a poisoner.--_Memoires historiques de la Cour de
France_.]

One night, during the year 1760, she was seized with a violent trembling,
and sitting up in bed, called Madame du Ha