By skillfully and constantly varying the amusements of her royal lover, with hunting-parties, promenades, fêtes, spectacles, and _petits soupers_, Madame d'Etioles was enabled to strengthen her empire over the heart of Louis XV., by making him feel how necessary she had become to his happiness. One striking advantage she had over her predecessors, and this was, the art she possessed of being able to metamorphose herself at all hours of the day. No one could better vary the play of her physiognomy than Madame de Pompadour. At one time she would appear languishing and sentimental as a madonna; at another, lively, gay, and coquettish, as a Spanish peasant girl. She possessed also, in a marvelous degree, the gift of tears: none knew better than she did when to weep, or how many tears it was necessary to shed. As a poet of the time has said, "She wept with so much art that she was enabled to give to her tears the value of pearls." Those who had seen her in the morning, superb, imperious, a queen in all the splendor of power, would find her in the evening, gay, whimsical, capricious, presiding over one of these _petits soupers_ with all the exuberant and madcap gayety of an actress after the theater. The Abbé Soulavie, who saw her often, has left us a well-studied portrait of the favorite;-- "In addition to the charms of a beautiful and animated countenance, Madame de Pompadour possessed also, in an eminent degree, the art of transforming her features; and each new combination, equally beautiful, was another result of the deep study she had made of the affinity between her mind and her physiognomy. Without in the least altering her position, her countenance would become a perfect Proteus."