Thoroughly acquainted with the tone of public opinion, since she had her own police and an arrangement with the director of the post-office, who violated the secret of letters for her, Madame de Pompadour was in despair at so many attacks. Uneasy, feverish, dissatisfied with the King and the kingdom, considering herself as a victim of destiny, a woman unjustly dealt with by fortune, spitefully angry at Frederick the Great, who scoffed at her; at Louis XV., who neglected her for the young girls of the Deer Park; at the clergy, who regarded her as a tool of hell; at the Parliaments, which disdained her; at the nobility, who saw nothing in her but an ambitious _bourgeoise_; at the middle classes, who reproached her for being immoral; at all France, which scorned her,--she suffered as much in her vanity as in her pride, and said to her confidant, Madame du Hausset: “The sorceress told me I should have time to repent before dying; I believe it, for I shall die of nothing but chagrin.” VII MADAME DE POMPADOUR, LADY OF THE QUEEN’S PALACE Madame de Pompadour was ready to play all parts in order to preserve her empire. To be an actress and a political woman was not enough; she willingly consented to become by turns, and simultaneously if need were, a devotee and a procuress, to favorize now the Church and now the Deer Park, to submit to every transformation, every servitude: _Omnia serviliter pro dominatione_. Never did any minister cling more firmly to his portfolio, never had any ambitious man a greater thirst for power. Louis XV. had a substratum of religion which made the favorite uneasy. The day he insisted on her reading one of Bourdaloue’s sermons she was frightened. With all her audacity she never dared to criticise the Church in the presence of the Most Christian King; for irregular as his own conduct was, he would not suffer the faith of his fathers to be insulted in his hearing. To keep her place, the Marquise would have asked nothing better than to assume the austere demeanor of a Madame de Maintenon; but she was married, unfortunately, and so was the King, and Catholicism has never compromised with concubinage or adultery. Hence Madame de Pompadour sought to avert the difficulty. She put on a half-way devotion which was wholly worldly, made for show, a sort of compromise between God and the devil, between the Church and the boudoir, the oratory and the alcove, a spurious, derisory, hypocritical devotion, examples of which are given by many women of our own century as well as of the last.