Sacred Influence (18 page)

Madame de Pompadour’s only hope of success lay in maintaining her favor with the king. She did not have the security of marriage, so her acts undoubtedly took on a more desperate character. Yet her success shows how such a woman can move a man.

Serving the King

The beautiful Madame de Pompadour knew that beauty fades and that she couldn’t possibly hope to compete with the best of France — indeed, the best of the world — for very long on beauty alone. Looks may have gotten her into the palace, but with so many enemies, they certainly couldn’t keep her there.

So she studied her man. She figured out what a busy king who bears the weight of his country on his shoulders most wants and needs, and then she worked hard to make it happen.

First, she realized that the king needed an escape from his responsibilities and duties — little pockets of enjoyment that would make his burden less heavy to bear. Accordingly, Madame de Pompadour set up small and intimate social gatherings that the king could enjoy two or three times a week. Biographer Christine Pevitt Algrant describes the dinners this way:

The marquise realized very early the importance of the
pe-tits
cabinets
for her own ends. She understood that the king liked this intimate, comfortable, pleasant, and cheerful setting — very bourgeoisie; she came to comprehend that, by establishing an ambience at once cozy and royal, relaxed and refined, she would become essential to his life. After becoming accustomed to such congenial society, after a tedious council or exhausting ceremony, Louis would not be able to do without it. And if it were she, and she alone, who was responsible for the good cheer, the discreet friends, the voluptuousness of it all, then without her, he would enjoy none of this.
³

Few could match the way Jeanne-Antoinette put herself almost entirely at the king’s disposal. When the king lapsed into a semi-depressed funk, the marquise “never left him alone; she tried to liven him up, stir him and divert him from his gloomy thoughts; she reassured him and surrounded him with a giddy gaiety. . . . She invited more and more people to the suppers in the private apartments and increased the number of escapades to the smaller chateaux.”
⁴

Madame de Pompadour
had
to entertain the king to maintain her place; but I wonder if wives can’t find something to apply here. After all, why do so many marriages break down? Many times, one or both partners simply stop trying to please their spouse. While dating, they may have put great effort and gone to great expense to make a good impression. They deliberated over thoughtful gifts. They demonstrated great concern. They felt eager to serve with a back rub, a plate of cookies, a special meal, a kind and thoughtful gesture.

If you think back, you may recall a time when gaining your man’s favor made you happier than almost anything else. You went about it very intentionally, didn’t you? But somewhere into the second or third year of marriage, instead of trying to please your spouse, perhaps you found that you wanted to be pleased
by
him. Resentment may have frozen your motivation, and you may have stopped even trying to please. Perhaps you began to take your spouse for granted and started coasting in your affection, care, support, and ser vice.

This happens in the bedroom as much as anywhere. I was eating an airline dinner, flying somewhere over the Midwest, when I put on some headphones and caught this piece of dialogue from the Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant movie called
Two Weeks Notice
: “Don’t let this lawyerly facade fool you,” Sandra warned Hugh. “I’m actually really good in bed.”

In a Christian worldview, a single person shouldn’t
know
whether he or she is “good in bed.” But since I was stuck in an aluminum tube thirty thousand feet above ground, I had plenty of time to think — and the question challenged me in another context. When did I, a married person, last ask that question: “Am I really good in bed?” I’m not trying to reduce sexual intimacy to mere mechanics; but why should I care less about pleasing a spouse who has committed her life to me than some drunken girlfriend cares about pleasing a guy she just met? Sadly, many people in marriage simply stop caring about whether they’re “good in bed.” They abuse the security and commitment of the relationship, allowing their physical intimacy to fall into a predictable routine. They stop trying and do just enough to “fulfill their duty” and keep their consciences at bay.

While it’s justifiable to question Madame de Pompadour’s low character, how much sadder that this mistress from the eighteenth century tried much harder to build an illicit relationship than many contemporary (even Christian) wives try to build healthy marriages! How deplorable that an adulterous woman put more thought into her relationship with a lover than many spouses do in their lifelong unions!

Why do we care less about a spouse than a mistress might about a king? Because we’ve forgotten the power of a
persistent
pursuit. Jesus warned us, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). Is your love for your husband growing cold?

For some women, marriage is the ultimate life goal — once attained, what’s to try for? When you stop trying to please your man, eventually, by degrees, you lose him; or at the least, you lose the intimacy that leads to influence. You become someone other than the person he married, and the two of you begin to drift apart.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not exonerating JeanneAntoinette’s morals. But I am applauding her effort!

The book of Proverbs contains a sober warning:

I went past the field of the sluggard,
past the vineyard of the man who lacks judgment;
thorns had come up everywhere,
the ground was covered with weeds,
and the stone wall was in ruins.
I applied my heart to what I observed
and learned a lesson from what I saw:
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest —
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.

Proverbs 24:30 – 34

Does your marriage look like the sluggard’s vineyard? Have you stopped planting healthy plants, with the result that weeds — unhealthy habits — have replaced them? Are your stone walls — the boundaries that protect your marriage — lying in ruins? Is your marriage vulnerable because of neglect? If you start slumbering in your marriage and let the relationship slowly drift, year by year, the riches of your marriage will collapse into emotional and spiritual poverty.

It takes great effort to love a man well. Marriage is work! Even the highest, most intense passion can cool if not maintained. Just because your husband once felt head over heels in love with you doesn’t mean he’ll die that way. If you take your husband for granted, if you let yourself grow lazy in the arts of love and relationship — then you run the very real risk of losing his heart.

Think about your past week. How much effort have you put into really
pleasing
your husband, into bringing joy and happiness into his life? Have you given it a single thought? If not, go back a month. How many times in the past four weeks have you made this a matter of prayerful concern? If you can’t remember the last time you actively strove to please your husband, if you’ve stopped caring whether you’re “good in bed,” then you’re giving less effort to your marriage than many a mistress would give to her adultery. Does that attitude honor God?

On a practical level, if you aren’t putting forth the effort, then you’re far less likely to influence your man. As we’ll see shortly, Madame de Pompadour ultimately became King Louis’ most influential adviser. Why? For one thing, she remained
persistent
in her pursuit.

The Most Delicious Woman in France

By 1748, the marquise’s position looked solid. Her work at distracting the king with intimate dinners and plays created a growing bond that seemed permanent. Madame Pompadour’s longtime enemy, the Marquis d’Argenson, grudgingly referred to her as the “oracle of the Court.”
⁵
After one play in February, the king showed his affection publicly, openly kissing the marquise and referring to her as “the most delicious woman in France.”
⁶

The title of “most delicious woman in France” did not come unearned. Madame de Pompadour spent considerable time and effort on the elaborate costumes that she wore to the plays. Algrant writes, “The marquise excelled on stage, dazzling her audience with her acting, singing, and dancing, not to mention her spectacularly glamorous costumes. For her dancing role in
Almasis
, she wore a low-cut bodice of rose taffeta decorated with a pattern of silver, embroidered in flowers of pastel colors.”
⁷

The lesson here should be quite clear: Jeanne-Antoinette never stopped trying to captivate Louis XV. She knew the king would take other mistresses — Louis XV was no more “faithful” to his favorite than he was to the queen — but she never ceased working to keep herself looking her best.

Appearance does matter to men. I realize such a statement can make many women wince, and let me assure you that, even as a man, I can at least empathize with a contemporary woman’s situation. In previous ages, a woman competed with perhaps dozens of other women in her village or small town.
⁸
Today, with television and magazines, you’re likely to be compared to hundreds of thousands of women! Modeling agencies scour the earth to find the next gorgeous supermodel, who will promptly retire by the age of twenty-five, with a new crop soon replacing her. But in those few short years, she’ll have clothes made just for her, makeup artists who spend hours getting her ready, and photographers who take hundreds of pictures and then display the ones that best showcase her beauty (after digitally enhancing them).

You can’t compete with that — and even if you could, your victory would be short-lived. Yet it might surprise you to learn that when dozens of men filled out a recent survey, listing how they wish their wives would love them,
not a single one
mentioned a desire for their wife to lose weight. About half of them, however, expressed a desire for their wives to cultivate a different attitude toward sexual intimacy — a comfortableness with sex and their bodies, the willingness to be emotionally engaged, initiating, enthusiastic. In a sense, this should be good news. You can’t lose ten pounds in an afternoon, but you can change your attitude anytime.

In this regard, I think men generally get shortchanged. Their sexual desires get dismissed as animalistic — “they just want a perfect body,” the saying goes, and frequent sexual activity. But none of the men responding (and none I’ve talked to) are like that. No mature Christian men I know expect their wives to look like a twenty-two-year-old supermodel.

In fact, if you feel uptight about your appearance and thus act more reserved in bed, your attitude, far more than your body, takes away from your husband’s enjoyment. I talked to one man whose wife is in her forties. Because of the wife’s commitment, they have sex more often now than they did in their twenties. And guess what he told me? “I’m more attracted to her today than I’ve ever been.”

I think it’s safe to assume that this man’s wife probably weighs a little more today than she did twenty years ago. I’m sure there are a few more wrinkles, very likely some stretch marks that didn’t exist when they were on the honeymoon, and a few body parts that don’t look as “tight” as they once did. But her husband loves her body more than ever. Why? It’s her
attitude
— she generously gives what she has, and her husband has bonded with that familiar but oh-so-glorious body in a very big way.

I guarantee that if you polled a hundred husbands, asking them if they’d prefer a supermodel look-alike who is cold emotionally and who never initiates sexual intimacy, or a woman carrying a few extra pounds who is eager, enthusiastic, and sometimes takes the lead, ninety-nine husbands out of a hundred would choose the latter.

But here’s the catch. While your husband probably doesn’t expect you to look like a supermodel, he does want you to look
feminine
. One time, Lisa and I were talking about how unmarried teens were becoming Victoria’s Secret’s biggest customers. A dad once told me that when he and his wife folded the laundry, he couldn’t help but notice that his unmarried daughter had far more attractive undergarments than did his wife.