Alexandrine Le Normant d’Étiollesa mother's ambition

She is the little shadow that we sometimes saw following Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, in the rows of salons of her apartments at the Palace of Versailles: Alexandrine Le Normant d'Étiolles is the daughter of one of the royal favorites the most criticized in the history of France. Writing the life of this passing shadow, the ten years of this existence... nothing could be less easy. And yet, the mutual attachment between Alexandrine and her mother tells us how much, to understand the great friend of Louis XV, we must follow step by step the destiny of the one she nicknamed Fanfan.

By Luc Grosshans, historian

To evoke the daughter of Madame de Pompadour, we must first of all be aware of the more than pointillist aspect that the story will take: the testimonies about her quickly dry up and, nevertheless, her figure appears primordial in the life of the royal favorite.

The absence of sources

Things become complicated when the sources that we have hitherto put forward turn out to be apocryphal: the first of which is the famous Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, maid of the Marquise de Pompadour, at the origin of many disappointments about the latter, of which her alleged frigidity is just one example among many others. The presumed author of this false testimony would be Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan who, certainly, rubbed shoulders with and knew the favorite, particularly at the end of her life, but whom we should be wary of, as we will see. The other authors traditionally summoned for the study of the reign of Louis XV and the life of Madame de Pompadour are, for their part, not very verbose on the subject of Alexandrine and, in the few lines that each delivers, sometimes come to contradict each other. The parish registers, which could have been of great help, disappeared in the fire at the Hôtel de Ville during the Paris Commune in 1871.

Deprived of these archival sources, the historian must be cunning and turn to the scholars of the 19th century who, for some, had the intelligence to give us the fruit of their relentless note-taking in bundles that have now been reduced to smoke. But the real boon for those who want to find little Alexandrine is contained in the correspondence that her mother maintained throughout her life with her family, her supporters, and her friends. Widely dispersed in the archives, these letters have been the subject of particular care on the part of the biographers of the Marquise who, some of them, have published unpublished ones. The most complete edition of this correspondence, to date, remains the one provided to us by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, famous publisher of Charles Baudelaire. It is nevertheless important to remain on guard: in the critical edition she made of it, in 2014, Cécile Berly underlines the risk of getting caught up in the game of apocryphal missives. Indeed, from 1771, a series of four volumes of letters, all false, were published in London, some of which touch the very heart of our subject, since within these paper forges slipped some notes allegedly addressed to Alexandrine. Finally, the arts offer us, in their way, a brilliant but limited testimony to what a mother's attachment to her little daughter could have been, even more than to the latter's life.

Mr and Mrs Le Normant d’Étiolles

On March 9, 1741, the projects of Charles-François-Paul Le Normant de Tournehem, farmer general, finally came to fruition: the marriage of his nephew Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d'Étiolles and his niece, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the daughter of François Poisson, one of his close companions in the world of finance, is celebrated in the Saint-Eustache church. The one who will become the favorite of Louis XV takes her first steps into the nobility and launches into what one could call a real race for honors. This unbridled desire for grandeur, which her biographer Robert Muchembled (1) was able to describe well, quickly transfers, as we will see, to her daughter, Alexandrine or Fanfan, as she calls her.

The little girl came into the world almost three years after the birth of her first child, Charles-Guillaume-Louis, on December 26, 1741, and died at an early age. The baptismal certificate has now disappeared but, fortunately, two scholars, Auguste Jal and Alfred Potiquet (2), give us the date and place of Alexandrine-Jeanne's baptism: August 10, 1744, in Saint-Eustache (3), the parish of the Poisson family. Until 1745, the small family lived under the same roof, in an apartment on rue Saint-Honoré. Jeanne-Antoinette, future Marquise de Pompadour, assiduously frequented the salons, accompanied or not by her husband, and in particular that of Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin Marquise de Tencin, one of her close friends who was perhaps the godmother of Alexandrine, as her first name suggests.

The year 1745 was a real break for this family: marked by the birth of the romance between Louis and another. A letter bears witness to this new situation, essential in the life of little Alexandrine: the future Marquise de Pompadour reassures her father, François Poisson, by writing to him: “My daughter will stay with her father and that of her mother (without whom she was born); in truth, his lot is still fair enough; there are few like it. » It would therefore be appropriate to deduce that the child spent his early years at the Hôtel de Gesvres – in the current 2nd arrondissement – ​​where Charles-Guillaume lived until 1751, with his father-in-law and his father-in-law. brother, Abel-François, future Marquis de Marigny. Alexandrine was likely placed in foster care, as stated by Pierre de Nolhac (4). We find, in any case, the mention of a certain Madame Platier who received a pension of 200 Livres, according to the statement of expenses of Madame de Pompadour, and who is designated by the editor of the document as "the nanny of his daughter (5). However, the unreliable nature of this report and the deliberate falsification of the accounts (6) require us to be cautious about it.

Regarding Alexandrine's appearance, some wanted to see behind the cute figure of a little girl in a white dress, painted by François-Hubert Drouais and today exhibited at the Cognacq-Jay museum in Paris, a portrait made during his young years about which so little is known. With Xavier Salmon (7), however, we are more reserved about this attribution – very widespread since the 19th century.

In her mother's skirts

Alexandrine's destiny tends to become clearer to the historian from the age of five: she now appears very regularly in her mother's correspondence. The Marquise brought her regularly to the Court and her residences, without her remaining there permanently. In 1750, she wrote to her father: “Alexandrine spent six days at Marly and Versailles; she is in good condition, although very thin. We leave tomorrow for Crécy, until Saturday, and on the Wednesday of the holidays until the following Saturday. » In letters to her brother, Abel-François, then in Italy, she frequently notes at the bottom of her page: "Alexandrine kisses her little uncle. » Between the multiple Court residences are interspersed stays at the Château de Bellevue, which belongs to Madame de Pompadour, as indicated in a strange missive from Charles-Guillaume to Abel-François, in July 1751: “Mademoiselle your niesse [sic ] is still in Bellevüe and doing very well too (8). » Even more interesting is the episode reported by François Poisson, of which we only have a few scraps of correspondence cited by Pierre de Nolhac (9) and now lost. The grandfather wrote, on an unknown date, probably between December 1749 and April 1750: “Little Alexandrine, dressed as Gray Nun, played a role at the Petits Appartements theater. She was ready to eat, and she had been staying with her mother for ten days. »

When she is at Versailles, the little girl therefore participates in the life of Court, the Marquise, undoubtedly proud of her, presents her on the stages of the theater built on the steps of the Ambassador’ staircase, in a secondary role, which no memoirist echoes. Furthermore, François Poisson gives us an indication of the place where Alexandrine stays when she is at the castle: “For three or four months her mother had taken her away from her, and […] had lodged her in her small mezzanines », to Madame du Hausset (letter of June 11, 1750). The little girl and her grandfather visibly maintain a very strong bond, which is not contradicted by the distance that is established when Alexandrine enters the boarding school, as we will see.

When she spent a few days with him in Marigny-en-Orxois, François Poisson was a very attentive grandfather, which earned us one of the most famous diatribes from the Marquise de Pompadour, in December 1752: “ I brought Alexandrine to La Muette, my dear father, she was in good health. However, you have to blame yourself for causing him indigestion. Why do grandparents always have to spoil their grandchildren? I find it very ugly; provided that it is not too shocking, I will be satisfied because I am very far from wanting a transcendent figure. This only serves to make you enemies of the entire female sex, which, with the friends of said women, makes up two-thirds of the world. » This extract leads us to question the true content of the relationship between mother and daughter, which largely escapes us apart from a few mentions, all in all quite agreed. There is a reciprocal attachment that cannot be denied on the Marquise's side, but as her biographer Évelyne Lever rightly analyzes: she “had little time to devote to the child. She undoubtedly loved him, but above all dreamed of a very brilliant marriage for her” (10). It is also important to see behind this call from Alexandrine to Versailles certainly the sign of Madame de Pompadour's maternal love, but above all a desire to show her to potential parties, to marry her.

A little girl to marry

The efforts that Madame de Pompadour undertakes to marry her daughter into a good family of the aulic aristocracy are akin to a real matrimonial policy. According to Robert Muchembled, the Marquise “possesses a deep family spirit” which she translates through her taste for alliances between her parents and financiers or nobles, the origin of a true “family power” (11). Between 1750 and 1754, she attempted at least twice a rapprochement with a major family of the Court. According to the Journal of the Marquis d'Argenson, the first to pay the price for this policy would be Marshal de Richelieu, support of the favorite in her early days. The memoirist notes on the date of October 4, 1751: “It is announced that the king [Marshal de Richelieu] having proposed to marry M. le duc de Fronsac, his son, with Mademoiselle Alexandrine, daughter and sole heir of Madame de Pompadour, he replied that the mother of his son being from the house of Lorraine, he had to first consult the emperor to find out whether or not he approved this marriage: hence open quarrel. » And there is something to displease Louis XV: the Duke of Lorraine is none other, at this time, than the husband of Maria Theresa of Austria, Emperor Francis Stephen. We sometimes read that the disagreements between the marquise and the marshal date from this refusal. It is undeniable that this did not work in Richelieu's favor, but it must be noted that a real game of cat and mouse had already developed between the two.

Failing to have managed to take the Duke of Fronsac as her son-in-law, Madame de Pompadour turned to the Duke of Chaulnes. In 1751, she lent him 500,000 livres, “a sure way to retain the loyalty of an aristocrat” (12). The following year, on August 25, 1752, d’Argenson indicated: “The marriage of the son of M. de Chaulnes was agreed upon with Mademoiselle Alexandrine, daughter of Madame de Pompadour. » This announcement of the engagement of the Duke of Picquigny to the young Le Normant d'Étioles is part of a real indictment on the part of the Marquis d'Argenson against the favorite of Louis XV who, according to him, " always has everything” and, “thinks she’s a queen”. This clearly shows the importance of such a matrimonial policy. On this subject, the chronicler Barbier was not mistaken; after the death of Alexandrine in 1754, he analyzed very correctly: “The marriage was to take place in a year and a half. This is a very sad event for Madame de Pompadour. It was a support for her in the events to have her daughter a duchess and in the house of Chaulnes and Luynes, which is in great credit at the Court, especially with the considerable property that Madame de Pompadour has, instead of here she is isolated. »

It has, moreover, often been written that Madame de Pompadour sought to have her daughter married by Charles de Ventimiglia, Comte du Luc, an illegitimate child that Louis XV had with Madame de Ventimiglia. The anecdote of the staging of their meeting, of the croquignolette looks of the king and his favorite on the little couple they formed in the gardens of Bellevue occupied these pages of which biographers are fond. However, it is appropriate to question such a story: the only source of it remains, in fact, the so-called Memoirs of Madame du Hausset. It is not even certain that the Marquise had even the slightest idea of ​​such a union: in any case, there is no trace of it anywhere else.

Among the Ladies of the Assumption

All testimonies agree on Alexandrine's entry into the convent of the Ladies of the Assumption, rue Saint-Honoré, in Paris, at the beginning of June 1750 and not in 1749, as we have sometimes read. On June 15, 1750, Madame de Pompadour wrote to her brother: “Alexandrine has been in the convent for fifteen days; she is perfectly comfortable there and delighted to be there. » This decision nevertheless seems to have been carefully prepared by the favorite since she built "a beautiful apartment for this child and a woman of quality who must be her governess", as noted by the Marquis d'Argenson on April 4, 1750. The latter adds that "Quantity of women today seek to board at the convent of the Assumption because we are going to put Miss Alexandrine there." The memoirist thus gives us a comical indication of the influence of the marquise whose protection we are visibly seeking – something we have already seen in the case of the Duke of Chaulnes. Nothing is surprising about entering a boarding school during the year: at a time when there was no back-to-school period, young people could start studying at the convent at any time of the year. year and more particularly between March and May (13), which coincides well with Alexandrine's situation.

Mentions of Alexandrine are, therefore, less frequent in the Marquise's correspondence and it is perhaps to compensate for this absence that she had a portrait of her painted by François Boucher in 1749. To get an idea of ​​this work, we must refer to a painting acquired by the Society of Friends of Versailles, in 2019, before donating it to the Palace of Versailles. Now presented in the former apartments of the Marquise de Pompadour, the painting depicts a little girl feeding porridge to a goldfinch in a cage. This copy, which the favorite never owned, was taken from the pastel made by Boucher which appears in the marquise's post-death inventory, at a time when "the practice of transcribing a pastel into oil was common" ( 14)”. The little girl continues, moreover, to have strong links with her family: a correspondence is established between Alexandrine and her mother and we know that it is through the latter that the letters that the young resident writes to her mother pass. grandfather. He gives us an unprecedented testimony of Alexandrine's state of mind, in his letter of June 11, 1750: "Mr. de Tounehem informs me of the arrival and entry of my dear Alexandrine into the convent of the Assumption. I thought she would despair when she had to go […]. But [...] we had inspired the dear little child with how much pleasure she would have in being in the convent with other young ladies of her age, and especially with the little princess of Soubise. She couldn't breathe until it was time to go, so true is it that you persuade children of everything when you go about it the right way? She said to me, before going there: “My dad, I am going to learn to write very quickly, so that you receive my letters every day.” »

Alexandrine receives frequent visits both from the Marquise, who is said to have acquired the Hôtel d'Évreux – current Élysée Palace – to have the leisure to visit her daughter, and from François Poisson, who reports on it in his correspondence. It was he, too, who was at the origin of the choice to place Jeanne-Marie Darnay, first cousin of Madame de Pompadour, with Alexandrine. A correspondent of Abel-François, a certain Ysabeau, informed him on May 17, 1750: “You know without a doubt that Mad[am]e Damois, offered herself to Madam your sister and was accepted to be the superintendent of education of Mademoiselle your niece, she is going to join her at the Assumption; Currently she is in Versailles to try out for a governess, which she proposed [sic] (15). » The young woman wrote a few letters of thanks to her protector in November 1750 and also gave us a precious testimony on Alexandrine's character: "Your little fan fan waited for you yesterday all after dinner, it is, without doubt, a real sadness for her when you fail to speak to her but your presence always puts an end to her little resentments (16). » Unfortunately for the little girl who, visibly, greatly appreciated Jeanne-Marie Darnay, the latter fell seriously ill during the year 1751. Madame de Pompadour echoed this to her brother: "Poor Madame Dornoy being infected, I was obliged to take my daughter out of her apartment, the smell of which was very unhealthy. This poor woman wrote to me two days ago to say her last goodbyes. My heart aches; I think she is dead now. »

Alexandrine's last days

Memoirists are of great help in understanding the last days of the daughter of the Marquise de Pompadour. The testimonies of the Duke of Luynes, the Marquis d'Argenson, and Barbier, each in their way, provide us with details, accompanied by the few usual contradictions. What seems to be assured is summarized as follows: on Friday, June 14, 1754, Alexandrine was seized with vomiting and fever, the effects of an illness against which the donkey's milk she drank, the purge practiced by the doctors, and bloodletting, mentioned by Barbier, can do nothing. The little one would have received a visit from her father Charles-Guillaume, according to Luynes, before passing away on Saturday, June 15, in her apartment in the convent of the Ladies of the Assumption. Because rumors of poisoning were circulating, the Court doctors, Jean-Baptiste Sénac and Germain Pichault de la Martinière, were brought in, responsible for carrying out an autopsy on the small lifeless body.

Their conclusion does not seem to be well known to contemporaries: the three memoirists do not agree on its subject. D’Argenson said she “died of smallpox” before changing his mind, writing “it is claimed that this milk went bad”. It was also from indigestion that Barbier caused Alexandrine to die, but the chronicler nevertheless evokes a fanciful “convulsion of a large tooth which has erupted”. Finally, according to the hypothesis accepted today, it seems that the little girl died of peritonitis, which would be confirmed by the fact "that her peritoneum was found gangrenous", according to Luynes, as well as " some drops of blood extravasated in the lower abdomen,” according to d’Argenson. These contradictions seem to clearly illustrate a circulation of information that is uneven, to say the least, and explain why the idea of ​​poisoning could have quickly circulated.

The political-religious context of the time can shed light on the spread of such rumors: the crisis of confession notes and the rumblings of Parliament were not calmed until the end of 1754. Some think that by poisoning a person or those around him, people tried to “scare the king.” This remark from the Marquis d'Argenson underlines, once again, the idea of ​​a very lively influence of the Marquise on Louis XV. However, it is less the reality of such poisoning, moreover contradicted by the autopsy, than the simple rumor of its existence which should interest the historian. In any case, on October 19, 1754, Alexandrine's remains were exhumed from the choir of the Church of the Ladies of the Assumption to be transferred to the chapel of the Church of the Capucines on Place Vendôme, which Madame de Pompadour bought it from the Duke of La Trémoille in 1748. The abbess of the place, Sister Marie du Saint-Esprit, wrote him a moving letter on October 11: “Infinitely honored to be the custodians of the precious remains of an angel in heaven, we will receive with respect this body which has been animated by such a beautiful soul and we will constantly unite with it to attract to you, Madam, all the graces that you desire from the goodness of God, from which it has the happiness of enjoying and with which its innocence makes it very powerful to obtain for you everything necessary for your salvation (17). » Two years later, in 1756, the marquise made a new purchase: she acquired, from the Duke of Noailles, the first chapel on the left where, according to the hypothesis of Robert Muchembled, she had her father buried and where she was deposited, upon her death on April 15, 1764, reunited with those she carried in her heart, until the destruction of the building in 1806.

A mother's sadness

Madame de Pompadour emerged bruised from the year 1754, the ranks around her had continued to thin for almost a decade: her mother died in 1745, followed six years later by Le Normant de Tournehem, uncle and protector of the marquise, while in 1754 his daughter and her father died successively. After Alexandrine's death, however, Madame de Pompadour did not indulge in too many effusions. The Duke of Luynes thus noted, on June 19: “Mme de Pompadour is at Bellevue very distressed and inconvenienced; her foot was bled. » As for the Duke of Croÿ, at the beginning of August, he analyzed finely: “I saw, for the first time, the Marquise, since the loss of her daughter, a terrible blow by which I believed to have crushed her. But, as too much pain would have done too much harm to her face, and perhaps to her place, I found her neither changed nor dejected, and, by one of those miracles of Court which are frequent, I did not find it neither worse nor appearing more serious. However, she had been badly hit, and she was probably as unhappy on the inside as she appeared happy on the outside. » It seems that Madame de Pompadour knew how to play these court masks, an art that she mastered perfectly. Indeed, alongside these external testimonies, we have an admirable letter from the Marquise to the Count of Stainville, the future Choiseul, then ambassador to the Holy See. Undated, the missive however seems to be part of the news of the painful event: “I am sensitive to the concern you have about my happiness. June 15 put an invincible obstacle there. All satisfaction died for me with my daughter. It’s currently just more or less a distraction (18). »

Largely marked by the mourning of her daughter, it was undoubtedly following this ordeal that the royal favorite experienced a moment of intense conversion, during the year 1755, which all observers have highlighted. If it is appropriate to read this conversion in the context of strong tensions around the image of the marquise and the king, then in the process of deterioration, as well as that of the crises which the monarchy was experiencing at this time, and which we have already mentioned, we must nevertheless emphasize the probable sincerity of Madame de Pompadour. Furthermore, the attachment she has to her dearly departed is widely reflected in the sources: her correspondence bears witness to this, but the painting also gives us a clue.

Thus, during the 1760s (19), the painter François Guérin created a double portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour and her deceased daughter. From the elegant sanguine preserved at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento was taken a miniature that long belonged to Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The latter, largely inspired by the first composition – except for the decor which is much more sober than that of the red chalk –, clearly reveals that the painter has never seen the little girl but that he is directly inspired by Boucher's portrait of it: the position is very similar and the theme of the goldfinch is taken up. The sanguine represents another detail, not taken up later: a little Moorish page bringing a dog to the marquise. We could see the figure of Raman, a young Indian, likely playmate of Alexandrine, of whom Madame de Pompadour said she was godmother and whom she included in her will. According to Xavier Salmon (20), Guérin's miniature can be linked to the mention made in the marquise's post-death inventory of a “Portrait of Madame de Pompadour and Mademoiselle Alexandrine her daughter, in miniature, by Baudouin [sic], under glass and border”, a sign that, until the end, she was faithful to the memory of her dear Fanfan.

1• Robert Muchembled, Mysterious Madame de Pompadour, Paris, Fayard, 2014.

2• Auguste Jal, Critical Dictionary of Biography and History, Paris, 1867 and Potiquet (Alfred), “Genealogy of the Poisson-Pompadour family”, in L’amateur d’autographes, n° 352-354, January-March 1883, p. 9.

3• It should be noted that the location of the baptism in the parish of Saint-Roch is incorrect. It is due to the Duke of Caraman, in his Family of the M[arqu]ise de Pompadour, genealogical study, Paris, 1901, which nevertheless drew on Potiquet's article.

4• Pierre de Nolhac, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour: studies on the court of France, based on unpublished documents, Paris, 1904, p. 104.

5• Joseph-Adrien Le Roi, Historical curiosities on Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Mme de Maintenon, Mme de Pompadour, Mme du Barry, etc., Paris, 1864, p. 225.

6• Muchembled, op. cit., p. 386 sq.

7• Xavier Salmon (dir.), Madame de Pompadour and the arts, National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon, February 14-May 19, 2002, ed. Meeting of national museums, Paris, 2002, n. 1, p. 156.

8• BHVP, MS-NA-90 (2), f° 440.

9• Pierre de Nolhac, op. cit., p. 296-301.

10• Évelyne Lever, Madame de Pompadour, Paris, Perrin, 2000, p. 165.

11• See the developments of R. Muchembled, op. cit., p. 115-121.

12•  Ibid., p. 184.

13• We will profitably consult this article devoted to the subject of the education of girls in the convent: Emmanuelle Daniellou, “Les pensionnaires des Grandes Ursuline de Rennes (1651-1734)”, History, economy & society, 2008/3, pp. 31-44.

14• Gwenola Firmin, “Portrait of Alexandrine Jeanne Le Normant d’Étiolles”, “Enrichment of the collections”, Versalia. Revue de la Société des Amis de Versailles, 2020, n°23, p. 50.

15• BHVP, MS-NA-90 (1), f° 79, note that the name Darnay has very fluctuating spellings, we have opted for the one used by Robert Muchembled.

16• BHVP, MS-NA-89, f° 50.

17• Quoted by R. Muchembled, op. cit., p. 229

18•  This letter comes from the following article in which this previously unpublished epistolary exchange was presented: General de Piépage, “Letters from Madame de Pompadour to the Count of Stainville (Choiseul), Ambassador (1754-1757)”, Revue de l history of Versailles and Seine-et-Oise, 1917-1918, p. 13.

19• We do not know the exact date: the catalogs of the two Salons of 1761 and 1763 remain very laconic on this subject: “several Paintings under the same Number”. Diderot himself does not dwell on it: “I do not know the first, and not a living soul will tell you about it. »

An unpublished letter

In April 2017, the Ader auction house put up for auction a previously unpublished letter, from the collection of Claude Flers, signed “Alexandrine Lenormant” and intended for her father. These two pages were written in elegant and rather well-controlled handwriting, on the date of December 31 of an unknown year. It recounts a trip that Alexandrine made the day before to “Belle Vüe”, during which she received from her “Belle Maman” a “silver kit” and had “the honor of presenting [s]es respects to the King and to offer him two scholarships [,] works from [his] convent”. The following mention: "My aunt Damoy gives you a thousand sincere compliments, she intends to write to you these days", leads us to date this note from December 1750 - and not 1753, as proposed until then - since the latter died in 1751. Several clues argue in favor of its authenticity.

The fact that memoirists mention a stay of Louis The mention, which we cited above, of Alexandrine's governess, designated as her "aunt" and in the same spelling as the person concerned's signature, constitutes the sign of an intimate knowledge of the Poisson family if not a pure and simple affiliation of the writer of this letter to the circles close to the Marquise de Pompadour. The fact remains that the young girl's great mastery of writing never fails to amaze us: she was six years old at the time and had only received her first lessons a few months earlier. Analyzing this precise point amounts to considering three elements. First of all, we can note that the Marquise de Pompadour mentioned for the first time a letter from Alexandrine, in her correspondence, in 1752. We therefore know that at that date, at least, the young girl mastered writing. Next, we can briefly look at the question of the pace of learning in residential schools in the 18th century. This is subject to two major constraints: a stratification – more or less rigid depending on the establishment – ​​of different learning, where the teaching of writing is conditioned by mastery of reading, as well as a great optimization of time of study which should allow young girls to stay in boarding school for the minimum number of years possible. Alexandrine does not seem to have been in the latter situation: she returned to boarding school relatively early and spent four years there. Finally, it is possible to put the little girl's letter into perspective with another document. This is a note that her mother wrote to the attention of Crébillon père to thank him for the care he gives to his daughter: “As much as I want her to be educated and know how to take care of herself, I will be saddened that she acted so well. » We have lost track of this note, cited by the Goncourt brothers, since its sale in 1887: it is difficult to know more, particularly its date. Nevertheless, he seems to suggest that Crébillon, who had been one of Jeanne-Antoinette's teachers in her youth, may also have been one of Alexandrine's. This would explain the rapid mastery of writing and the polished style of Madame de Pompadour’s daughter.