Poor Mme de Pompadour. I suppose it’s one of the occupational hazards when you are official mistress to the king, but not everybody at the court of Louis XV seems to have liked her.
Even the king found her difficult at times.
I really want to please Louis, but alas, sometimes he thinks I’m a scoter.
An odd insult, but a cruelly skillful one indeed. As a cookbook published for the preceding Louis had explained,
The scoter is a fish-bird…. It counts as a fish because it has cold blood, which is the only criterion for us to distinguish between foods that can be eaten on fast days and those that cannot.
Poor Mme de Pompadour — née Poisson.
