When it came to mistresses, few married women had a good impression of them. Even men associated them with moral corruption.
These women often treated men as cash machines. A business a husband and wife had worked so hard to build could be driven into crippling debt by one of them; an upright official might embezzle and take bribes to cover her expenses. They often lived for their looks and vanity, making them easy to exploit.
Behind nearly every honey trap stood a man or a clever woman pulling the strings. Beauty, like fame, made people unable to see the true nature of things.
These beautiful monsters were greedy, yet men still hoped they would give them more.
Perhaps people envied an emperor's life because he could have wives and concubines in abundance, while the women exhausted themselves competing for his favor. He would not have to work as hard as an ordinary man to please and pursue them.
A Hermes bag cost one hundred thousand euros. An engineer would have to go without food or drink for five years to afford one. Being an emperor was different—if he wanted it, he bought it.
The word Hermes represented Hermes, the god of alchemy. Hermeticists also believed that only by maintaining a neutral view of everything before one's eyes could one avoid being disturbed or shaken by the rhythms of rise and fall in the real world, and stand at a higher level to overlook the whole picture.
Madame de Pompadour was not actually exceptionally beautiful, but she was not an ordinary woman who used her looks to seduce the king.
France's present-day presidential residence, the Élysée Palace, had been a gift from Louis XV to Madame de Pompadour. At the time, porcelain from China was an extremely expensive luxury item.