Madame de Pompadour

Madame de Pompadour

Madame de Pompadour

Madame de Pompadour

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Overview

When Madame de Pompadour became the mistress of Louis XV, no one expected her to retain his affections for long. A member of the bourgeoisie rather than an aristocrat, she was physically too cold for the carnal Bourbon king, and had so many enemies that she could not travel publicly without risking a pelting of mud and stones. History has loved her little better. Nancy Mitford’s delightfully candid biography re-creates the spirit of eighteenth-century Versailles with its love of pleasure and treachery. We learn that the Queen was a “bore,” the Dauphin a “prig,” and see France increasingly overcome with class conflict. With a fiction writer’s felicity, Mitford restores the royal mistress and celebrates her as a survivor, unsurpassed in “the art of living,” who reigned as the most powerful woman in France for nearly twenty years.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590175309
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publication date: 05/09/2012
Series: NYRB Classics Series
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 296
Sales rank: 220,440
File size: 491 KB

About the Author

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) was the eldest of the “Mitford girls,” the sisters who captured the attention of the English public and press with their literary talents and unpopular politics. Nancy Mitford herself was famous for her novels (The Pursuit of Love, The Blessing, and Don’t Tell Alfred), for her forays into social science (a critical study of the English aristocracy), and for her biographies of famous figures from French history (Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire in Love, and The Sun King).

Table of Contents

Introductionxiii
1Versailles and Louis XV3
2Paris and Madame d'Etioles19
3The Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees36
4Fontenoy47
5Presentation at Court60
6Mourning76
7The Staircase82
8Pleasure93
9Royal Family and Poisson Family108
10Power126
11Friends and Table Talk139
12Tastes and Interests156
13From Love to Friendship168
14The Affaire Choiseul-Romanet180
15Politics at Home188
16Politics Abroad205
17Damiens216
18The Seven Years' War233
19Choiseul253
20The End of a Dream264
Bibliography275
Index281
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