Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford, Amanda Foreman (Introduction)

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:	9780940322653
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/31/2001
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	465,887
Product dimensions:	4.99(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) was born into the British aristocracy and, by her own account, brought up without an education, except in riding and French. She managed a London bookshop during the Second World War, then moved to Paris, where she began to write her celebrated and successful novels, among them The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, about the foibles of the English upper class. Mitford was also the author of four biographies: Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and Frederick the Great (1970)—all available as NYRB classics. In 1967 Mitford moved from Paris to Versailles, where she lived until her death from Hodgkin’s disease.

Amanda Foreman was born in London in 1968 and educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Oxford University, where she received a Ph.D. in history. She is the author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and A World on Fire; her new study, The World Made by Women: A History of Womankind from the Age of Cleopatra to the Era of Hillary Clinton, is forthcoming in 2016.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xiii
1	Versailles and Louis XV	3
2	Paris and Madame d'Etioles	19
3	The Ball of the Clipped Yew Trees	36
4	Fontenoy	47
5	Presentation at Court	60
6	Mourning	76
7	The Staircase	82
8	Pleasure	93
9	Royal Family and Poisson Family	108
10	Power	126
11	Friends and Table Talk	139
12	Tastes and Interests	156
13	From Love to Friendship	168
14	The Affaire Choiseul-Romanet	180
15	Politics at Home	188
16	Politics Abroad	205
17	Damiens	216
18	The Seven Years' War	233
19	Choiseul	253
20	The End of a Dream	264
	Bibliography	275
	Index	281