Madame de Pompadour

By Nancy Mitford
Introduction by Amanda Foreman

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.

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Reviews

It is the great merit of this biography by novelist Nancy Mitford that it excels in depicting both ... the brilliant romantic showcase and the recessed world of power... No historian writing in English has given a better pen-picture of Versailles in its heyday.
— Time

Also see:

The Life of Henry Brulard By Stendhal Preface by Lydia Davis Translated and with an introduction by John Sturrock The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

Hons and Rebels By Jessica Mitford Introduction by Christopher Hitchens In Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford tells about her upbringing, which, she drily remarks, "even for England, in those far-off days of the middle twenties...was not exactly conventional...."

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