Madame de Pompadour

Description

Nancy Mitford’s delightfully candid biography of the mistress of Louis XV recreates the spirit of the 18th-century court of Versailles with relish. With a fiction writer’s skill, 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. Madame de Pompadour was very well read and extremely well-dressed, yet she had so many enemies that she could not travel publicly without risking a pelting of mud and stones, and Mitford is clearly thrilled by her subject. She pours out the story in the highest spirits and at a rattling pace. The style is deceptively simple, as if the author were gossiping to a friend on the telephone about something that had amused her the previous night at a party. Madame de Pompadour is not only deliciously readable but strictly accurate. Miss Mitford’s book is still viewed as one of the best accounts of this powerful woman. This is the first edition, published in 1954.