Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford

Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford

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.

Nancy Mitford, the eldest of the six legendary Mitford sisters and the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, was born in 1904 and schooled at home on the family estate in Oxfordshire. She made her début in London and quickly rose to prominence as one of the era's bright new things, becoming close friends with Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. She began writing for periodicals and novels while still in her twenties, a beauty and a wit. She published eight novels and biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great, in total. In 1973, she passed away. Visit www.nancymitford.com for more details.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780940322653
ISBN 10	094032265X
Title	Madame de Pompadour
Author	Nancy Mitford
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2001-03-31
Number of pages	296
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.