Skip to product information
1 of 1

Madame de Pompadour

Madame de Pompadour

by Nancy Mitford, introduction by Amanda Foreman

Regular price $19.95
Regular price $0.00 Sale price $19.95
Format

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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9780940322653
Pages: 296
Publication Date:

Praise

Apart from Miss Mitford's special interests in the fun and fashion department, one may admire her most for her power to condense and explain the most complicated events.
The New Statesman

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it