Madame De Pompadour.

First Edition of Nancy Mitford's Madame De Pompadour; Inscribed in the Year of Publication

Madame De Pompadour.

MITFORD, Nancy.

Item Number: 25021

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954.

First edition. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “Mrs. Jean Jeffcoat with best wishes Nancy Mitford Paris 1954.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket with a chip to the spine and front panel. Cecil Beaton designed the dust jacket art. Uncommon signed.

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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