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Book Review of Madame de Pompadour: A Life

Madame de Pompadour: A Life
BethG avatar reviewed on + 108 more book reviews


I got this book because I recently read that Pompadours taste was still very influential in France. That intrigued me and sent me looking for this book.

She was a great beauty who became Louis XV's mistress at 24 and never lost her place. She had enormous influence and used it. She was blamed for many things that she did not have anything to do with, and truly hated by the common people. In her later years she just about ran France and she was, Im sorry to say, a disaster.

This book is translated from the French and sometimes that was a little too obvious. It assumes that the reader will know things that I certainly did not. I also thought it was amazing that the death of Pompadours only child was reported in a dependent clause. Still, an interesting book on an interesting life.