My love affair* with the Mitford ladies continues with Nancy’s biography of Madame du Pompadour, Louis XV’s favorite mistress.
This book is pretty good. It is like spending a long, boozy afternoon with your friend who has just finished an exhaustive research project and is just telling you the juiciest anecdotes from her research. She lets you know who all the fun people were, who was boring and/or priggish (the Queen, the Dauphin, some guy named Prince de Croy who sends hilariously detailed memoranda to everyone, including the Versailles gardener).
I suspect that Miss Mitford is one of those people whose summary of a party is way more fun than the party itself. That said, I trust her research methods. Even though it doesn’t have law review-style footnotes at the end of each sentence, the bibliography shows you which sources are quoted in each chapter. She also clearly visited every site and surviving artwork that the book discusses, and will tell you which of them have been spoiled and by whom (Germans or New Money, generally).
I was impressed, as my title indicates, by the bureaucratic nature of being a royal mistress in 1750s France. Apparently, everyone married at like 12 and they all had lots of mistresses (and misters, or whatever the term is). Madame du Pompadour was Louis XV’s fourth interesting mistress (the first three were a set of sisters! Scandalous!). She was sort of the mistress in chief, installed with a role in the court and official recognition and various sort of diplomatic duties — no running around in secret; it was like being a member of the cabinet or something. And then, esp. as she got older and because, as Miss Mitford observes, “[s]he was not strong enough for continual lovemaking and it exhausted her,” there were various lesser mistresses in mistress middle management, and then below them these young prostitutes the King would just sleep with once and send on their way. The French are funny. I recommend this book.
*Actually, this has a lot to do with my queue management issues at booksfree.com. I keep forgetting to cancel my membership and they keep forgetting to cancel it for me, even though they have an expired credit card. So books show up and I read them. But for some reason they only send me Mitford-related books. Perhaps it is some bug in their software. At least they do not send me books that are not on my list.
