"Nineteenth century historians, shocked by the contemplation of such a merry, pointless life, have been at great pains to emphasize the boredom from which, they say, the whole Court and the King suffered. No doubt a life devoted to pleasure must sometimes show the reverse side of the medal and it is quite true that boredom was the enemy, to be vanquished by fair means or foul. But the memoirs of the day and the accounts of the courtiers who lived through the Revolution .. do not suggest that it often got the upper hand; on the contrary they speak on and all, of a life without worries and without remorse.. of perpetual youth, of happy days out of doors and happy evenings chatting and gambling in the great wonderful palace... If ever a house radiated cheerfulness, that house is Versailles; no other building in the world is such a felicitious combination of palace and country house...""..The case of the Duc de Richelieu illustrates the fact that once a man has been convicted of treachery, he is better dead; the traitor will always betray...If, when the Regent had enough proof to cut off four of M. de Richelieu's heads, he had cut off just one, the history of France might have been different indeed."If you guys read those paragraphs and aren't smiling or shaking your head or clapping your hands or some other expression of delight, then perhaps this book isn't for you, but I'm doing all of those things and LOVING IT. I absolutely adored this book from start to finish, and Nancy Mitford's narrative charm is the reason entire. It is of course helpful that her subject is fascinating in her own right, and her cast of supporting characters were leading men and ladies in many other stories and indeed can't help but steal the spotlight from time to time (if the Duc de Richelieu is playing sidekick #2, you've got a damn good thing going is all I'm saying). But this biography reveals two women, not one, and it is a picture of two times and two mindsets, and the primary one is not the one that takes place in the 18th century. What is it about these early 20th century women? These British women writers in particular? There's something about their assurance, their ability to opine and pronounce and tell a tale with such utter confidence and pull it off without the slightest self-consciousness. There's a way some of these women have of staring you down with utter unconsciousness that anyone could sensibly feel anything different that makes you blink even when you know there's something wrong with that reasoning.I think part of it really does have to do with the fact that so many of them descended from the aristocracy. It might have been an aristocracy whose material rights had in many ways long since gone, but please do let's remember that it is just possible for women of that generation to have had grandfathers who fought Napoleon. The values being imbibed, the educational program, and the history being taught was not so different, and the society was still to a great degree closed. It still mattered who you were born... but of course there is a consciousness that that is all fading away, so quickly. And you know that when things are falling away, oftentimes that is the first time you see them, clearly.Nancy Mitford's book was all about this. It manifested itself in two ways: the first was the way that she approached the world of Versailles, the nobles, the King, and Madame de Pompadour herself. She approached her as an equal, and actually rather as her sympathetic superior. While other historians might have spent a great deal of painstaking time explaining the social codes of Versailles and entangled family trees and have lists of names and navigational charts, Nancy Mitford's book assumes a warm familiarity with her readers and her subjects. She is not intimidated by Versailles, and she expects that you will be equally comfortable walking about the ancient pile while she waves her hand at "oh that old Hall of Mirrors, it really is just too dusty I keep telling Mother the maids really do forget to dust in there, oh mind your dress darling the step is just a bit uneven there, this way loves, we'll have a picnic lunch by the lake today, shall we, it's lovely outside..."... as we pass on easily from room to room, watching the men and ladies come and go, confident that the people we meet will be in perfect accord with us. The dresses might be different, and the wigs, but Mitford makes that all seem a matter of fashion- as if we had been out of the country for a year and just needed to pay a morning call to our good friend the Duchess who would fill us in. We just need to make sure our friends don't see us in this shocking state before we've had time to get rigged up properly.As the quotes above might show, her aristocratic ease and sense of belonging to this world means that she feels free to make many pronouncements on it. In telling the story of Madame de Pompadour, she lets us know when she feels the lady has gone wrong, when she's been clever, and what she could have done better- the same judgement and really the same understanding is applied to the other characters in the story. For instance, she sets up a careful contrast between the marriage of the King and the Queen and how the Queen was a clearly inferior creature to Madame de Pompadour because she hadn't the least idea of how to manage a man- and nor should she poor lamb, taken out of poor obscurity with her poor Polish king father, with her dowdy religiousity and her frigid refusal to sleep with the King (who otherwise, apparently, might have been faithful)... much better to have stayed at home. When Madame de Pompadour ceased sleeping with the king, by contrast, Mitford applauds how well she manages to keep his love despite it all, though she is realistic about the nearby brothel that develops to replace her. She has a fairly down to earth view of things and when she is sentimental, it is well hidden behind a practical argument.What I loved about this whole viewpoint was that she successfully individualizes history to the extent that she makes it all seem a matter of "person X was rather cranky that day and lady Y just didn't quite know how to manage him properly, and person Z was a nasty little beast who should have been strangled at birth and made things very much the worse..." It's a personal view of history that makes the work of deciding the fate of millions, declaring war and peace, dealing with complex financial matters as just another damn thing that must be done after inspecting what's on for dinner and sorting out a dispute between the cook and the housekeeper. There's really no reason to make it a bigger drama than that and those who do well... loves, perhaps that is a sign you don't really belong here, isn't it?So this is the second thing that fascinated me about this one. Similar to the work of Isak Dinesen, to Vita Sackville-West and Evelyn Waugh (in Brideshead at any rate), this is a lament for the decline of the aristocracy. It might seem an odd approach to celebrate the life of one of the world's most successful bourgeoisie social climbers while also making a case for why the aristocracy has been unjustly maligned and why it should still exist, but it's actually a rather clever way of doing it. I don't think it was necessarily a conscious agenda of hers, but her opinions on the subject seemingly couldn't help but come through. Mitford presents Jeanne de Poisson (as yes, the poor lady was born before she became La Pompadour) as a good upper middle class girl who never forgot her roots or pretended to be anything other than she was (both a prime English virtue and something the class conscious aristocrat would have been on the lookout for), and yet as someone who was "naturally" born with an upper class feeling and point of view and taste- she is fiercely loyal to her friends, a lovely, warm person who doesn't gossip behind other people's backs, a lady who throws wonderful parties and makes even shy people feel welcome, a woman who can discuss important issues with men, but knows when to retire, a woman who knew how to keep her looks and her friends as she aged. An unusual case, but much like Cinderella hiding in her dirty clothes, a case where the way we are born nonetheless does tell. She constantly defends Madame as having gotten a bad rap, and completely unfairly too- she rather mindblowingly and continuously argues for why she may have gotten a lot of money from the King but a) it wasn't as much as has been thought (oh, you know fifty million, not a hundred million, so that's totally okay!), and b) that what money she did have was well spent. Nancy Mitford rather crushingly tells us that she was skilled "in the art of living," and people who were starving for their bread just can't properly appreciate that apparently. She goes on rapturously about the beautiful houses she built and decorated with her exquisite taste, and seems to save the greatest of her pity for these troubled times for how her houses didn't last long after her death- after all, beauty and art are what should be appreciated above all. (Once again, the starving and the bread and the oppressed peasants with no rights get no mention- or if they do, it is in mentions of Madame's charity or her helpfulness in certain sticky political situations to save an innocent.) With regards to the King, she takes him to task when she feels he is not fulfilling his proper role in the world, and honestly blames a lot of what comes after on the fact that he does not know how to lead properly.There are some mentions of the Revolution to come, of course. How she approaches this though is to phrase the problems as a peculiarly French extreme of oppression and particular problems of the personalities at the top. She does once or twice acknowledge that Louis XVI was rather shut off from the world in Versailles, and speaks of the political abuses that went on in France. However, she phrases it as if there really would have been no need for the overthrow of the system, which is perfectly fine in theory, thank you, if France hadn't gone about it all the wrong way. I don't mean to present this as a political program of a book- that's not the dominant feeling of it, just something that underpins the approach. More of a viewpoint, really- her biography dominating Madame's biography. I wouldn't have it any other way. It's incredibly well written- relatable and warm, sparkling and close. She knows how to tell a story in just the right way to make you laugh, how to deploy an anecdote to tell you all you need to know about a situation. Her knowledge about her subject is clearly deep, but she is able to use it in the way that only the most eminent of scholars do these days- without footnotes, without careful demonstration of knowledge and self-conscious admissions of "I could be wrong"- just one long, continously flowing story that is written not to prove she knows something, but because it's a story worth telling and perhaps it will pass the evening until you go to bed. One could picture her as a good hostess handing these out to her guests to busy them at a house party rather than gossiping to them herself all night long since she has a cold in her throat. Her ultimate verdict on the story of Madame de Pompadour and its meaning really is that of a hostess, or someone who has been a guest for many years. As her funeral cortege leaves the palace, and the King turns to go inside with tears streaming down his face, she remarks only: "After this a great dullness settled over the Chateau of Versailles."By that point in the book, you know what that means- and bells ringing out and a Requiem blasting at full strength couldn't have said it better.
Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de La Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life.Louis XIV began his reign in 1643, at the age of five. He finally died in 1715, just days before his 77th birthday, well after almost everyone else he knew, including legitimate children and grandchildren, leaving the throne to his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV.The Sun King covers his life in more or less chronological order, from the early days of his personal reign (starting in 1661 when his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin died) when he was converting “his father’s little hunting lodge” into the new seat of government in Versailles, to the final days when he died unsure whether the frail Louis XV would live (he did, and died at the age of sixty-four, having reigned for nearly sixty years; it’s during this reign that Madame de Pompadour and Voltaire come in).Far from a stodgy biography of one of history’s strongest monarchs, a man whose commissioned paintings depict him as the Sun King, Mitford’s biography is a giddy and guilty little treat, as if she were a tabloid journalist wandering around Versailles, recording the foibles of the aristocracy.Of course, besides Louis XIV, the main topics of this story are also introduced in that opening sentence: Versailles and the women who went up and down in his favor.Versailles itself gets quite a lot of attention at the beginning of the book when Louis XIV is trying to make it “grand without being pompous” (not so sure he succeeded here, but Mitford, who died at her home in Versailles, seems to think he did). We learn about the aristocrats who didn’t like that Louis was shifting the seat of government from Paris to Versailles, about the ministers who did the design and ensured, as best they could, that funds would continue to flow in. Soon Versailles almost like a party palace, and, though Louis XIV was a smart leader of what was arguably the strongest world power at the time, we get the sense he was the king of the party.And the women. Throughout the book we learn the names of women vying to become his principal mistress (though many of them still succeeded in sleeping with him and bearing him children, that did not do them much good).Mme de Montespan went on to have seven children with the King.Besides going through the King’s life and his interests in Versailles and women, The Sun King also presents other topics, such as the rampant poisonings going on among the upper class and the awful services provided by the physicians.Yet as fun as the book is to read, the tone changes when the Queen dies and Louis marries Mme de Maintenon in a secret ceremony. At about this time, the tone around Versailles and the tone in Mitford’s book shifted from light and fun to serious and weighty. Louis XIV had a kind of conversion and began to strictly uphold — on the outside — the rules of the church, and he enforced these beliefs on his subjects. To make matters worse, as he aged, feeling quite healthy and strong, he watched his line diminish, not knowing if he would have any heirs, something that must have seemed ridiculous in the mind of the Sun King, the man verifiably divinely appointed to rule France in a Golden Age.Nancy Mitford recreates the spirit of the French eighteenth century with the support of an enthusiastic writing, which stimulates the reader from the first page to the last. And best of all, since it is a biography, the author does not mace who reads Madame de Pompadour introducing excess footnotes.In short, it is a worthy biography to read.
What do You think about Madame De Pompadour (2001)?
http://wineandabook.com/2014/03/27/re...If you’re looking for a sterile, fact-forward, speculation-free, scholarly biography of Madame de Pompadour, this is not the book for you. With Nancy Mitford at the helm, Versailles of the eighteenth century comes back to life in all its glory and decadence. The entire biography reads like having a glass of wine with a very intelligent, very gossip-y confidant, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a world that Mitford, of all people, understands a bit more than those of us born outside of the aristocracy. She carries this perspective and insight into the narrative and is able to infuse a sense of empathy and access into one of the most exclusive eras of French history.This is not to imply that this book is not thoroughly researched. Though it may read more like a novel at times, Mitford did her due diligence research-wise. In fact, her study turned up information that ran contrary to the popular historical opinion of the day; most historians argued that Madame de Pompadour had little political influence, whereas Mitford uncovered that she had more power over the King than previously thought, though Mitford is honest about the scope and scale of de Pompadour’s contributions:“Madame de Pompadour’s excursion into politics will not give much satisfaction to the feminist…To her, as to most women, politics were a question of personalities; if she liked somebody he could do no wrong–a good friend was sure to make a good general, a man who could write Latin verses, and amuse the King, a good minister. Political problems in themselves were of no interest to her, her talents did not lie in that direction.” (p. 188)So she may not have always directly weighed in on the issues of the day, but she was primarily concerned with making sure the king was happy and amused, and did exercise the influence she had as to who the King surrounded himself with, which was bound to have political repercussions in a roundabout way. Her power came from her extensive access to the King. She was his confidant and many times, his secretary. Not as much his lover, as one would imagine. Theirs was a relationship built on deep love, affection, trust and friendship.To give a bit of context (for those of you who may not be French history buffs), Madame de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV until her death. In fact, when she was just a young girl, a fortune-teller prophesied that she would “reign over the heart of the king,” and that she did (p. 22). After her death, the King took a new mistress, who held that position until his death, which ushered in the era of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (and, as we know, that era didn’t exactly end well for the royal family). When reading about Madame de Pompadour’s cultural tastes and hobbies, it was hard not to see the stage being set for Marie Antoinette and the infamous misquote of “Let them eat cake!”“Croÿ describes a visit to Trianon with the King, who showed him the hot-houses, the rare plants, the hens (which he specially liked), the charming pavilion, the flower and vegetable gardens; all arranged so prettily. Croÿ is full of admiration, but deplores the fact that Madame de Pompadour should have given the King ‘an unfortunate taste for expensive little things which cannot last.’ This view was shared by the public. Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.” (p. 128)One of de Pompadour’s largest contributions to court life was the establishment of a theatre company composed entirely of ladies and gentlemen of the court. It was invitation only, for the actors as well as for the audience, and access to their productions became another huge indicator of status in courtly life. This excess, this emphasis on the importance of pleasure and leisure, is why I find this era of history so fascinating.When I visited Paris in high school, I fell IN LOVE. With the spirit of the city. With the architecture. With the art. With the romance. With the energy. With Rick, our tour guide (HUGE unrequited crush…he read us POETRY IN FRENCH and knew about ART and LITERATURE, all of which I found incredibly attractive).My heritage is French, Irish and Iroquois, and when our tour guide read my last name, he told me that there was a good chance that the “de” in my last name indicated that somewhere along the line, my family had received that title from the King. Well, that hooked me. Whether that holds to be true or not, I have found myself completely enthralled by French history ever since. The notion that there was an entire class of people who spent their entire life in service to art and beauty and pleasure…the excess and the courtly rules and the intrigue! And the CLOTHES!!! God, the CLOTHES!!!!*catches breath*I’ve read quite a few biographical pieces on this era of French history, and I thoroughly enjoyed Mitford’s work. To me, it felt like a great translation reads: she truly captured the spirit and essence of the time.Rubric rating: 8
—Jaclyn Michelle
Let's get this out here first: if I wanted to bring back one 20th century British person to go to tea and just hang out, it would be Nancy Mitford (sorry, Jessica, you are my go to girl for rallies and being snide about people, I promise). Nancy Mitford's account of the life of Madame de Pompadour is immensely readable and well presented. From her beginnings as Jeanne Antoinette Poisson to the cultural curator of the French court, Nancy Mitford chronicles the rise and death of the most famous French king's mistress. Along the way she turns the characteristic Mitford sarcasm towards many of the people at court, especially the court physicians that readers of The Sun King will remember. Mitford refrains from judging Mme du Pompadour too harshly. Mitford's narrative consists of Mme du Pompadour going up against an engrained nobility (which in retrospect was not far from failing miserably) as a more bourgeois but also more authentically French personality. Mme du Pompadour couldn't help her upbringing, let alone rumors about her parentage, but she could renovate homes, collect art, and act as advisor to the King as well as be captivating enough to be the principle and steady mistress for twenty years. Mitford pulls no punches when discussing Pompadour's successor, Mme du Barry, as a classless woman of ill repute. Imagine the wrath of an English aristocrat for the French. And now make it witty, classy, and dismissive. Mitford retains some of her academic tone while also putting those she does not care for in their place, striking a balance between substance and commentary. Once again, Mitford has captured the spirit of a time as well as accomplishing an incredibly readable biography of a famous figure from pre-Revolutionary France. Also recommended are Voltaire in Love and The Sun King, and I am very much looking forward to her biography of Frederick the Great that was just re-issued last month. Before Mitford Enlightenment France was not particularly a favorite subject, though now it is through Mitford's incomparable English style.
—Margaret
Biographies are my kind of book. I've probably said it before, but if they're well written they're an instant 4 star read for me. This one I rated 3 stars. Looking back, that's probably harsh, but while I liked it, I didn't really like it. Sometimes Nancy's writing got a little confused, jumping around in chronological order and made a lot of assumptions about our knowledge of French life and courts, as well as being able to read passages in French. There was a lot to like though. Nancy has an intimate way of writing, that really draws you into the story. I bet she'd have made a great palace gossip of this period. I also liked how well Madame de Pompadour came across. It was obvious that Nancy found her fabulous and this was infectious, I loved her too. In fact, I wonder now why I didn't rate it 4 stars.
—Pink
