Download or read book Madame de Pompadour written by Nancy Mitford and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Madame de Pompadour written by Evelyne Lever and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this biography, historian Evelyne Lever chronicles the extraordinary life of the most famous and influential mistress of Louis XV: Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour - a bourgeois girl of questionable parentage who would rise to the highest ranks of French society and maintain a twenty-year relationship with Louis XV.
Download or read book Madame de Pompadour written by Christine Pevitt and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV offers dramatic insight into the life of one of the most enchanting, powerful, and feared women to grace the world's stage. Groomed from an early age to assume the role of a rich man's mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson underwent several transformations before she caught the heart of the king himself. Although accustomed to the king's extramarital relationships, the court was shocked at the sudden ascension of the low-born Mademoiselle Poisson. The newcomer, however, wasted no time in establishing herself as the king's sole confidante and, ultimately, his indispensable partner in affairs of state. The critically acclaimed author of Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, Christine Pevitt Algrant traces Madame de Pompadour from her modest beginnings in early-eighteenth-century Paris to her reign as the undisputed mistress of Versailles. Filled with photographs, and evocative and insightful in its telling, Madame de Pompadour is a seductive portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential women of the age.
Download or read book Madame De Pompadour Classic Reprint written by Jean Baptiste Honoré Raymond Capefigue and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Madame De Pompadour I look upon the reign of Louis XV. As the re ection of the spirit of chivalry, the last glow of its ame before it ickered and went out, extinguished altogether beneath the comtte blanche, which was by then already fast be coming old-fashioned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."
Download or read book Voltaire in Love written by Nancy Mitford and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inimitable Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s fifteen-year relationship with the Marquise du Châtelet—the renowned mathematician who introduced Isaac Newton’s revolutionary new physics to France—is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment. Mitford’s story is as delicious as it is complicated. The marquise was in love with another mathematician, Maupertuis, while she had an unexpected rival for Voltaire’s affections in the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (and later in the philosophe’s own niece). There was, at least, no jealous husband to contend with: the Marquis du Châtelet, Mitford assures us, behaved perfectly. The beau monde of Paris was, however, distraught at the idea of the lovers’ brilliant conversation going to waste on the windswept hills of Champagne, site of the Château de Cirey, where experimental laboratories, a darkroom, and a library of more than twenty-one thousand volumes enabled them to pursue their amours philosophiques. From time to time the threat of impending arrest would send Voltaire scurrying across the border into Holland, but his irrepressible charm—and the interventions of powerful friends—always made it possible for him resume his studies with the cherished marquise.
Download or read book Marie Antoinette written by Evelyne Lever and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-09-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the French queen explores the intrigue surrounding her life from her birth, through her unhappy marriage, her lavish life at Versailles, to the events leading up to her death by beheading during the French Revolution.
Download or read book Madame Du Barry written by Joan Haslip and published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005-08-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born the illegitimate daughter of a monk and a seamstress, Madame du Barry rose from poverty to become one of the most powerful and wealthy women of France. A courtesan, she became Louis XV's official mistress and was fêted as one of France's most beautiful women. On Louis XV's death she became vulnerable to those secretly longing for her downfall. Marie Antoinette had her imprisoned for a year, and in 1793 she was executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal for her aristocratic associations. Joan Haslip's classic biography shares the extraordinary and ultimately tragic story of du Barry's life and, in turn, illustrates the dazzling world of the eighteenth century royal court of France and the horrors of the Revolution.
Download or read book Queen of Fashion written by Caroline Weber and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-10-02 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.
Download or read book The Sun King written by Nancy Mitford and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “devastatingly witty” biography of Louis XIV and the Court of Versailles—at once a historical record of late 17th- and early 18th-century France and a gossip-filled narrative of lovers and rivals, artists and warriors (The New York Times) The Sun King is a dazzling double portrait of Louis XIV and Versailles, the opulent court from which he ruled. With characteristic élan, Nancy Mitford reconstructs the daily life of king and courtiers during France’s golden age, offering vivid sketches of the architects, artists, and gardeners responsible for the creation of the most magnificent palace Europe had yet seen. Mitford lays bare the complex and deadly intrigues in the stateroom and the no less high-stakes power struggles in the bedroom. At the center of it all is Louis XIV himself, the demanding, mercurial, but remarkably resilient sovereign who guided France through nearly three quarters of the Grand Siècle. Brimming with sumptuous detail and delicious bons mots, and written in a witty, conversational style, The Sun King restores a distant glittering century to vibrant life.
Download or read book Frederick the Great written by Nancy Mitford and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on 1970 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Frederick II (German: Friedrich II.; 24 January 1712? 17 August 1786) was King in Prussia (1740?1786) of the Hohenzollern dynasty. He is best known for his brilliance in military campaigning and organization of Prussian armies. He became known as Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Große) and was nicknamed Der Alte Fritz ("Old Fritz"). He was a grandson of George I of Great Britain, and a nephew of George II."--Wikipedia.
Download or read book The Creation of the French Royal Mistress written by Tracy Adams and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-institutionalized political position. This study explores the emergence and development of the position of French royal mistress through detailed portraits of nine of its most significant incumbents: Agnès Sorel, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Diane de Poitiers, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Françoise d’Aubigné, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and Jeanne Bécu. Beginning in the fifteenth century, key structures converged to create a space at court for the royal mistress. The first was an idea of gender already in place: that while women were legally inferior to men, they were men’s equals in competence. Because of their legal subordinacy, queens were considered to be the safest regents for their husbands, and, subsequently, the royal mistress was the surest counterpoint to the royal favorite. Second, the Renaissance was a period during which people began to experience space as theatrical. This shift to a theatrical world opened up new ways of imagining political guile, which came to be positively associated with the royal mistress. Still, the role had to be activated by an intelligent, charismatic woman associated with a king who sought women as advisors. The fascinating particulars of each case are covered in the chapters of this book. Thoroughly researched and compellingly narrated, this important study explains why the tradition of a politically powerful royal mistress materialized at the French court, but nowhere else in Europe. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the French monarchy, women and royalty, and gender studies.
Download or read book French Book plates written by Walter Hamilton and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Marquise de Gange written by The Marquis de Sade and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is time to die, Madame: there shall be no mercy for you..!' It was one of the most shocking crimes of the seventeenth century, and would provide Sade with the inspiration for the last novel he published. The beautiful and virtuous Euphrasie, admired by the King himself, falls in love with the young and handsome Alphonse, Marquis de Gange. Within the forbidding walls of his castle in Provence, however, sinister forces are conspiring against the young couple. Alphonse's brothers, the Abbé and the Chevalier, want Euphrasie for themselves. Published in English for the first time, The Marquise de Gange is a neglected Gothic classic by one of the most notorious authors in the literary canon. Although a departure from his earlier pornographic and libertine works, beneath the novel's thin veneer of respectability lurks the same subversive presence of an author plotting against virtue in distress.
Download or read book The Secret Wife of Louis XIV written by Veronica Buckley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon and secret wife of the Sun King, Louis XIV, was born in a bleak French prison in 1635, her father a condemned traitor and murderer, her mother the warden’s seduced daughter. A timely pardon and a hopeful Caribbean colonial venture failed to mend the family’s fortunes, and Françoise was reduced to begging in the streets. Yet, armed with beauty, intellect, and shrewd judgment, she was to make her way to the center of power at Versailles, the most opulent and ambitious court in all Europe. At fifteen, she was married off to the forty-two-year-old satirical poet Paul Scarron, a former roué now grievously deformed by rheumatism—“a sort of human Z,” as he described himself. Despite his ailments, Scarron presided over the liveliest and most scandalous literary salon in Paris, and Françoise quickly became its most prized ornament. After Scarron’s death, she enjoyed a merry widowhood in the fashionable Marais district, in the company of the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos and the King’s splendid mistress, Athénaïs de Montespan, who made the young widow governess to her brood of illegitimate children. The appointment transformed Françoise’s life, but was fatal to the temperamental Athénaïs herself, with the King soon turning his attentions to the graceful governess. Françoise was raised to the nobility as Madame de Maintenon—and, unofficially, “Madame de Maintenant,” the lady of the moment. The acclaimed biographer Veronica Buckley traces the extraordinary story of Françoise’s progress from pauper child to salonnière to the compromised position of Louis’s secret wife and uncrowned Queen. An absolute ruler, Louis turned away his many other mistresses to live with Françoise only, trusting her as his closest confidante and remaining in love with her for forty years. Sparkling with the irresistible wit of contemporary chroniclers such as Madame de Sévigné, this exactingly researched biography is a pinnacle of the form. In vibrant colors, The Secret Wife of Louis XIV paints a portrait of Europe in an age of violent change, and the Sun King’s France in the process of becoming its modern self.
Download or read book Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art written by Michael Elia Yonan and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the intersections between monarchy, gender, and art through an investigation of the visual and architectural culture of the eighteenth-century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Boucher written by David F. Wakefield and published by Chaucer Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A balanced portrait of an artist of the Rococo period in 18th century France
Download or read book How They Decorated written by P. Gaye Tapp and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How They Decorated illustrates some of the great rooms of the twentieth century, whose stylish residents influence our tastes today. Gloria Vanderbilt cleverly noted, “Decorating is autobiography.” Reflecting that truism, the interiors in this book capture the individual approaches of these icons of style: Bunny Mellon’s spare all-American elegance; Hélène Rochas’s refined sophistication; Vanessa Bell’s colorful bohemianism; Mona von Bismarck’s breezy opulence; and Georgia O’Keeffe’s earthy chic. Author P. Gaye Tapp analyzes each of her subjects’ refined way of living, how she embellished her residences (or left them elegantly stark), and the long-lasting effects on today’s generation of designers and connoisseurs of beauty. The book is presented in four sections that describe the aesthetic approaches that the ladies took in decorating their abodes: “The Fashionably Chic”, “The Unconventional Eye”, “In the Grand Manner”, and “Legacy Style”. Each interior illustrates the crucial aspect of the lady’s definitive taste. Some worked closely with decorating legends such as John Fowler, Albert Hadley, Billy Baldwin, Syrie Maugham, and Jean-Michel Frank. Others took to the task of decorating single-handedly—like Pauline Trigère, Sybil Connolly, Vita Sackville-West, and Fleur Cowles. The interiors of these trendsetting ladies defied their time and inspire and delight to this day. In How They Decorated, one can learn from the most notable style muses of the last century.
