With a heritage stretching back nearly 200 years, HarperCollins is one of the world's foremost English-language publishers, offering the best quality content right across the spectrum, from cutting-edge contemporary fiction to digital hymnbooks and pretty much everything in between. Evocative and insightful, this is a seductive portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential women of the age. She also illuminates her influence across the artistic and political spectrum of the day, including her relationships with the leaders of the French Enlightenment: Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. The newcomer, however, wasted no time in establishing herself as the king's sole confidante and, ultimately, his indispensable partner in affairs of state.Īlgrant takes the reader into the farthest and most exclusive chambers at Versailles, allowing us to glimpse the resourcefulness and the determination with which Madame de Pompadour deftly manipulated the factions at the court. A compelling new biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV of France with dramatic insights into the life of one of the most enchanting, powerful and feared women to grace the world's stage.įrom her modest beginnings in early 18th-century Paris to her reign as the undisputed mistress of Versailles, this is the story of a truly remarkable woman whose astonishing rise confounded the most experienced and the most sophisticated of her contemporaries.Īlgrant weaves her richly textured narrative with tremendous authority, detailing the transformations that marked the life of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson from her early grooming to assume the role of a rich man's wife, her half-hearted marriage to a Parisian tax collector, her involvement with the financial elite of France and her eventual role as the mistress of the king.Īlthough accustomed to the king's extra-marital liaisons, the court was shocked at the sudden ascension of the low-born Madame Poisson.

Madame de Pompadour by Christine Pevitt