Nancy Mitford's biography brings her wit and light touch to the life of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Madame de Pompadour, mistress and confidante of King Louis XV of France. Born into the bourgeoisie rather than the aristocracy, Pompadour rose through charm, intelligence, and ambition to become the king's official mistress and, for two decades, one of the most powerful figures at the court of Versailles. Mitford, herself a novelist and a fixture of English literary society, tells the story with the eye of an insider to aristocratic manners: she is fascinated by the etiquette, intrigues, and daily texture of court life, and renders the vanished world of eighteenth-century Versailles with affection, gossip, and sparkling humor. Pompadour emerges not merely as a royal favorite but as a formidable political and cultural force—a patron of the arts who supported painters, architects, and writers, championed the porcelain of Sèvres, encouraged the philosophes, and involved herself in the affairs of state, including the diplomatic realignments that preceded the Seven Years' War. Mitford is frankly partisan on her subject's behalf, defending Pompadour against the calumnies of contemporaries and later historians and portraying her as a woman of taste, loyalty, and resilience amid the ruthless competition of the court. The book is less a work of exhaustive scholarship than an elegant, entertaining portrait, animated by Mitford's conversational style and her delight in the personalities and absurdities of the ancien régime. Charming and knowing, Madame de Pompadour is a vivid evocation of a woman and a world at the glittering, precarious height of the French monarchy.