Word: pompadour
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MADAME DE POMPADOUR (324 pp.) Nancy Mitford- Random House...
...Beautiful Bluestocking. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, daughter of a well-to-do businessman and created Marquise de Pompadour by her royal lover, arrived in the "rats' nests" in 1745, stayed at the court 20 years until her death at 42. Her figure seemed to be made wholly of nymphish curves: her skin was "snow-white," her eyes "the brightest, wittiest and most sparkling." She could act dance and sing, play the clavichord "to perfection," paint, draw, engrave precious stones, and spout about gardening, botany and natural history-"a more accomplished woman," says Author Mitford, "has seldom lived." The only interesting...
...poor lady of the court allowed herself to be seduced by a right-royal-looking "yew tree"-only to find on her return to the ballroom that she had barked up the wrong one. "The real King . . . was engaged in a laughing conversation" with the future Marquise de Pompadour...
...burghers of France had reason to detest La Pompadour. The flowers in her many gardens "were renewed every day, as we renew them now in a room" (the greenhouses at Trianon alone held 2,000,000 pots). At her town house in Paris, she thought nothing of taking "a big bite into the Champs Elysées for her kitchen garden" (it would have been much bigger if Parisians had not burst out in a storm of rage). The secret police were in her pocket. In affairs of state, "nothing was decided without her knowledge"; in the Seven Years...
When a boyish-looking Republican named William G. Stratton was elected governor of Illinois last year, not much was expected of him. The 39-year-old politician with a pompadour and an adolescent voice seemed unlikely to fill Adlai Stevenson's shoes. The liberals labeled Stratton a reactionary. Even the old pols in his own party looked upon him as an upstart, and some of them had an uncomplimentary nickname for him: "Billy...