Word: pompadours
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...lovers may appreciate the perky papillon, painted by Fragonard, Boucher, Velasquez and Titian. Its name derives from its butterfly-like ears. Madame de Pompadour always carried one, Marie Antoinette took hers along to prison, and Edith Wharton brought papillons to the U.S., where currently there are 158 registered...
Loyalties of the Purse. Inevitably, much of Author Levron's material is not new. Nancy Mitford nine years ago produced a lighthearted biography sympathizing with Pompadour's difficulties and praising her good taste, which, since she was the major patroness of the arts in France, set the age's style in painting and sculpture and architecture...
What sets Levron's work apart is that he approaches Pompadour not merely as an apologist and admirer but as an archivist-he is curator of all the his toric papers at Versailles. Delving into little-known notebooks and letters, he supports his assessments of her character with elaborate documentation of her daily housekeeping and the worthy causes she supported...
...distorting disability that makes the writer's subject loom through history at elephant size while other personages appear as ants. Describing the Seven Years' War, in which Austria and France were eventu ally drubbed by England and Prussia, Levron somehow creates the impression that Mme. de Pompadour was fighting the war singlehanded-writing almost daily letters to generals on all fronts, conniving with the Viennese court, desperately trying to put a little pluck into her King and his flagging ministers, many of whom, Levron admits, she had chosen personally...
...this seems ridiculous now, at least one potentate of the time saw things Levron's way. In 1757, Frederick II of Prussia secretly wrote offering her the "principality of Neuchatel and Val-angin" if she would see that peace was signed. Pompadour ignored...