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Sunday 14 September 2014

Madame de Pompadour

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764), was a member of the French court and  the official chief mistress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death.

She was presented to the royal court by a cousin of the King, the Princess of Conti.

A fully rounded hair style, the Pompadour, in which the hair is swept straight up from the forehead to a high, turned-back roll, for women, or simply brushed up from the forehead, for men is named after her.

Versailles sent out fashion dolls ever five years or so to other European courts with miniature versions of Madame Pompadour's latest wardrobe so that women such as the Russian Czar Catherine the Great could get their dressmakers to copy them

Although they had ceased being lovers after 1750, they remained friends, and Louis XV was devoted to her until her death from tuberculosis in 1764 at the age of forty-two.

Her importance was such that she was approached in 1755 by Wenzel Anton Graf Kaunitz, a prominent Austrian diplomat, asking her to intervene in the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Versailles. This was the beginning of the Diplomatic Revolution, which saw France allied to her former enemy Austria.

Source Wikipedia

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