The Confidantes Of A King Madame De Pompadour PDF Download

Excerpt from Madame De Pompadour The life of a left-handed queen is always invested with a certain degree of interest, for it is safe to assume that, in order to arouse something more than an ephemeral passion in the heart of a monarch, a woman must have been the possessor of exceptional qualities. But in all the long roll of reines de la main gauche it is open to question whether there is one whose career affords anything approaching the attraction for the student of history or for the general reader as does that of the subject of the present volume. For Madame de Pompadour was no ordinary king's mistress; she was a great political force. She made and unmade ministers, she selected ambassadors, she appointed generals, she conferred pensions and places. Upon her rests the responsibility for that sudden change in the traditional policy of France towards the House of Hapsburg which enabled the vindictive Maria Theresa to fan the ashes of the War of the Austrian Succession into the devouring flame which ravaged Europe for seven long years; and to her influence must be ascribed, in a great measure, the suppression of the Jesuits in France. Nor was her activity by any means confined to politics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.