Word: levron
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...then Pompadour had to be doubly on guard against being driven from favor by more lusty ladies -among them a curvaceous Celt with the improbable name of Louise O'Murphy who "looked like a naughty Rubens." The strain was terrific. "When in private she could remove her mask," Levron writes, "she was, at thirty-seven, already an elderly, exhausted and haggard woman who spat blood...
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...
Occasionally Levron seems to suffer from biographer's lens, a 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...
...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...