Word: pompadour
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...epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was François Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien régime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense of rococo art published almost a century after the death of Boucher, "French 18th century...
...schizophrenic collapse. She spent the last two years of her life shuffling along the sidewalks of New York, imploring God to forgive her "wicked" life. She died at 43 after a stroke. "In the 18th century," wrote Augustin Thierry, "she would have played a great Pompadour role, with taste in small things and courage in big ones . . . She was born a hundred years too late." Or a hundred years too soon...
Adolf Hitler's mistress was a pudgy, middle-class blonde who gloomed more than she glittered. Yet her name will go down in history alongside such famous and glamorous kept women as Lola Montez, Madame de Pompadour, Nell Gwyn and the Du Barry. How did she manage to catch der Führer's eye and remain with him until their joint suicide in the Berlin Reich chancellery? Photographs from Eva Braun's personal album, published in the London Sunday Times magazine last week, give few new clues to her mysterious charms. The collection shows Eva riding...
...truffle has tantalized palates and minds for thousands of years. The ancient Greek Theophrastus believed truffles were a product of thunder. In the Middle Ages they were considered evil things grown from the spit of witches. Later they came to be prized as an aphrodisiac, and Madame de Pompadour fed them to Louis XV. Napoleon, who was having difficulty fathering children, begat his only legitimate son after eating a truffled turkey. He promoted a lieutenant to colonel for having given him the recipe. In 1825, Brillat-Savarin, the savant of haute cuisine, called truffles "the diamonds of gastronomy...
Some of the chosen eponyms are familiar: the sandwich was once an earl; the pompadour a king's mistress; sadism originated with the Marquis de Sade. Many more are likely to surprise: maud lin is the old vernacular form of (Mary) Magdalene, usually pictured weeping: Jules Leotard was a 19th century trapeze artist; mausoleum derives from the tomb of "the wily satrap" Mausolus, in Turkey; and tawdry comes from the cheap souvenirs sold at the shrine of a 7th century Anglo-Saxon princess who was called St. Audrey...