talents, but with a
sort of sentiment which had not the grandeur of an aristocratic
ambition. She loved the king for himself, as the finest man in the
kingdom, as the person who appeared to her the most admirable.
She loved him sincerely, with a degree of sentimentalism, if
not with a profound passion. Her ideal had been on arriving at
the court to fascinate him, to keep him amused by a thousand
diversions suggested by art or intellect, to make him happy and
contented in a circle of ever-changing enchantments and pleasures.
A Watteau-like country, plays, comedies, pastorals in the shade,
a continual embarking for Cytherea, that would have been the
setting she preferred. But once she had set foot on the shifting
soil of the court, she could only realize her ideal imperfectly.
Naturally obliging and good-hearted, she had to face enmity open
and concealed, and to take the offensive to avoid her downfall.
Necessity drove her into politics, and to become a minister of
state. Madame de Pompadour can be considered as the last king's
mistress, deserving of the name. The race of the royal mistresses
can then be said, if not ended, to have been at least greatly
broken. And Madame de Pompadour remains in our eyes the last
in our history, and the most brilliant."

SAINTE-BEUVE.

INTRODUCTION

It is one of the oldest of truisms that truth is stranger than
fiction. The present volume is but another striking example in
point. The legend of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid palls
before the historic story of a certain Jeanne Poisson, an obscure
French girl who won a king's favor and wielded his sceptre for
twenty years. We do not hear anything further from the Beggar
Maid, after she became queen; but the famous Pompadour became
the most powerful figure of her day in all France, not excepting
the king himself.

These veritable _Memoirs_ of her reign are ascribed to her attendant,
Madame du Hausset, a woman of good family and, above all, of
good memory, who has here given us a faithful account of her
remarkable subject. Her opportunities for exact knowledge may
be gathered from her mistress's own words: "The king and I trust
you so completely that we look upon you as we might a cat or a
dog, and talk ahead with as much freedom as though you were not
there." And the critic, Sainte-Beuve, adds: "When the destiny of
a nation is in a woman's bedroom, the best place for the historian
is in the ante-chamber. Madame du Hausset se