beauty; the brow is lofty and severe; the lips, slightly compressed, express at the same time decision and irony; the eyes are of a most vivid brilliancy, and the nose is perfection itself:  in short, there reigns throughout every lineament of this most striking countenance an air of nobility, and even of dignity, which qualifies in some measure the accounts left us by history of the share she bore in the petits soupers of Versailles, the masked balls of the Hotel de Ville, and the thousand other orgies got up for the entertainment of the most dissolute monarch of (at that period) one of the most dissolute courts of Europe.

The history of Madame de Pompadour is not generally known in all its particulars, though much has been written of her by persons of every shade of opinion.  Some have exalted her virtues, while others have multiplied her crimes.  Both parties are right, and both wrong.  A courtier, and a man seeking to be revenged, are not historians when they write.  With a little patience, and by a careful study of the writers of the eighteenth century, we are enabled to seize here and there a faithful trait of this extraordinary, yet most fascinating woman, and by diligently sifting conflicting opinions arrive at something approaching the truth.  That Madame de Pompadour was a woman endowed with great talents, many virtues, and as many vices, is not to be denied; that she employed those talents in general for her country’s good we think is equally true, though many writers have unjustly contended that all the defeats and reverses of France are to be traced to the influence exercised by her over the mind of Louis XV.  Beyond a doubt the ruling passion of her heart was ambition, and yet even this passion, which according to many writers of her day was boundless, she kept so skillfully concealed from all her intimates, that not one of the many courtiers, philosophers, and men of letters, who thronged her antechambers—­with the exception, perhaps, of the Abbe de Bernis, of whom more anon—­was ever enabled to discover the secrets of that heart, which, in the words of a writer of the time, “she ever kept closely hidden beneath an eternal smile.”

Madame de Pompadour was born in Paris in the year 1720.  She herself always said, in 1722.  We are told that Poisson, her father, at least her mother’s husband, was employed in the commissariat department of the French army:  some historians affirm that her father was a butcher of the Invalides, who was condemned to be hung; according to Voltaire she was the daughter of a farmer of the Ferte-sous-Jouarre.  But this is of slight consequence, as her true father was the Fermier-general, Lenorman de Tourneheim.  This individual having taken a fancy to Poisson’s daughter when she was quite an infant, took her to his house, and brought her up as his own child.  Having from her earliest years displayed quite passion for music and drawing, the first masters of the day were engaged by Lenorman de Tourneheim for his adopted