Excerpt from Madame De Pompadour: A Study in Temperament Dear reader, - I am not an historian, bring ing you unpublished documents on the Marquise de Pompadour. I am a portraitist fondly interested in my model, who, following illustrious predecessors, has tried to depict for you, after a woman's manner, the figure of a woman. In this pastel sketch what is to live again for you is the Parisian woman of the middle-class, the mistress and friend of the Kin g - beheld, not in her political capacity, but in her privacy as woman loving and beloved a Pompadour in something like undress, an artist-nature in a pretty fragile body - she who died as she had lived, in a Court gown, with a. 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.