Pompadour

Pompadour, Marquise de (Jeanne Antoinette Poisson), courtesan, was of humble origin, and was born in 1722. She married at the age of nineteen a M. d'Etioles, and her beauty and charming manners attracted one day the attention of the licentious Louis XV., whose favourite unstress she immediately became. She gained very rapidly a complete ascendency over that worthless monarch, and ruled both him and his kingdom. Her imperious and vindictive conduct and her tremendous influence were visible in the wholesale manner in which she doomed hundreds of people to life-long imprisonment for daring to object to her actions. She even heartlessly allowed those perfectly innocent of that mistake to languish many years in dungeons. In 1745 she was made a marchioness, and her shameless conduct in ministering to all the king's depraved tastes is a matter of history. In defiance of all etiquette, she persisted in spending her last hours at Versailles, and on her death-bed forced the king to carry out her instructions with regard to her favourites. The French Revolution has been not unnaturally considered the result of the corruption and tyranny of Louis XV.'s reign.