The year is 1745, and King Louis XV's bed is once again empty. Enter Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, a beautiful girl from the middle classes. As a child, a fortune teller had told young Jeanne's destiny: She would become the lover of a king and the most powerful woman in the land. Eventually connections, luck, and a little scheming pave her way to Versailles and into the King's arms.
All too soon, conniving politicians and hopeful beauties seek to replace the bourgeois interloper with a more suitable mistress. As Jeanne, now the Marquise de Pompadour, takes on her many rivals—including a lustful lady-in-waiting, a precocious fourteen-year-old prostitute, and even a cousin of the notorious Nesle sisters—she helps the king give himself over to a life of luxury and depravity. Around them, war rages, discontent grows, and France inches ever closer to the Revolution.
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"Using a voice as delicate as 18th-century porcelain and effervescent as champagne, Wiley renders de Pompadour with a somewhat naive yet giddy quality . . . "
— Library Journal
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Sally Christie is the author of The Sisters of Versailles and The Rivals of Versailles. She was born in England and grew up around the world, attending eight schools in three different languages. She spent most of her career working in international development and currently lives in Toronto.
Elizabeth Wiley, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a seasoned actor, dialect coach, and theater professor. In addition to her growing portfolio of audiobooks, her voice can be heard in The Idea of America, Colonial Williamsburg’s virtual learning curriculum; in Paul Meier’s e-textbook Speaking Shakespeare; and modeling US-English on one of the world’s top language-learning products.