Memoirs of the Courts of Louis XV and XVI. — Complete: Being Secret Memoirs of Madame Du Hausset, Lady's Maid to Madame De Pompadour, and of the Princess Lamballe

Madame du Hausset heard things no courtier was meant to hear. As lady's maid to Madame de Pompadour, the most powerful woman in France besides the queen, she moved through the private chambers of Versailles where history was made not in councils of war but in whispered conversations between lovers, rivals, and ministers. These are her secret memoirs, encouraged by a friend to commit her observations to paper, she recorded what she witnessed behind doors that remained closed to ambassadors and historians alike. She writes of Louis XV and his legendary weariness, of Pompadour's calculated ascent and gradual decline, of the young dauphin and his Austrian bride who would one day become king and queen of a France that no longer existed by the time ink met paper. Three voices inhabit these pages: Du Hausset's own, the Princess Lamballe's, and an unknown English girl. Together they offer the view from below the glittering surface, a court that believed itself eternal, recorded by those who served it. The French Revolution would swallow everything these pages describe within decades. These memoirs survive as an intimate, inadvertent elegy for a world that burned.