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Pompadour   /pˈɑmpədɔr/   Listen
Pompadour

verb
1.
Style women's hair in a pompadour.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Pompadour" Quotes from Famous Books



... times of trouble, giving to statesmen sound counsel, which, followed, has led to beneficial results; and, alas! they have, equally with men, been found capable of base intrigue. Cleopatra was fully on a par with Marc Antony, Madame de Pompadour ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster

... Eden, a pretty, gentle woman with a face of dreaming tragedy (it was she who had defended Rosalind outside the gate); Miss Valentina Gilchrist, a middle-aged woman who displayed a large grey pompadour above a rosy face with turned-back features which, when she was not excited, had an incredulous quizzical expression (Miss Gilchrist was the one who had said they had been led into a trap); Miss Ethel Farmer, fair, attenuated, scholastic, wearing pince-nez ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... none of the elegance even of that wretched King's depraved circles; and public decency was as much outraged by the three yachts which were prepared to carry over King George's mistresses and their suite,[70] when he visited Hanover, as by the empire of Madame de Pompadour. It must, independent of every other consideration, have been galling to Englishmen to behold, seated on their throne, a German, fifty-four years of age, who from that very circumstance, was little likely ever to boast, like Queen Anne, "of an English heart." "A hard fate," observes a writer of ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... Keep out, and keep away from her." And then the Doctor's patience slipped and his voice rose: "What do you want to give her the household bills for? Pay 'em yourself or let Laura send her checks!" The Doctor's tones were harsh, and with the amiable cast off his face his graying blond pompadour hair seemed to bristle militantly. The effect gave the Doctor a fighting face as he barked, "You can't afford it. You must stop it. It's no way to do. I didn't ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... to be choking him. The Pompadour was protected by a Derby of the Fried-Egg species. It was the kind that Joe Weber helped to keep in Public Remembrance. But in 1886 it was de Rigeur, au Fait, and ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... a kind of immense apron, down the front of my dress. Packed tight together, eh? It will be delightfully barbarous. And then twenty more or so for my hair. They go very well with powder; don't you think so?" And she turned to Rowland. "I am going en Pompadour." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... No. 3 is for calling and all entertainments where the bonnet stays on; it has a baby bang edge a trifle curled and a substantial cushion atop to hold the hat pins; while No. 4, the one she wore on our arrival, is an elaborate evening toupie with a pompadour rolling over on itself and drooping slightly over one eye while it melts into a butterfly bow and handful of puffs on the crown that in turn end in a ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... the station I drove at once to Villa Wahnfried—" "Villa Wahnfried!" echoed two voices in dismayed unison. "Yes, to Frau Cosima, and she directed me here." "She directed you here?" "Yes, why shouldn't she? Is there anything wrong in that?" asked the stately, high-nosed lady with the gray pompadour, beginning to peer about suspiciously. "Oh, no, mamma, but how did Frau Cosima know that I was here?" "I don't know, child," was the testy answer. "Come, get down and let me introduce you to my charming travelling ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... planting cabbages at Salona, than ruling the world at Byzantium. Another Emperor, Severus, declares that he has held every position in life from the lowest to the highest, and found no good in any. Look into the history of France, and see what the world gave to Madame de Pompadour at the last. She had sacrificed virtue and honour for the glitter of the court of Louis XV. And now in the latter days she tells us that she has no inclination for the things which once pleased her. Her magnificent house in Paris was refurnished ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton

... one that she never tried to analyze. When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,—gave him a sort of tense eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... an azotea where were tropical plants and a monkey. It was a bare, cheerless apartment, hot in the unshaded light of a tropical noonday. The tables were not alluring. The waiters were American negroes. A Filipino youth, dressed in a white suit, and wearing his black hair in a pompadour, was beating out "rag time" at ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... elderly women are not expected to go in low neck unless they wish to, so that the chaperon can wear a dress such as she would wear at a dinner—either a velvet or brocade, cut in Pompadour shape, with a profusion of beautiful lace. All her ornaments should match in character, and she should be as unlike her charge as possible. The young girls look best in light gossamer material, in tulle, crepe, or tarlatan, in pale light ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... to be "all there," and trust to finding out the routine of a New York shop-girl's life from one of themselves. She hoped the sardine would be engaged—nice, trim little sardine with smooth black pompadour, small white face, jewel-bright eyes, pugnacious nose, determined chin! A snappy yet ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... was that from the quiet and thoughtful Marquise de Lambert, who was admitted to have made half of the Academicians, to the clever but less scrupulous Mme. de Pompadour, who had to be reckoned with in every political change in Europe, women were everywhere the power behind the throne. No movement was carried through without them. "They form a kind of republic," said Montesquieu, "whose members, always active, aid and serve ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... penetrating discernment, measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown and the parlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my time. Under the roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de Pompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic disciples had cried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be cured without a great internal commotion; but woe to those who have to do with it; into such work the French go with no slack hand.' Rousseau, in a passage in the Confessions, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... Felicity had a very contemporary air. About everything was the recent look characteristic of the home of a lately married couple. The room looked as if it had been decorated the day before for a twentieth-century Madame de Pompadour. But, if the background was almost archaeological, the atmosphere was absolutely modern. In this ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... say that," chuckled Gladwin. "It would take a deal of this gold and silver junk to buy a Rembrandt or a Corot. There are a couple of Cellini medallions, though, just below that miniature of Madame de Pompadour that a good many collectors would sell their ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... Lee, has grown to look curiously like her husband. Her face has become longer, sharper, more aggressive. She wears her yellow hair in a high pompadour, and is bedecked with rings and chains and "beauty pins." Her tight, high-heeled shoes give her an awkward walk, and she is always more or less preoccupied with her clothes. As she sat at the table, she kept telling her youngest daughter to "be careful ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather

... on the same grim conditions to keep friends with himself." On the bench an enormous woman with a hat that looks like a schooner atop of a great pompadour wave and on the very same bench a mummied old Chinese as thin as a wafer. An aeroplane hums above and Stevenson's little boat looks envious. Where did Captain Montgomery of the sloop Portsmouth stand when he planted the flag in 1848? The Mission bell, so many miles to Dolores, ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... receiving her friends with her usual brilliant smile, her manner of high dignity and sweet cordiality. She was a majestic figure in spite of her short stature and increasing curves, for the majesty was within and her head above a flat back had a lofty poise. She wore her prematurely white hair in a tall pompadour, and this with the rich velvets she affected, ample and long, made her look like a French marquise of the eighteenth century, stepped down from the canvas. The effect was by no means accidental. Mrs. McLane's grandmother had been French and ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... I only want to say that Cheesehurst-by-the-Sea would be a nice place if a person could wear armor plate to avoid the mosquitoes. I have rubbed my complexion with peppermint, and I have worn smoke-sticks in my hair till I burned my pompadour, but the mosquitoes still look upon me as their meal ticket. I expect to insult everybody present and leave for home ...
— Skiddoo! • Hugh McHugh

... Reggimento. Melodramma comica. Carteggio di Madama la Marchesa di Pompadour, ossia raccolta di Lettere scritte della Medesima. Istruzioni di morale Condotta per le Figlie. Francesca di ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... handsome little minister, in his navy blue coat, white collar, and neatly bowed tie. His black eyes shone, and his black curls were brushed up in quite a ministerial pompadour, but threatened to tumble over at ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... the days of Pompadour and Du Barry, until modern American politics were invented, has a state been ruled from such a place as Number 7 in the Pelican House—familiarly known as the Throne Room. In this historic cabinet there ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the long face and the stiff white pompadour, who looked like a patent toothbrush, gave him his chance. The tall man happened to look out of the car window and see in an inlet a fleet of beached fishing boats, and he remarked on their ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... take family soup with me, and entertains me with anecdotes of his five and thirty years' imprisonment. How fertile is the mind of man, which can make the Bastille and dungeon of Vincennes yield interesting anecdotes! You know this was for making four verses on Madame de Pompadour. But I think you told me you did not know the verses. They ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... had married a woman who had been even finer than himself. And she was still fine, with her black hair dressed in a prominent pompadour, and her figure curbed by the tightness of her Sunday gown. Under her polished hair Mrs. Randall's face shone with a blond pallor. It had grown up gradually round her features, and they, becoming more and more insignificant, were now merged in its general expression of good will. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... bosom, and a serpentine figure, was obtained by him, the agent, for nothing. And so to this day the mythological goddess stands, with one foot elegantly lifted, above the tomb of Tihon Ivanovitch, and with a genuinely Pompadour simper, gazes at the calves and sheep, those invariable visitors of our village graveyards, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... of mature beauty—a gold net is drawn over her almost golden yellow hair, and her neck, arms, and hands are profusely covered with jewels. Her bodice of bright purple is trimmed with costly fur, and the robe is of azure velvet. In her hand she carries a sort of pompadour of brown leather, of the most elegant form and finish. Her eyes and mouth are not pleasing, notwithstanding their great beauty—in the mouth, particularly, one can discover ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... advanced by quick stages from red-faced confusion to purple mirth. It appeared that my presence was the ground for a heavy German joke in connection with the youngest of the aborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking aborigine with a doll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared and bristling pompadour and very small pig-eyes. The other aborigines clapped him on the back ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... parts of this ancient structure persisted in surviving. Only a few years ago the heavier timber still hanging together was called "The King's Wood-yard." But nothing now remains of it, and imagination only summons the haunting spirit of this creature of La Pompadour, whose mischievous influence lost Louis XV his colonial empire, and whose infamies sealed the fate of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... Treron Pompadoura. The Pompadour pigeon. "The Prince of Canino has shown that this is a totally distinct bird from Tr. flavogularis, with which it was confounded: it is much smaller, with the quantity of maroon colour on the mantle greatly reduced."—Paper by Mr. BLYTH, Mag. ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... from their novelty and ingenuity, soon became fashionable at the supper-parties and in the coffee- houses of Paris, and were espoused by every gay marquis and every facetious abbe who was admitted to see Madame de Pompadour's hair curled and powdered. It was not, however, to any political theory that the strange coalition between France and Austria owed its origin. The real motive which induced the great continental powers to forget their old animosities and their old state maxims was personal aversion to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the drawing-room fire, impatiently waiting the hour of dinner, when Lady Maclaughlan and her three friends entered. The masculine habiliments of the morning had been exchanged for a more feminine costume. She was now arrayed in a pompadour satin negligee, and petticoat trimmed with Brussels lace. A high starched handkerchief formed a complete breast work, on which, amid a large bouquet of truly artificial roses, reposed a miniature of Sir Sampson, a la militaire. A small fly ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... appearance, and Austria will be compelled to acknowledge that France maintains the best understanding with all the European powers, and that she is not the less respected because the Marquise de Pompadour is ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... people would cease to want to read of wickedness, and then Frederick would need supporting—on helping the poor. The parish flourished because, to take a handful at random, of the ill-behavior of the ladies Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l'Enclos, and even of learned Maintenon. The poor were the filter through which the money was passed, to come out, Mrs. Arbuthnot hoped, purified. She could do no more. She had tried in days gone ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... Horace Mann, Oct. 28.-Projected trip to Florence.. Madame de Brionne. Lady Coventry at Paris. Duke Hamilton and his Duchess. Anecdotes. Parisian indecorums. Madame Pompadour's husband. Trait of Louis the Fifteenth. Epigram on the quarrel of the Pretender and his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... it. I know that a few days ago the French ambassador delivered to him a most affectionate missive from his friend the Marquise de Pompadour; and I know too that yesterday he replied to it in a similar strain: It is his fixed idea, and that of La Pompadour also, to drive Austria into a new line of policy, by making her the ally ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... Louis the Fifteenth, or it may have been Madame de Pompadour, who said, "After me the deluge;" but whichever it was, very much that thought was in Mr. Buchanan's mind in 1861 as the time for his exit from the White House approached. At the North there had been a political ground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by the Gulf States, yawned ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... a pompadour like a penwiper, round eyes, and a wide smile. He trotted out to Lana in the reception-room and gave her comradely greeting. "Any other night but this, Lana Corson, and I'd have been up to your house to pat Juba ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... in front of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono, curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance, respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to which I had written ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... though she would gladly have been useful and necessary to him. She reckoned on the charms of habit to keep him by her; she was always ready to open her salons and display the luxury of her dinners and suppers for his friends, and to further his projects. She desired to be for him what Madame de Pompadour was to Louis XV. All actresses envied Florine's position, and some ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... you 've seen a donkey and a bird. Not on your life! Just glance back, if you dare. The zebra chews, the nylghau has n't stirred; But something 's happened, Heaven knows what or where, To freeze your scalp and pompadour your hair. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... the shifting soil of the court, she could only realize her ideal imperfectly. Naturally obliging and good-hearted, she had to face enmity open and concealed, and to take the offensive to avoid her downfall. Necessity drove her into politics, and to become a minister of state. Madame de Pompadour can be considered as the last king's mistress, deserving of the name. The race of the royal mistresses can then be said, if not ended, to have been at least greatly broken. And Madame de Pompadour remains in our eyes the last in our history, and the ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... and no respecter of persons; and a woman may forgive an injury, but never a scornful gibe. It is this that has brought both France and Russia on him. Madame Pompadour, who is all powerful, hates Frederick for having made disrespectful remarks concerning her. The Empress of Russia detests him, for the same reason. She of Austria has a better cause, for she has ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... is exquisite, George! I have seen nothing like her in my time," lisped a superb coxcomb, attired in a splendid civilian's suit of Pompadour and silver, to a young cornet of the Life Guard who ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... two of the largest hotels in New York, and half a dozen enormous winter and summer places, looked no more like a boniface than he did like a little girl on communion Sunday. He was a small, wispy, waspish fellow with a violently upright, raging pompadour, a mustache which, in spite of careful attempts at waxing, persisted in sticking straight forward, and a sharp hard nose which had apparently been tempered to a ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester

... descriptions given by Roman historians and have found the descriptions generously fanciful: in the portraits we do not see the countenance of a Venus, delicate, gracious, smiling, nor even the fine and sensuous beauty of a Marquise de Pompadour, but a face fleshy and, as the French would say, bouffie; the nose, a powerful aquiline; the face of a woman on in years, ambitious, imperious, one which recalls that of Maria Theresa. It will be said that judgments as to beauty are personal; that Antony, who saw ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... nauseous self-abasement, by Voltaire of Louis XV., so little like Trajan in character—is monumental. The occasion was the production of a piece of Voltaire's written at the instance of Louis XV.'s mistress, the infamous Madame de Pompadour. The king, for answer, simply gorgonized the poet with a ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... open letters before her, and a sheet of foolscap scrawled over with names. She had been planning her campaign for the season—so many dinners, so many dances, alternate Thursdays in May and June; and a juvenile fancy ball, at which a Pompadour of seven years of age could lead off the Lancers with a Charles the Twelfth of ten, with an eight-year-old Mephistopheles and a six-year-old ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... about this domesticating of their art? We are not told of the wry face they made when, with ideals in their souls, they were set to compose chair-seats for the Pompadour. Her preference was for Boucher. Perhaps his revenge showed itself by treating the bourgeoise courtisane to a bit of coarseness now and then, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous despotism of the back stairs,—and you have some faint picture of the government of Rome under some of the twelve Caesars. What the barber Olivier le Diable was under Louis XI., what Mesdames du Barri and Pompadour were under Louis XV., what the infamous Earl of Somerset was under James I., what George Villiers became under Charles I., will furnish us with a faint analogy of the far more exaggerated and detestable position held by the freedman Glabrio under Domitian, by ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... man first attracted attention. The delegates had deadlocked over a discussion in regard to a scheme for insuring crops against hailstorms in Saskatchewan, half of them favoring it and half opposing it. The young homesteader from Beaverdale got up, ran his fingers through his pompadour and outlined the possibilities of co-operative insurance which would apply only to municipalities where a majority of the farmers favored the idea. He talked so convincingly and sanely that the convention elected ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... perhaps there is not another piece of ground in the world that I could take so much pleasure to observe." Then, though with difficulty, he obtained the leave of the pipe-clay Duke to go to Paris. There he saw the hollow grandeur of the decaying monarchy and the immoral glories of Pompadour. "I was yesterday at Versailles, a cold spectator of what we commonly call splendour and magnificence. A multitude of men and women were assembled to bow and pay their compliments in the most submissive manner to a creature of their own species." He went into the great world, to which he gains ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... in the tertiary russet; enters subordinately into the two other tertiaries, citrine and olive; goes largely into the composition of the various hues and shades of the semi-neutral marrone or chocolate, and its relations, puce, murrey, morelle, mordore, pompadour, &c.; and is more or less present in browns, grays, and all broken colours. It is likewise the second power in harmonizing and contrasting other colours, as well as in compounding black and all other neutrals, into which it enters in the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... of art began, as I have said, at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and the Du Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of the toilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to have enjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming; he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... her hair in the prevailing pompadour fashion, which was highly becoming; and the kimona imparted to her face a soft rose color. She was a pretty rose of a woman, and he leaned against the newel and regarded her ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... du Hausset, chamber-woman to Madame du Pompadour, there are some amusing anecdotes of this personage. Very soon after his arrival in Paris, he had the entree of her dressing-room; a favour only granted to the most powerful lords at the court of her royal lover. Madame was fond of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... "Well we may wonder," said he; "search the wide world over! But reely and truly you've come to the wrong 'ouse this time. Here, stand to one side!" he commanded, as a lady in the costume of La Pompadour, followed by an Old English Gentleman with an anachronistic Hebrew nose, swept past me into the hall. He bowed deferentially while he mastered their names, "Mr. and Mrs. Levi-Levy!" he cried, and a second footman came forward to escort them up the stairs. To convince myself that this was ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... he was bombarded with anonymous letters and warnings, calling Lola by every evil name that occurred to the writers. She was La Pompadour and the Sempronia of Sallust in one, a "voluptuous woman," and a "flame of desire." There were also tearful protests from the higher clergy, who, headed by Archbishop Diepenbrock, were positive that the "dancing woman" was an emissary of Satan (sometimes they said of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... order to explain the situation to their teacher and evince her personal interest. Miss Burke was a pretty girl two or three years younger than herself. She looked capable and attractive; a little coquettish, too, for her smile was arch, and her pompadour had that fluffy fulness which girls who like to be admired nowadays are too apt to affect. She was just the sort of girl whom a man might fall desperately in love with, and it occurred to Mary, as they conversed, that ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... voyage, a tropic isle, The hush of the forest, the ocean blue, A lament for all that is false and vile, A paean for all that is good and true. Pompadour's fan, or Louis's queue, Mournful or merry, right or wrong. Subjects, you'll find, are not so few, But love is excluded ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles

... beside him as a boy removed the tire. It was a solemn occasion. They stood there on the pavement, thoughtful, intently watching the operation. Hawkins was coatless; he had pink elastics holding up his sleeves and his hair stood up in a solemn pompadour and his high stiff collar had a spot of ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... who was a blonde, with an exaggerated pompadour fastened with aggressive celluloid pins, smiled pertly. "Reckon I h'ain't no more use for men than you hev for women," said she, as she poured the coffee. All that could be seen of her behind the counter ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

... of the element of the marvellous with which Voltaire had surrounded it. He called to his aid the testimony of the Duc de Choiseul, who, having in vain attempted to worm the secret of the Iron Mask out of Louis XV, begged Madame de Pompadour to try her hand, and was told by her that the prisoner was the minister of an Italian prince. At the same time that Dutens wrote, "There is no fact in history better established than the fact that the Man in the Iron Mask was a minister of the Duke of Mantua who was carried off from Turin," ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Italy. It is true that no great material advantage can result from it; but L. N. is sufficiently well acquainted with France to know that the glitter of such a course would probably content her. All this would be easy to understand if Maria Theresa reigned at Vienna, Frederic at Berlin, and Mme. de Pompadour at Versailles; in a word, if we were in the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century. But being, as we are, in the nineteenth century, the designs which are ascribed to the Emperor are to be condemned ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton

... that are created in a month with a made soil and transplanted shrubs, while the grass seems as if it must be made to grow by some chemical process. He admired not only the decoration, the gilding, the carving, in the most expensive Pompadour style, as it is called, and the magnificent brocades, all of which any enriched tradesman could have procured for money; but he also noted such treasures as only princes can select and find, can pay for and give away; two pictures by Greuze, two by Watteau, two heads by Vandyck, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... sea," quickly interposed the professor, the fingers of one hand vigorously stirring his gray pompadour, while the other was lifted in a deprecatory manner. "At sea, literally as well as metaphorically, my dear Bruno; for, correctly speaking, the ocean alone can give ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.

... female favorite. The English shopkeeper's wife does not vote, but it is for her interest that the politician canvasses by the coarsest flattery. France suffers no woman on her throne, but her proud nobles kiss the dust at the feet of Pompadour and Dubarry; for such flare in the lighted foreground where a Roland would modestly aid in the closet. Spain (that same Spain which sang of Ximena and the Lady Teresa) shuts up her women in the care of duennas, and allows them no book but the breviary; but the ruin follows ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... were warmly received at the court, and the boy is said to have expressed his surprise when Mme. Pompadour refused to kiss him, saying: "Who is she, that she will not kiss me? Have I not been kissed by the queen?" In London his improvisations and piano sonatas excited the greatest admiration. Here he also ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... a favorite with Mme. Pompadour, of whom he made a portrait statue. She employed him to do many works for her. His best monument in Paris is that of the Comte d'Harcourt, in ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... a supreme disgust for the man who at the hustings has no opinion beyond or above the clamour round him. How such a fellow would have kissed the ground before a Pompadour, or waited for hours in a Buckingham's antechamber, only to catch the faintest beam of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... off his headdress and handed it to one of the women who came running to help him. Underneath, his hair was not like an Indian's at all—at least, not like the Indians whose pictures the Bunker children had seen. Black Bear's hair was cut pompadour, and if it had not been for the awful stripes across his face he would not have looked bad. Even Rose admitted this, in a whisper, to ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope

... bright, her skin sallow, she smiled gravely, and her calmness and her smile reminded Sir Basil a little of Imogen; perhaps they were racial. She was dressed in a simple gray cotton frock with neat lawn collar and cuffs, and her hair was raised in a lustrous "pompadour," a wide comb traversing it behind and combs at the sides of her head upholding it in front. Toward Sir Basil she behaved with gracious stateliness of demeanor, so that he wondered anew at the anomalies of a country of ideals where a young person so well-appearing should ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... frequently engages in an unequal contest with his victims. The great prince treated all his political opponents in this way, and aroused deadly enemies against himself. He joked at the table, and put in circulation stinging verses and pamphlets about Madame de Pompadour in France and the Empresses Elizabeth and Maria Theresa. Similarly, he sometimes caressed, sometimes scolded and scratched his poetical ideal, Voltaire; but he also proceeded in this way with people whom he really esteemed highly, in whom he put the greatest ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... days, in which Madame de Pompadour reigned in France, and Madame Pean in Quebec, rings and public robbery flourished in Canada; but among high officials, all were not corrupt. There were some memorable exceptions. One of these exceptions was the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... his successor, to abstain from war. We are told that the obedient legatee accepted the caution as his motto, and had it hung upon his bedroom wall, where it served him as an excellent excuse for doing nothing at all. His government was notoriously in the hands of his mistresses, Pompadour and the others, and their misrule was to the full as costly to France as the wars of the preceding age. They drained the country quite as deeply of its resources and renown; they angered and insulted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... was a young man of under forty years. He looked like a fox. He had red eyes, alert and cunning, a long, sharp-pointed nose, a pointed red beard, and red eyebrows that slanted upward. His hair, standing erect in a pompadour, and his uplifted eyebrows gave him the watchful look of the fox when he hears suddenly the hound baying in pursuit. But no one had ever successfully pursued Vance. No one had ever driven him into a corner from which, either pleasantly, or with raging indignation, he ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis

... word "pompedore" or Pompadour was in constant use in that day. We read of pompedore shoes, laces, capes, aprons, sacques, stockings, ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... possibility of our latter-day literature acquiring a pedigree and an incrusted fragrance such as belong to works, however dull and worthless in themselves, from the libraries of Grolier, Maioli, De Thou, Peiresc, or Pompadour. There is a sort of sensation of awe in taking up these volumes, as if they had passed through some holy ordeal, as if they had been canonised. It is not the piece of dressed leather with its decorative adjuncts ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... chief and a graduate of Carlisle was entitled, applied for work to the President of the Elliott Bay National Bank, it was not an act of such presumption as some might suppose. No one, to be sure, when he saw the high cheek-bones, wiry black hair brushed pompadour, dull brown eyes, and copper complexion, could possibly have been deceived by Johnny's well-cut clothes, clean linen, and good English. Nor did Johnny affect these things as a disguise or as signifying that, in adopting the apparel and speech of the white man, he had renounced ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... that could be seen, and he had a ring on his finger, and when he came to drink his tea at the Breadland, he brought no hat on his head, but a droll cockit thing under his arm, which, he said, was after the manner of the courtiers at the petty suppers of one Madam Pompadour, who was at that time the concubine ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... [311] "The Pompadour pigeon is the species, which, by carrying the fruit of the cinnamon to different places, is a great disseminator of this valuable tree."—See ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... collections of china and miniatures; and she talks about them all just like a book, and calls them simple little things, and you would never have guessed they cost thousands, and that she had not been used to them always, until she showed us a beautiful enamel of Madame de Pompadour, and called it the Princesse de Lamballe, and said so sympathetically that it was quite too melancholy to think she had been hacked to pieces in the Revolution; only perhaps it served her right for saying ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... the Gaston de Paris fought in all its details against the idea of shipboard life, the gilt and scrolls of the yacht decorator, the mirrors, and all the rest of his abominations were not to be found here, panels by Chardin painted for Madame de Pompadour occupied the walls, the main lamp, a flying dragon by Benvenuto Cellini, clutching in its claws a globe of fire, had, for satellites, four torch bearers of bronze by Claus, a library, writing and smoking room, combined, opened from the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... acceptance of that of Austria, the tempting bait of Frederick's Rhenish provinces. But Louis XV at first refused an Austrian alliance: it would be a departure from the traditional French policy of opposing the Habsburgs. Kaunitz then appealed to the king's mistress, the ambitious Madame de Pompadour, who, like the Tsarina Elizabeth, had had plenty of occasions for taking offense at the witty verses of the Prussian monarch: the favor of the Pompadour was won, and France entered the league ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... her three friends in triumph into my study; and, in truth, the little room seemed to be perfectly transformed by their brightness. My honest, nice, lovable little Yankee-fireside girls were, to be sure, got up in a style that would have done credit to Madame Pompadour, or any of the most questionable characters of the time of Louis XIV. or XV. They were frizzled and powdered, and built up in elaborate devices; they wore on their hair flowers, gems, streamers, tinklers, humming-birds, butterflies, South American beetles, beads, bugles, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... securing a preponderance of court favor for the plotters. Like all the other mistresses who had successfully reigned in the French courts, Madame du Barri had a party of adherents who hoped to rise by her patronage. The Duc de Choiseul himself had owed his promotion to her predecessor, Madame de Pompadour, and those who hoped to supplant him saw in a similar influence the best prospect of attaining their end. One of the least respectable of the French nobles was the Duc d'Aiguillon. As Governor of Brittany, he had behaved ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... from the hotel. He is a portly man of forty-five, but rather soldierly than fat. His hair, pompadour, is reddish blond, beginning to turn gray, like his mustache and large full beard; the latter somewhat "Henry IV." and slightly forked at bottom. His dress produces the effect rather of carelessness ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson

... to 1787, Chevalier, declared, obviously on the evidence of tradition, that all the Mask's furniture and clothes were destroyed at his death, lest they might yield a clue to his identity. Louis XV. is said to have told Madame de Pompadour that the Mask was 'the minister of an Italian prince.' Louis XVI. told Marie Antoinette (according to Madame de Campan) that the Mask was a Mantuan intriguer, the same person as Louis XV. indicated. Perhaps he ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... a marvel of dexterity. After a while, the journalist is apt to find that it is the perfect theme which proves to be the hardest to treat adequately. Clothe a broomstick with fancies, even of the flimsiest tissue paper, and you get something more or less like a fairy-king's sceptre; but take the Pompadour's fan, or the haunting effect of twilight over the meadows, and all you can do in words seems but to hide its original beauties. We know that Mr. Austin Dobson was able to add graceful wreaths even to the fan of the Pompadour, and that another writer is able to impart to the misty twilight ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... Fleming and Clarice Strozzi and present them without rivals to the king. The king fell in love with Miss Fleming, by whom he had a natural son, Henri de Valois, Comte d'Angouleme, grand-prior of France. But the power and influence of Diane were not shaken. Like Madame de Pompadour with Louis XV., the Duchesse de Valentinois forgave all. But what sort of love did this attempt show in Catherine? Was it love to her husband or love of ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... again. One could not embarrass Lizzie long. But she kept her eyes on the stranger, and let them wander disapprovingly over her apparel in a pointed way as she took out the long hat-pins from the cumbersome hat she wore and adjusted her ponderous pompadour. ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill

... a space was clear'd on the floor, And she walk'd the Minuet de la Cour, With all the pomp of a Pompadour, But although she began andante, Conceive the faces of all the Rout, When she finished off with a whirligig bout, And the Precious Leg stuck stiffly out Like ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... gaze shifted to a colossal Rubens "Rape of the Sabines"; her face lighted for an instant when her fingers in groping closed upon a cobwebby golden net, scintillating with cunningly wrought jeweled insects caught in the meshes, which had once graced the all-powerful head of Pompadour. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... one of the drummers, who, according to ancient custom, attend with their thundering gratulations the day after a wedding. A performer on the bass viol, and a herd of butchers armed with marrow-bones and cleavers, form an English concert. (Madame Pompadour, in her remarks on the English taste for music, says, they are invariably fond of every thing that is full in the mouth.) A cripple with the ballad of Jesse, or the Happy Pair, represents a man known by ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... the Empress of Germany formed a defensive alliance. The Cotillon Coalition of the Seven Years' War, formed for the destruction of Frederic II., and the parties to which were the Czarina Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, and Madame de Pompadour,—a drunkard, a prude, and a harlot,—brought Russia famously forward in Europe. In the Eighty-Seventh Letter of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, published a century ago, are some very just and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... ceremonious character of this dance is preserved together with its old fashioned, naive grace and charm. It is quite possible while playing it to see the dancers at a French court ball or in the ballroom of some chateau, the women, beauties of their day, in high pompadour with puffs and curls powdered white, with petites mouches, little moon and star-shaped beauty spots, on their faces; square cut bodices, lace stomachers, paniers over brocaded skirts with lace panels; feet encased in high heel satin slippers with jewelled buckles; ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... given them, and the concerts in the French capital brought the Mozarts a substantial sum and they were received very kindly in a visit to the Court of Versailles; of which visit little Nannerl said later, that her only recollection was of the Marquise de Pompadour standing Wolfgang on a table, that he wanted to kiss her, and when she drew back, he ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... ornamented with plaques of the beautiful and choice pate tendre, the delicacy of which was admirably adapted to enrich the light and frivolous furnishing of the dainty boudoir of a Madame du Barri or a Madame Pompadour. ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... daughter of the comte de Plelo, coupled with his connexion with the Richelieu family, gave, him an important place at court. He was a member of the so-called parti devot, the faction opposed to Madame de Pompadour, to the Jansenists and to the parlement, and his hostility to the new ideas drew upon him the anger of the pamphleteers. In 1753 he was appointed commandant (governor) of Brittany and soon became unpopular in that province, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... POMPADOUR, Madame, coiffeur, Queen of France. Said to have been a peach. Was a great friend of Louis XV, and helped make the dances at Versailles a success. Ambition: Plenty of hair. Recreation: Versailles. Address: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous

... see coming in Beau Brummell of the last century without his cloak; Aaron Burr, without the letters that to old age he showed in pride, to prove his early wicked gallantries; and Absalom without his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her titles; and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall Street, when that was the centre of fashion, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... up for they all knew the answers to Steve's simple, threadbare riddles. "The answer is I," he said, running a hand over his bristling pompadour. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... reign; after having exhausted everything? Every pleasure that Dubois could invent for his hot youth, or cunning Lebel could minister to his old age, was flat and stale; used up to the very dregs; every shilling in the national purse had been squeezed out, by Pompadour and Du Barri and such brilliant ministers of state. He had found out the vanity of pleasure, as his ancestor had discovered the vanity of glory: indeed, it was high time that he should die. And die he did; and round his tomb, as round ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... be mentioned with the delicacy that befits the topic. Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. It is true that Isabelle d'Este, and Madame de Pompadour, and Madame de Maintenon, were collectors; and, doubtless, there are other brilliant exceptions to a general rule. But, broadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don't understand them; second, they ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... XV. was set up in the Place to which it gave its name (where the Luxor column now stands, in the Place de la Concorde) amidst the jeers and insults of the mob, who declared it would never be got to pass the hotel of Madame de Pompadour. How much or how little of all this touched Gibbon, we do not know. We do know one thing, that his English clothes were unfashionable and looked very foreign, the French being "excessively long-waisted." Doubtless his scanty purse could not afford a new outfit, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... giving a loud, harsh laugh, and shaking her hair—the huge pompadour in front, the pug behind. "Well, go ahead. And I'll report you—and ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates

... crown people's loves; A magnificent bride-cake comes home from the baker. And lastly appears, from the German Long Acre, That shaft which, the sharpest in all Cupid's quiver is, A plumb-color'd coach, and rich Pompadour liveries, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... every quarter of Europe, living by his wits as journalist, doctor, mesmerist, and diplomat; effected an entrance to many high social circles and was presented to Catharine of Russia, Louis XV, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Madame de Pompadour; arrested in Venice as a spy in 1755, imprisoned and escaped; afterward honored by Italian princes and decorated by the Pope; became librarian to Count Waldstein in Bohemia in his fifty-seventh year; his "Memoirs" notable as a picture of manners and morals at ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... down on one knee beside the cot and tried to take her hand, but she jerked it away. "I've tried wearing my hair that way, and it—it isn't becoming, to say the least. I don't mind having it wet and brushed back in a pompadour, if you insist, but I certainly do ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... clever enough; and, of course, everybody was constrained in the presence of Madame de la Baudraye, who produced a sort of terror among the woman-folk. As they admired a carpet of Indian shawl-pattern in the La Baudraye drawing-room, a Pompadour writing-table carved and gilt, brocade window curtains, and a Japanese bowl full of flowers on the round table among a selection of the newest books; when they heard the fair Dinah playing at sight, without making the smallest demur ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... ruffled-lace sleeves, but revealed in all their delicate charm by the close-fitting plain dark net. And above them rose the head of such unsuspected loveliness of contour, which rats and puffs and pompadour had once deformed grotesquely, but which the wonderful new hair-dressing accentuated in a transfiguring degree. The poise of Mary Alice's head, the carriage of her shoulders, were fine. But she had never known, before, that those were big points ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin

... a lily upon its stalk; her shoulders were sloping and beautifully moulded, notwithstanding her lack of embonpoint, for in those days she was as slight as a reed. A profusion of fair hair—which she wore turned back from the face in the graceful style known as "a la Pompadour," but speedily to be rechristened "a l'Imperatrice"—and a hand and foot of truly royal beauty completed an ensemble of charms that were well calculated to drive poor masculine humanity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... the seals, as a reward for his industry and skill in providing victims for the royal seraglio at Versailles.[82] The man who had ventured to use his mind, was thrown into the dungeon at Vincennes by the man who played spy and pander for the Pompadour. The official record of a dialogue between Berryer and Denis Diderot, "of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion," is a singular piece of reading, if we remember that the prisoner's answers were made, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... from me?" Mrs. Feinermann gasped. Her hat was awry, and what had once been a modish pompadour was toppled to one side and shed hairpins with every palsied nod of her head. "I ain't done nothing!" ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass

... of the location of the porcelain works in Sevres, France, and what the process is of making those beautiful things which come from there? How is the name of the town pronounced? Can you tell me anything of the history of Mme. Pompadour? Who was the Dauphin? Did you learn anything of Louis XV whilst in France? What are ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... cantering along the trail, and I saw him first. He was leading the shaggiest, piebaldest, pottest-tummied, craziest-looking little cayuse that ever wore a bridle. I gave one look at his tawny-colored forelock, which stood pompadour-style about his ears, and shouted out "Paderewski!" Dinky-Dunk came and stood beside me and laughed. He said that cayuse did look like Paderewski, but the youth of the fiery locks blushingly explained that his present name was "Jail-Bird," ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... Mirrors at Versailles had seen many astonishing sights in the centuries gone by; and doubtless that night the shades of Richelieu, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Marie Theresa, Madam Pompadour, looked down on one of the strangest incidents in all history, a German Emperor receiving his crown in the very palace of the old French kings, who in their turn, had waged some twenty hard wars upon Germany, and more than once ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... romance of love, intrigue, and adventure in the time of Louis XV. and Mme. de Pompadour, when the French colonies were making their great struggle to retain for an ungrateful court the fairest jewels in the ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... no heads, he succeeded in vanquishing the whole of France, and trained Louis XIV., who completed Richelieu's work by strangling the nobility with gilded cords in the grand Seraglio of Versailles. Madame de Pompadour dead, Choiseul fell! ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... notebook in hand, looking about him in a loftily curious way. He was a small, slightly built youth, sallow of complexion and insignificant of feature, with pale hair brushed up into an exaggerated pompadour, and a neat little moustache. In contrast to Dr. Grayson's heroic proportions he looked like a Vest Pocket Edition alongside ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey

... that lady, happening upon the sketch later, had dealt with Fanny in a manner seemingly unwarranted. In the same way it was not only the exterior likeness of the man which she was catching now—the pompadour that stood stiffly perpendicular like a brush; the square, yellow peasant teeth; the strong, slender hands and wrists; the stocky figure; the high cheek bones; the square-toed, foreign-looking shoes and the trousers too wide at the instep to have been cut ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber



Words linked to "Pompadour" :   hairdo, coif, coiffure, hair style, hairstyle, marchioness, style, marquise



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