Nearly three centuries ago, the business of governing the world ran past a woman’s dressing table.
It’s the year 1748, and Europe has just emerged from a devastating continental war. Empires are being divided, borders redrawn. That December, when the grounds at Versailles were dark and dreary, an extraordinary line had formed inside the palace.
It wasn’t outside the king’s apartment. Nor his ministers’. For hours on end, courtiers, ambassadors, financiers and noblemen pressed themselves against the narrow staircase leading to the apartment of a woman who held no official government role — some carrying petitions, others rehearsing arguments.
Inside her chamber, sumptuously decorated in green silk and damask, Madame de Pompadour, who had recently become the king’s mistress, sat at her toilette — her dressing table — as servants applied her powder and rouge and tended to her cascading curls. “The other day, the crowd stretched all the way to the bottom of her staircase waiting for her to start getting ready,” France’s former secretary of state wrote in his diary on Dec. 28, 1748, according to material collected by leading Pompadour expert Susan Wager, an associate professor of art history at the University of New Hampshire and author of a forthcoming book about her. “Every important matter now passes through her,” wrote the nobleman, expressing dismay that ambassadors were no longer received in a council chamber, but were instead escorted straight to her dressing table.
A piece of furniture designed for a private ritual — the act of getting ready — had become one of Europe’s most influential stages.
