Free True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth Page B

take a stroll down one of the loveliest streets in the world, a street whose keynote is femininity.
    Madame de Pompadour loved beautiful things – music, ideas, clothes, paintings, household objects. A gifted, middle-class, sensible
Parisienne
, she would surely have become a salonnière had destiny not stepped in. When she was a little girl a fortune-teller told her she would be the great love of a king: teasingly, her family nicknamed her
Reinette
. The dream, remarkably, came true. King Louis XV fell in love with the charming
bourgeoise
and swept her off to Versailles. Together they pursued their shared passion – the art of graceful living.
    La Pompadour became the tastemaker of her age. Hers was perhaps the only time in history that a young woman presided over a major art movement – the rococo – with unashamed femininity as its keynote. Like François Boucher’s rosy breasts and bottoms, it was light, lavish and shamelessly decorative. This was not grand or monumental art, it was charming and domestic, art embedded in the details of everyday life.
    A hundred years after Pompadour’s death, the Goncourt brothers, journalists and critics, described it this way:
    When Louis XV succeeded Louis XIV, when a gay, amorous society emerged from a ceremonious one, and when, in the more human atmosphere of the new court, the stature of persons and things diminished, the prevailing artistic ideal remained factitious and conventional but it was an ideal that had descended from the majestic to the charming. There was everywhere diffused refined
elegance, a delicate voluptuousness, what the epoch itself defined as ‘the quintessence of the agreeable, the complexion of grace and charm, the adornments of pleasure and love’
.
    Pompadour, the greatest mistress in history, was a specialist in creating
the adornments of pleasure
. Every woman who has relished a perfectly cut perfume bottle, or an exquisite gold box, or a vase of luminous and fragile beauty, enjoys the legacy of Madame de Pompadour’s aesthetic vision. Her personal collection was astounding: gold engraved snuff boxes, rock crystal perfume bottles with jewelled stops, musical clocks, dainty teacups, lacquered tabletops, candles of gold and entwined porcelain flowers, blue and gold dinner plates. There’s a Boucher portrait of Madame de Pompadour
en négligé
, applying makeup at her dressing table. She wears a pink ribboned wrap, there’s a blue flower in her hair, in her hand is her gold pot of rouge, on the table is her gold box and powder puff and there’s a cameo of her lover Louis XV attached to her wrist with lace. Here, you think, is a woman who understands that allure lies in the details.
    Pompadour single-handedly created the French cult of quotidian beauty. It’s no wonder that France today is the world’s greatest maker and marketer of affordable luxury goods, small items of glamor that make women feel special. La Pompadour transmitted
l’art de vivre
through beautifying the sweet, small details of daily life.
    Today the weather is cool and cloudy, perfect for a spring walk. I follow rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as it winds and dips, and it’s going to be good exercise because I have to keep running back and forth across the road to savor every exquisitely presented shop window. Each turnbrings another. The names on the canopies tell a story of craftsmanship as well as glamor –
parfumerie
Annick Goutal, beauty salon Guerlain, ultra-luxe emporium Hermès, couturier Yves Saint Laurent …
    One of the shops stops me in my tracks. It’s a
confiserie
, the sort of place you will only see in France, in Paris. The boxes alone look good enough to eat. There are melt-in-your-mouth
pâtes de fruit
, rich golden
abricots confits
, nutty
marrons glacés
. Everything is shiny, tasty, tempting. And the pleasure begins here, in the anticipation, to be followed by each sweet’s