Portrait de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour fait par elle-même

Paris: s.n., 1756. 12mo (169 x 96 mm). 10, [2 blank] pages. Woodcut ornament on title. (Title soiled.) Extra-illustrated with three states of an engraved bust portrait of Mme. Pompadour, in two states, of which two avant la lettre, one in black and one in sepia, the latter on very thick paper, and one with lettering (Mme. de Pompadour). Jansenist blue-green morocco, turn-ins gilt, gilt edges, silk ribbon marker, 5 blank leaves at front and 6 at back (spine slightly sunned). Provenance: J[ules] Noilly, his gilt monogrammed booklabel, sale Paris, 15-20 March 1886, lot 432 (lot ticket preserved).***

First and apparently only edition of a loosely constructed mildly satirical erotic poem, almost a prose poem, that pretends to be a self-celebration by Louis XV’s mistress, friend, and influential advisor Madame de Pompadour.

Praising her own looks — her skin, face, eyes, mouth, and hair, even her “two-storey chin” (standards of beauty change), she moves on to her intelligence, wit, lack of pretense (carefully constructed), and other attractions, finally circling back to the most enticing part of all, for the lascivious male. The culmination of the poem is a rather trite metaphorical description of her “private parts” as a welcoming grotto, and the mounting excitement of the daydreaming poet[ess]. In the last lines she shakes herself: “what am I saying, where is the rhyme taking me?” and she summons a cold shower in the form of “the sad reminder of a husband, a mother, a hunchbacked prelate, and a battleaxe of an Abbess.” (The first two references may be to Mme de Pompadour’s husband Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d'Étiolles and to her by then deceased mother Madeleine de La Motte; I have not identified the other two.)

An enlightened patron of literature and the arts, Mme de Pompadour would have scoffed at this silly concoction, but the generally complimentary (if disrespectful) tone of the piece implies that it may have been produced by someone in her circle. It is not a Poissonade in the classic sense. The pamphlet was sometimes bound with various editions of Mme de Pompadour’s equally apocryphal letters.

The Parisian bibliophile Jules Noilly had this fine copy bound by Marius-Michel with three states of a small oval stipple-engraved portrait of Mme de Pompadour, which he or the cataloguer of his collection described as “after Céroni”; cf. Catalogue de livres rares et curieux, anciens et modernes, et d'une précieuse collection de livres de l'École Romantique, composant la bibliothèque de M. J. Noilly (Paris: veuve Labitte, 1886), lot 432.