Mme. Du Hausset

Madame du Hausset was a French lady of the eighteenth century who served as femme de chambre to Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, during the 1750s. A widow of modest noble birth, she lived in the marquise's apartments at Versailles and saw the king and his circle at close quarters, and she set down what she witnessed in a notebook that was rescued from the fire by Pompadour's brother the Marquis de Marigny and later published in 1809 by the writer Quintin Craufurd. Her memoirs, short and unpretentious, are prized by historians as the most candid eyewitness account of Pompadour's private life.