ancois Hubert Drouais, but there can
be little doubt that the original portraiture was from the hand of the
engraver (Dagoty), as the style is far inferior to Drouais." He thus
describes it:

Here we see the last of Louis XV's mistresses, sitting in her
bedroom in that alluring retreat of hers at Louveciennes, near the
woods of Marly, as she takes her cup of coffee from her pet
attendant, the little negro boy, Zamore, as the Prince de Conti had
named him, all brave in red and gold. Doubtless she is expecting
the morning visit of the King, no longer the handsome young
gallant, but old and leaden-eyed, and puffy-cheeked; and perhaps it
will be on this very morning that she will wheedle Louis, in a
moment of extravagant badinage, into appointing the negro boy to be
Governor of the Chateau and Pavilion of Louveciennes at a handsome
salary, just as, on another day, she playfully teased the jaded old
sensualist into decorating with the cordon bleu her cuisiniere when
it was triumphantly revealed to him that the dinner he had been
praising with enthusiastic gusto was, after all, the work of a
woman cook, the very possibility of which he had contemptuously
doubted. But as we look at these two, the royal mistress and her
little black favorite, we forget the "well beloved" and his
voluptuous pleasures and indulgences, for in the shadows we see
another picture, some twenty years on, when the proud
unconscionable beauty, no longer _reine de la main gauche_, stands
before the dreaded Tribunal of the Terror, while Zamore, the
treacherous, ungrateful negro, dismissed from his service at
Louveciennes and now devoted to the committee of public safety, and
one of her implacable accusers, sends her shrieking to the
guillotine.

[Illustration: "PETIT DEJEUNER," BY BOUCHER

Showing the home coffee service of the period of 1744]

[Illustration: COFFEE SERVICE IN THE HOME OF MADAME DE
POMPADOUR--PAINTING BY VAN LOO]

The introduction of the coffee house into Europe was memorialized by
Franz Schams, the genre painter, pupil of the Vienna Academy, in a
beautiful picture entitled "The First Coffee House in Vienna, 1684,"
owned by the Austrian Art Society. A lithographic reproduction was
executed by the artist and printed by Joseph Stoufs in Vienna. There are
several specimens in the United States; and the illustratio