Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, known as the Marquise de Pompadour, was celebrated for her great patronage of the arts, including architecture. This biographical account of her Turkish boudoir at Bellevue examines its implications of personal and private life, class and gender, and the role of exoticism in eighteenth-century architectural interiors. Analysis of the boudoir and its contents reflect much about its unusual mistress and the unique period of the mid-eighteenth century, as all are likened to the metaphor of existing in a liminal space “between worlds.
