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She plays down Pompadour’s physical role, both as mistress and later as procuress; she underlines the fact that too much sex made Pompadour ill, and says that what she and Louis XV enjoyed together was ‘that particularly delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter’. She talks of Pompadour’s love of life, and interest in people, being ‘perhaps the base of what we variously call charm, sex appeal or fascination’. (Our italics.) So to Nancy, sex appeal is just charm under another name; its base is not anything so crude as physical desire.
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