Editing Nancy Mitford (section)

===Rue Monsieur===
{{Quote box|width=250px|bgcolor=#E0E6F8|align=right|quote= "I am so completely happy here&nbsp;... I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight&nbsp;... Diana Cooper is being too angelic. I am captivated completely by her beauty and charm&nbsp;... Oh my passion for the French!"|salign = left |source= Nancy Mitford, writing to her mother after deciding to live permanently in France.<ref>Mosley (ed.), pp. 184–185.</ref>}}
During her first 18 months in Paris, Mitford lived in several short-term lodgings while she enjoyed a hectic social life, the hub of which was the British Embassy under the regime of the ambassador, [[Duff Cooper]], and his socialite wife, [[Lady Diana Cooper]].<ref name=Hastings173/> Eventually Mitford found a comfortable apartment, with a maid, at No. 7 [[Rue Monsieur-le-Prince|rue Monsieur]] on the [[Rive Gauche|Left Bank]], close to Palewski's residence.<ref>Acton, pp. 71–72.</ref> Settled there in comfort, she established a pattern to her life that she mostly followed for the next 20 years, her precise timetable being determined by Palewski's varying availability. Her socialising, entertaining and working were interspersed with regular short visits to family and friends in England and summers generally spent in Venice.<ref name=odnb/><ref>Hastings, pp. 221–222.</ref>

In 1948, Mitford completed a new novel, a sequel to ''The Pursuit of Love'' that she called ''[[Love in a Cold Climate]]'', with the same country house ambience as the earlier book and many of the same characters. The novel's reception was even warmer than that of its predecessor. Waugh was one of the few critics to qualify his praise; he thought that the descriptions were good but the conversations poor.<ref>Hastings, p. 189.</ref><ref>Amory (ed.), p. 301.</ref> In 1950 she translated and adapted [[André Roussin]]'s play ''La petite hutte'' ('The Little Hut'), in preparation for its successful [[West End theatre|West End]] début in August,<ref name=Thompson284>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|pp=284–286}}</ref> ''The Times''{{'}}s critic noted the "habit of speech at once colloquial and unexpected which instantly declares itself the creation of Miss Mitford."<ref>{{cite news|title= Lyric Theatre|newspaper= The Times|date= 24 August 1950|page= 6}}</ref> The play ran for 1,261 performances, and provided Mitford with a steady £300 per month in royalties.<ref name=Thompson284/> The same year ''[[The Sunday Times]]'' asked her to contribute a regular column, which she did for four years.<ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|p=279}}</ref> The busy period in her writing life continued in 1951 with her third postwar novel, ''[[The Blessing (novel)|The Blessing]]'', another semi-autobiographical romance this time set in Paris, in which an aristocratic young Englishwoman is married to a libidinous French marquis. Harold Acton deems it her most accomplished novel, "permeated with her joyous love of France".<ref>Acton, p. 85.</ref> This time Waugh (to whom the book was dedicated) had no criticism; he found the book "admirable, deliciously funny, consistent and complete, by far the best of your writings".<ref>Amory (ed.), p. 346.</ref>

Mitford then began her first serious non-fiction work, a biography of [[Madame de Pompadour]]. The general view of the critics when the book was published in March 1954 was that it was "marvelous entertainment, if hardly to be taken as history".<ref>Hastings, pp. 219–220.</ref> The historian [[AJP Taylor]] likened Mitford's evocation of 18th-century Versailles to "Alconleigh", the fictitious country house that formed the background to her recent best-selling novels, a comparison that she found offensive.<ref>Mosley (ed.), pp. 381–382.</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Thompson|2003|pp=287–288}}</ref>