Warwick

Monað modes lust mæla gehÆ¿ylce ferð to feran.

Mouse dropping in the pepper

Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King - Antonia Fraser




Busty young princess Marie-Adélaïde set tongues and codpieces wagging today as she made her first appearance in court looking dressed to kill in a daring figure-hugging gown. The saucy Savoyarde (34-20-34, after corset) was presented to future hubby the Dauphin – but onlookers said her Alpine attributes also had the King giving her the royal once-over. Official courtiers were unavailable for comment, but sources close to Versailles told us: ‘She may only be 11, but that's hardly likely to stop Louis. Frankly, if we didn't keep a steady supply of hos round here, I honestly worry he'd start humping the furniture.’ ‘House of Bourbon?’ said another. ‘House of Whore-bon, more like!’


This book is essentially a Louis-Quatorzian tabloid.

The problem I had with it was that it felt a bit too light to be valuable history, but at the same time not quite salacious enough to be enjoyed as just good gossip. Antonia Fraser's approach is to tell the story of Louis XIV's reign through the women that were close to him – from his mother Anne of Austria, through his wife(s?) and mistresses, down to his beloved granddaughter-in-law Adelaide – but although it does contain quite a few fascinating anecdotes, overall I felt I didn't finish the book much more enlightened than before I started.

It does drive home to you quite how much Louis, for want of a better word, slutted it up at court. The very fact that there was a semi-official position for his maîtresse-en-titre, complete with suite of royal apartments, kind of amazes me – what on earth did the queen think of it? (One of many fundamental questions that this book doesn't really address.) They all lived in each other's pockets, so nothing can have been a secret, yet the fiction had to be maintained. The queen on one occasion actually walked right past the room where Louise La Vallière was going into labour with Louis's love-child. ‘Are you all right?’ the queen asked, seeing this girl clearly in some pain. Louise, panicking, called back, ‘Colic, Madame, an attack of colic’!

My favourite mistress was Françoise-Athénaïs, a.k.a. Madame de Montespan – the only one who seems to be enjoying herself, she had a famously sparkling line in conversation and also (Fraser seems weirdly shocked by this) liked sex a whole lot. She's described as having long blonde hair, a pouting mouth, and eyes that were ‘huge, blue and very slightly exophthalmic’, all of which makes me think casting directors should be calling up Amanda Seyfried.



Athénaïs happened to be married already; her husband, despite being advised that if your wife's cheating on you with the king you should probably just keep quiet, kicked up a huge fuss about it and ended up getting exiled from court. Back on his estate, he pulled down the gates to his château, telling everyone loudly that his cuckold's horns were now too big to fit through them. Classy way to handle it.

Dominating the latter parts of the book is Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon, who was older than Louis and clearly more of an emotional support for him than a sexual fling. Indeed she didn't really want to be a mistress, as such, preferring the role of religious advisor and loyal friend – but, as Fraser puts it, she ‘decided that a best friend's duty to Louis XIV did unfortunately include sleeping with him, in order to prevent other more frivolous, less religiously focused people doing it without her own pure motives.’ Louis probably married her in secret after his first queen died.

Perhaps my favourite character at court was not a mistress at all, but Louis's sister-in-law – a German princess known as Liselotte. She was rather overweight and hated almost everyone, especially the royal bastards whom she referred to cheerfully as ‘the mouse-droppings in the pepper’. While all around her were consumed with etiquette and courtesy, she was scribbling happily during a particularly nasty cold that she probably looked like ‘a shat-on carrot’, or enjoying impromptu farting competitions with her immediate family (the winner could make ‘a noise like a flute’).


‘I shall look like a shat-on carrot’

Occasionally I questioned Antonia Fraser's methods. She has an admirable desire to make her story readable and compelling, but sometimes she takes liberties to get the job done. Consider this passage:

Louise flung herself trembling on the ground before him. Only then did his glacial reception – she had defied his explicit orders to stay at Versailles – convince her of her terrible mistake. ‘How much inquietude you might have spared me, had you been as tepid in the first days of our acquaintance as you have seemed for some time past! You gave me evidence of a great passion: I was enchanted and I abandoned myself to loving you to distraction.’ The poignant words were those of a young woman in […] the celebrated best-seller of the time, Letters of a Portuguese Nun. They might have been spoken word for word by Louise.



Wha–? You can't do that! You can't just borrow lines from a novel and say, ‘Wow, historical figures might well have said something a bit similar’ – at least not without a lot of care and signposting. This is not cool.

If I look out of my kitchen window, I can see the building where Louis XIV was born – now an overpriced hotel. My daughter plays in the enormous gardens of what was once the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. So this is a place and period I am particularly interested in, and this book does give you a few clues as to the ‘interesting mixture of sexuality reined in by religious fervour’ that prevailed at the Sun-King's court. But in the final analysis, I find myself craving something a bit more detailed and critical.

tl;dr: Phwoar what a scorcher

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