The King's Way

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: Very Good
Publisher: Collins
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 1984
Edition: First Edition

Description: 497 pages. Book and Jacket are both in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: The Marquise de Maintenon, nee Francoise d'Aubigne, born in a Poitou prison in 1635, became Louis XIV's uncrowned queen - and left 80 volumes of letters, the primary source of this densely researched historical reconstruction: Chandernagor has provided unobtrusive fictional stitching so that Maintenon may tell her own story. Francoise's childhood is bizarre - from prison days with Papa (lutist, counterfeiter, murderer) to a feverish year on Guadeloupe, an idyll with Huguenot relatives back in France, and conversion to Catholicism. Sans dowry, Francoise must either take the veil or - a livelier prospect - marry M. Scarron, the aging, crippled poet and wit. So, during the ups and downs of Scarron's salon (the "Hotel Impecuniosity"), the 16-year-old Mme. Scarron discovers: the delights of drawing-room coquetry; that tantalizing ache for "honor and glory"; the value of cultivating the influential; the thrilling vulnerability to passion. And, when Scarron dies, his young widow is taken under the rapier pinions of the King's prime favorite, "the incomparable" Mme. de Montespan, a greedy eminence of Olympian wraths; soon Mme. Scarron is even given the care of a series of children - offspring of Montespan and the King. But what of her strange dreams of replacing Montespan? "I believe not in dreams but in merit, patience, restraint. . . we see fountains shooting skyward. . . but the force behind it has travelled league upon league, secretly underground." Eventually, then, the man behind the Sun King image - capricious, profligate, callous - responds to Francoise's lingering beauty and sharp wisdom. She becomes "Mme. de Maintenon" - or, as Court wags have it, "Mme. de Maintenant" (Mme. NOW). And, after the death of the Queen, she will become the King's morganatic wife: her influence is considerable; her wit, in stiletto commentary on the excesses of the Court or the sad follies of the self or of nations, is awesome; her spiritual/philosophical speculations are salted with caustic self-knowledge. (On the pursuit of honor and glory: "It takes more strength than I possess not to run to the spot to which you see everyone else running.") With shrewd views - splendor and sewage in equal measure - of the Court of the Sun King: a rich, stylish, authentic impersonation. (Kirkus Reviews)

ISBN: 9780002228602