Weidenfeld £25 pp388

Antonia Fraser long ago mastered the art of writing meticulous history so that it reads like an engrossing novel, and her latest offering is no exception. Split into four sections (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter), her book tells the story of the Sun King through the women who were his stars. Refreshingly, Fraser includes not only the famous mistresses — Louise de la Vallière, the Marquise de Montespan and Madame de Maintenon — but a host of other women, from Louis’s mother Anne of Austria (of whom the Princesse de Conti said that she would vouch for her virtue from the waist down, but not from the waist up) to Louis’s adored little granddaughter-in-law, the child-bride Adelaide of Savoy.

Fraser’s treatment of the mistresses (as well as of a number of minor amours) is distinguished by the understanding she brings to the tension between the opposing attractions of illicit love and religious conviction. For these God-fearing yet life-loving Catholics — including the king — the pull of boudoir and confessional was pretty evenly balanced. The most devout of Louis’s significant others was the innocent young Louise, who surrendered her virginity to him and, in order to do so, had to convince herself that sleeping with the king was “a kind of holy duty”. But this conviction never overcame her sense of shame; she made several attempts to run away to a convent, finally succeeding when the king’s attentions turned to the voluptuous Athénaïs de Montespan.

Athénaïs embodied the difficult combination of radiant sexuality and genuine piety; a spirited woman, she once retorted to a moralising duchess: “Because I commit one sin, it does not mean that I commit them all.” The celebrated preacher Father Bourdaloue almost persuaded both the king and his beloved mistress to abandon their sexual relationship but in the end it wasn’t so much religious conviction as middle age that did the trick, for by the age of 38 poor Athénaïs had grown too fat for Louis’s liking. No doubt contributing to her girth was the circumstance of having borne her royal lover six children.

Louis’s final long-term amour was of a more austere nature altogether. He had first encountered Françoise, who became Madame de Maintenon, when she was the governess of a number of his illegitimate children. For her, sex with the king was the lesser of two evils — on the basis that if she did not satisfy this need in him, then some other, far less worthy woman would. After the queen’s death, it seems likely the couple were married morganatically — in secret, with the marriage recognised by the Church alone. Maintenon’s position inevitably created jealousies at court; Liselotte, the king’s coarse sister-in-law, took pleasure in referring to her variously as the old trollop, old prune, frump, hag, whore, garbage and ordure.

Louis, concludes Fraser, did on the whole treat his women well — “he was a philanderer,” she admits, “but he was not a monster”. Despite his prodigious appetites both at table and in bed, he could exercise remarkable self-control, as was evident when one of his courtiers claimed — falsely — to have slept with Athénaïs: “Louis, with the greatest difficulty mastering his seething outrage, broke his own cane in half and threw it out of the window ‘lest he strike a gentleman’.” But he was also a man “trained from the start to be self-centred as a form of duty” and this attribute affected all his relationships, even with those he loved most, such as Adelaide, the young wife of his grandson the Duc de Bourgogne. He had fallen for her at first sight because she was such a sweet and pleasing 10-year-old — but to continue to please him she wasn’t allowed to change and was still being summoned to sit on the king’s lap in her mid-twenties. Towards the end of Louis’s life, even the faithful Maintenon was finding his self-centredness irksome. Unable to tell the king what she thought of him, she gave vent in her letters to what Fraser describes as “a continuous kind of moan”.

When he was younger, Louis had a good friend in his sister-in-law, Henriette-Anne, the daughter of Charles I of England. Having endured with grace and fortitude a miserable marriage to the homosexual Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (known as “Monsieur”), Henriette-Anne died in agonising pain of acute peritonitis at 26. Such early death was all too frequent, the patients often helped on their way by the ministrations of physicians who knew only one “ cure” — bleeding. In 1712, after Louis had lost three heirs in the space of 11 months, a heroic governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour, realised what nobody else would — the doctors were killing their patients instead of curing them. She barricaded herself and the two-year-old Duc d’Anjou in her apartments in order to prevent the medical men getting at him, and, thanks to her bravery and defiance, the child survived to become Louis XV.

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