The King's Way: Recollections of Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon, Wife to the King of France Review

The King's Way: Recollections of Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon, Wife to the King of France
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The King's Way: Recollections of Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon, Wife to the King of France ReviewFrançoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon and second unacknowledged wife of Louis XIV, wrote nearly eighty volumes of letters; more than four thousand have survived and Françoise Chandernagor has used them with skill and feeling to write this first-person account of Maintenon's life. I enjoyed The King's Way very much - I knew very little about the life and loves of Louis XIV before reading it, and it proved to be a pleasant way to make this history memorable. It is not difficult to keep the cast of characters straight until the very end, when one is dealing with the bastard descendants of Louis - then the numerous names and titles tend to blur. The history is well handled, always through Mme. de Maintenon's eyes, which is quite credible since she was an intelligent, witty, and compassionate woman and her advice was sought by Louis, even though he did not often take it.
I will not summarize Maintenon's life here, since Kay Kirkpatrick has given an excellent summary in her recent Amazon review of Veronica Buckley's biography. Chandernagor's book is more affordable and more available than Buckley's book, although if you read it, you may want to know more - I went searching for a history and found only Buckley's book listed, along with Antonia Fraser's more general book on all of Louis's loves. Françoise d'Aubigné was well-known as the most moral and devout of Louis's loves, but she is by no means a "plaster saint." Chandernagor gives her a voice which is alternately witty, earnest, self-deprecating and proud of herself. She's someone I would like to have known. Neither of her husbands were easy marriage material. Paul Scarron, the first, was an intelligent and arrogant cripple who gave her a base of sorts in Paris society, but left her disillusioned and cynical about the possibility of combining love and marriage. Two subsequent affaires du coeur helped her realize that physical love could be enjoyable, but mocked her hope of marrying someone of higher rank than her own. One rejoices with her as Louis chooses her for her real self, even as one groans that she will never be known as queen - she truly deserved it.
Some historians have accused her of encouraging Louis's revocation of the Edict of Nantes and thus condoning the persecution of Protestants. On the contrary she was quite concerned about the situation of her own Protestant relatives who had been the first to show her any loving care as a child and who had introduced her to God. Chandernagor presents her as much more tolerant than Louis and certainly not in favor of the forced conversions which followed the revocation, although she was not above cleverly luring her young Protestant relatives into the Church. Although she felt a strong attraction to mysticism and contemplation, she was fundamentally a practical person who loved children and devoted much of her life to their education, as well as to improving the economic situation of the poor around her. A woman of contradictions, she loved the wit of Paul Scarron's circle and her early life at Louis's court (Mme. de Montespan and Ninon de Lenclos, notorious for their immorality as well as their intelligence, were friends), although she tired of the banal superficiality of most of this society. Similarly, she loved King Louis even as she couldn't stand his distanced controlling behavior and his insistence on leaving all the windows open even when she was freezing! Seeing him through her eyes, the reader loves him too, but loves her even more for her honest ability to confront herself in her endless variety.
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