Biography: In Love and Louis XIV, Antonia Fraser's expertise on women in history shines through, bringing a sympathetic warmth to her depiction of the Sun King's many love affairs, his vast sexual appetite and the sheer variety of female personalities in his intimate circle.
Any historical biography with the term "love" in its title clearly signals a greater interest in the personal and romantic aspects of Louis XIV's life than in his diplomatic or military skills. Yet, because Louis XIV's construction of self-image was so intensely public, his choices of wife, mistresses and female moral advisers were equally public events. Hence, this biography of Louis's women conveniently doubles as a more general history of Louis XIV and his mammoth 72-year reign. As Fraser underlines, whether Louis was engaged with the Fronde, Jacobites and war, or with Fouquet, jewellery and weeping, the binary cultivation of military glory and romantic gallantry received equal attention from the fastidious Apollonian king.
Because the Sun King was born, slept, woke, ate, and died with members of the court in the same room, privacy was never something that Louis could ever truly enjoy. With its clear echoes for celebrities in modern paparazzi society, such constant public intrusion on private life makes Louis's love affairs all the more intriguing. What exactly went on behind closed doors at Versailles?
Louis XIV's first lover, Marie Mancini, lacked rank and was therefore swiftly dispatched - a case of regrettable collateral damage in the campaign to procure a royal wife. Louis duly married the Spanish Infanta, Marie-Thérèse, who produced an heir.
Louis's measured abandon of his first love is traditionally vaunted as the Sun King's first triumph. On the contrary, Fraser subtly suggests that the unhealthy ancien régime obsession with male offspring is matched in its awfulness only by the simultaneous irksome burden placed on royal princesses whose sole function was to produce royal heirs. Not without its frustrating recent parallels in certain modern monarchies, the obsession with producing a male heir at Versailles bordered on sheer inhumanity.
The manner in which Fraser recounts Louis XIV's subsequent colourful love life is novelistic in tone, à la Nancy Mitford, with protagonists depicted in a racy and appealing light. Louis's next passionate affair was with Louise de la Vallière, who shared the king's love of hunting and dancing and was devoted to the cult of the Magdalen - a popular saint conveniently symbolising sinfulness followed by redemption. Louise, too, would bear the king children and would in turn be replaced by another favourite, Athénaïs de Montespan.
In a world where Louis was adored for his godlike beauty - he was an immense, dashing, and gallant royal magnet - it was fitting that his "official" mistress should be stunning. However, the voluptuous Athénaïs was also bright, energetic, and witty. Under her "reign", marble baths, silver tree-holders, fountains, terraces, finery and splendour were showered on her and on Versailles in abundance and she bore the king umpteen children.
Using the court language of the time, Fraser presents the tensions between such brilliantly imposing architecture, great art and propagandist Apollonian symbolism, versus the superficiality of a "beautiful" court, where physical style, facial features, ritual and comportment counted more than interest or intelligence. Once likened to a harem, the dizzy goldfish bowl of Versailles judged on appearances alone.
Curiously, one of the main problems with setting out to sketch Louis XIV's life is simply the fact that the monarch reigned for so long that the decline of his reign lasted longer than its glorious rise and splendid apogee. Voltaire, one of Fraser's many sources, managed to avoid dwelling on the ominous melting of the silver tree-holders by having the king die halfway through his Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and then waxing lyrical on Louis's patronage of the arts, thus avoiding a depressing slide into war, famine and austerity. Fraser divides her biography chronologically into four seasons, but it is her astonishing treatment of Louis's last companion, Madame de Maintenon, that injects positivity into an otherwise bleak autumn and winter. Just as she reinstated Marie-Antoinette in her earlier biography, Fraser here rescues a much-maligned Françoise de Maintenon, upending popular myths of her moroseness and even unearthing a coquettish streak in the devout lady presumed to have been Louis XIV's morganatic wife.
Fraser excels in conjuring up authentic atmospheric detail, just as Sofia Coppola's film of Fraser's Marie-Antoinette revels in female colour, fruff and the frivolous delights of a later female Versailles. Yet, this is absolutely not a dizzy biography. Drawing significant parallels with modernity, it challenges absolutism, superficiality and propaganda. With its astonishingly 17th-century literary desire to "please and instruct," this is arguably the perfect read for any past or prospective visitor to Versailles. As Fraser teases, Athénaïs's marble bath still beguiles in the Orangerie.
Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King By Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 388pp. £25
Síofra Pierse is a lecturer in French and Francophone studies at University College Dublin. She is currently completing a monograph on Voltaire's historiography