Grand Monarch MANY readers will buy The Sun King for
prestige purposes, to lie on coffee-tables, to be noted with approval and leafed through with gasps. Those—and surely' they will be the majority—who embark on the text will find, at once, that this is no sandwich-filling put in to keep the pictures apart, but a thorough and thoughtful study of an age, with one person (Louis XIV) and one place (Versailles) as the set orbs round which spins a number of more or less brilliant satellites, all finely differentiated, each observed with notable economy and wit.
They are all here, the famous stories—the rise and decline of Madame de Montespan; the unmeteoric but permanent career of Madame de Maintenon; the Affair of the Poisons; the unhappy, although sometimes hilarious, fortunes of the school of St Cyr. To say that The Sun King is easy to read is simply to offer a compli- ment to Miss Mitford, another thoroughly well- deserved bouquet. The book must have been extremely hard to write, principally because of the author's continual confrontation with choice —what to leave out—surely the final test of skill in any writing. Further, it must have required a formidable amount of research, of reading, and yet at no point is there the faintest whiff of midnight oil. Laughingly, where laughter is appropriate or salutary; seriously at all times, in the sense that her approach to history is serious, Miss Mitford builds for us the organic representation of an age which Louis XIV, that able, difficult, possessive man, and his beloved city of a palace truly did represent.
Perhaps her grandest achievement is in her handling of little things: meals and medicines and the epoch's horrible hygiene, the rub of day-to-day affections, the small pleasures amongst the great, the stifled wishes, the simple jokes, the too-human testinesses and misunderstandings —all against the background, gold lace and blood and hunger, religious genius, noble prose and poetry, heroic good manners, rocketing for- tunes, misfortunes descending with bewildering caprice, of the Grand Siecle.
WILLIAM BUCHAN
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