A King's: Mistress
end of last century, you got to know Louise de la Valliere from the interminably - thrilling pages of Dumas' Vicomte -de Bragelonne—a pale, demure and passive miss against a back- ground of ringing masculine oaths, finely tempered rapiers, and the clink of stage armour. It was the period, of swash- buckling melodrama which finally collapsed with When Knights Were Bold... The present generation is predominantly film-minded. The Louise de la Valliere of Courtesan of Paradise is a typical herOine of the screen, making her exits and entrances to the dying fall of a signature tune, registering successive emotions in highly magnified closezups, and wearing an outsize in eyelashes.
Apart from the absurd title and the saccharine flavour of the religious passages (which will please some and repel others), this is an unusually good specimen of the fashionable scenario biography. In the first place, Louise makes a supremely good subject for the rather obvious romance required by this form of art. She was Louis- XIV's first real love, though it is a rash claim that she- was his- " only true-" one. She was, on her side, a fervent and sinter .soul, who afterwards embraced religion as passionately and whole- heartedly as she had fallen into the arms of Louis. She loved him, as the phrase goes, for himself. Mrs. Trouncer deserves credit for unearthing the story (whether true or not) that a contemporary medal was struck in Holland representing Louis surrounded by his four most famous mistresses. Madame de Maintenon had her hand on his nose, Madame de Fontanges on his purse, and Madame de Montespan in a position which cannot be further particularised ; Madame de la Valliere had hers on his heart.
Secondly, Mrs. Trouncer has taken more trouble over her facts and her sources than is common in biographies of this kind. She assures us in her preface that she has " searched like a ferret and weighed . like a judge." Any pardonable exaggeration in this claim is to be attributed to lack, not of goodwill, but of that keen sense of evidence which may be presumed to prevail on the bench. Her most serious deroga- tion from historical probity is due to the need of providing her scenario with a :villain. Few of the stories of. the ritual murder of children which crop up repeatedly in European history from the middle ages down to the nineteenth century .will stand the most cursory examination ; and that associated with the name of Mine. de Montespan is one of the flimsiest of them. But Mme. de Montespan must obviously be cast as the villain of the piece ; and anyhow the scene, however ill-authenticated, was too screenworthy to be left out.
One misses, of course, any analysis of the spirit of that brilliant and contradictory epoch. _Louise_ and Mme. de Montespan were, one feels, unlucky in that their lot was cast in that brief period when the Church, frightened by the successes .of the Reformers, set about reforming itself and adopted a severely censorious attitude, scarcely known before :or since, towards royal mistresses. Before the reign was halt over the clever Mine. de Maintenon had successfully rc! established the old-fashioned compromise between faith and morals. Of all this Mrs. Trouncer has so little inkling that she can .refer to `,` the guileless Bossuet " ; and she shatteri our faith in her knowledge not of French history, but of the French language, when she renders " Je ne =is pas alai " by,
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