Versailles itself gets quite a lot of attention at the beginning of the book when Louis XIV is trying to make it “grand without being pompous” (not so sure he succeeded here, but Mitford, who died at her home in Versailles, seems to think he did). Of course, besides Louis XIV, the main topics of this story are also introduced in that opening sentence: Versailles and the women who went up and down in his favor. The Sun King covers his life in more or less chronological order, from the early days of his personal reign (starting in 1661 when his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin died) when he was converting “his father’s little hunting lodge” into the new seat of government in Versailles, to the final days when he died unsure whether the frail Louis XV would live (he did, and died at the age of sixty-four, having reigned for nearly sixty years it’s during this reign that Madame de Pompadour and Voltaire come in).įar from a stodgy biography of one of history’s strongest monarchs, a man whose commissioned paintings depict him as the Sun King, Mitford’s biography is a giddy and guilty little treat, as if she were a tabloid journalist wandering around Versailles, recording the foibles of the aristocracy.
He finally died in 1715, just days before his 77th birthday, well after almost everyone else he knew, including legitimate children and grandchildren, leaving the throne to his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. Louis XIV began his reign in 1643, at the age of five. Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de La Vallière at the same time Versailles was the love of his life.
This book has one of the best first sentences I know, a sentence that shows the tone, the wit, and the clear subjects of the biography:
Attracted to her wit, I have been looking forward to digging into these and decided to start with the one that covers the earliest period of time, The Sun King (1966). The three prior biographies each focused on French subjects: Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Louis XIV. This spring, NYRB Classics will reissue Frederick the Great, the last of the four biographies Nancy Mitford wrote in her lifetime.
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