I was researching something else entirely, when I came across the seventeenth century scandal at the heart of All the King's Ladies in a second hand paperback. Witchcraft, Black Masses, poisonings, plus political infighting, the court of Versailles, and the combination of influence peddling and romance that made up the lives of the king's mistresses seemed irresistible.
Fortunately, Versailles was the place to visit in the seventeenth century and as a result everyone who was anyone went there and many of the visitors and what seems like most of the inhabitants wrote letters or memoirs or kept diaries. One of the princesses even employed informers to make sure that her letters home to her German speaking relatives contained the most up-to-date gossip and scandal.
In addition, the interrogation reports on those accused of poisoning and worse in the scandal were preserved in the Bastille and the documents survived the fall of the Bastille during the French Revolution. We therefore know what Madame Voisin told the police and we know such intimate details as Madame De Montespan's reaction to one of her rival's illnesses and how the queen dealt with her husband's mistresses.
But for me, the most interesting aspect of life at Versailles was the very unexpected and unstereotyped role played by the royal mistresses. Far from being fluffy sex objects, the royal mistresses emerge from the historical record as hard nosed businesswomen, political pros and would be founders of dynastic families. Their potential power was such that ambitious families weren't above clubbing together to raise money to launch a pretty and clever young woman at court in the hope that she could snare the monarch and make them all rich.
Brief Synopsis:
In 1664, Marquise Athénaïs de Montespan returned to the Court of Versailles. At twenty-three, she was young, beautiful, and highly intelligent, but burdened with a young son, a mad husband, and big debts.
The way to power and prosperity at Versailles led through Louis XIV, well known for his susceptibility to pretty ladies. Athénaïs befriended his current favorite, dazzled everyone, and bided her time. Soon Athénaïs was a power in the glittering, dangerous court, and the sinister La Voisin, abortionist, witch, and poisoner, appeared to whisper that with a little help, Athénaïs could maintain her influence forever.
With a cast of characters ranging from the royal family and their dissolute courtiers to defrocked priests and poisoners to the Police Lieutenant of Paris, All the King's Ladies captures a turbulent and ruthless and glamorous society.
Quotes:
Publishers Weekly 8/29/86
Law reconstructs the scintillating, decadent court of Louis XIV, where women craftily utilize every blandishment to become the monarch's favorite.
Kirkus: 8/15/86
"..a highly successful, shrewdly peopled and bemused view of that most glittery and lunatic of historical power plays: the competition among highly placed ladies of King Louis XIV's court to have and hold the prime favors of the monarch..." "A bright sketch of a self-poisoning society, and an imaginative reshaping of the 'gilded prison' of a court with its glory and cruelty, where both the brainy and the vacuous were 'caught as surely as flies in honey'."
New Yorker 1/19/87
"...Janice Law tailors her fiction to fit the facts. Mme. De Montespan was implicated in a plot involving aphrodisiacs and arsenic at a time when back magic was très à la mode, but prosecutors stopped short of indicting the King's confidantes."
Hartford Courant 12/10/86
"The court intrigues of a beautiful, smart woman, a handsome lusty king and a clever police lieutenant sound like the stuff of "bodice-buster' paperbacks, but the painstaking research and the clear lucid style of 'All the Kings Ladies' takes it far beyond such category reading...the book is an absorbing mid-winter read."
West Hartford News 11/13/86
"It is a measure of Ms. Law's narrative abilities that these long-dead people come so vividly to life in these pages, that 17th century Paris takes shape so graphically, that this lively novel remains so absorbing to the last page."