Before Versailles

My next door neighbor is crazy about the author Karleen Koen.  He told me at a recent barbeque that her new book was coming out very soon.  He was surprised and a little bit jealous when I told him I had it on my shelf at home to read.  Her previous books Through a Glass Darkly, Now Face to Face and Dark Angels deal with a family dynasty in eighteenth century England.  I must admit I read the first book but haven't felt compelled to read the sequels. 

In Before Versailles; a Novel of Louis XIV (#91) Ms. Koen switches her focus to the other side of the Channel.  In this book she concentrates on four pivotal months of 1661, following Louis XIV when he is twenty two and just beginning his reign without the guidance of Cardinal Mazarin after his mentor's death.  This is the period that Ms. Koen sees the young king begin to gather the reins of power into his own hands, but before he becomes totally hardened by wielding absolute power.  He still is young and somewhat idealistic.  Ms. Koen has written this as a "What if...?" novel.  It might have happened this way and the reader is warned to bear that in mind.

I won't spoil all the elements of surprise she introduces in this book, but I did think to myself that she has a vivid imagination (except for what she borrows from Dumas).  I found it more than a little bit repetitive, and often found myself wishing that she would move things along and get to the point.  I found the most touching thing in the book the moment when Louis' (the fourteenth of that name as we're reminded repeatedly in the first third of the book) favorite hunting dog Belle dies (surrounded by sons and daughters, as always).  How nice that his current love interest, Louise de la Baume le Blanc was there to lead the rosary recitation.  Family, friends and courtiers are all spies trying to keep on the right side of power by betraying everyone else to whomever shows them the largest reward.  Chief Spider among them is the coyly named Vicomte Nicholas who is building his own power base with even the Queen Mother in his pocket.  This, of course, is the Fouquet, Minister of Finance, never actually given his proper name in the book.  Louise de la Baume le Blanc herself is one of Louis' earliest acknowledged mistresses, never named in the cast of characters as Louise de la Valliere, as she is best known to history, even though Ms. Koen dedicates this book to her memory under this title.  Karleen Koen drops plenty of "had she but known!" hints as to her fate but never actually spells out the entire story or the fact that she bore Louis several illegitimate children in her Authors Notes.  That would have been nice to get the whole picture instead of implying she went directly to a convent in a few years instead of spending years of being tormented by Athenais and the Queen in a court Louis would not allow her to leave.  But I suppose that will be covered in the book about Athenais' reign as royal mistress Marquise de Montespan that Ms. Koen says is "another story..."

But one good thing about this book was how much time I spent on other source material to try to separate fact from fiction.  I don't know that much about the reign of Louis XIV.  I was so grateful that two Christmases ago my husband gave me Antonia Fraser's excellent work Love and Louis XIV; the Women in the Life of the Sun King and it was right there on hand as I was reading Before Versailles.  There in the color plates I found pictures of Olympe, Louise, Henriette, Anne of Austria, Marie Theresa, Athenais, Marie Mancini, all of whom play a role in this novel.  I wanted to know if the rumors of Louis' parentage were wide-spread or a fictional device.  I wanted to see pictures of Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte and those were all available on the web.  Now I really would like to see them in person, especially after reading the description of the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte which have to be seen in person to appreciate the ingeniousness of their design.  I may need to see The Man in the Iron Mask again.  I seem to remember the movie being set totally in the wrong time period to jibe correctly with Ms. Koen's plot...  In the end, isn't the purpose of any good book to stimulate your imagination and expand your desire for knowledge?  In that, Ms. Koen succeeds.