Frances Mossiker
Louix XIV, Madame de Montespan, witchcraft, Satanism â€“ the royal court of the Sun King and the weird underworld of seventeenth-century Paris â€“ are linked together by Frances Mossiker, author of ,The Queenâ€™s Necklace, and ,Napoleon and Josephine,, as she reconstructs one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the age: the murky, death-laden Affair of the Poisons.,Here, immediate and authentic, is the incredible world of Versailles â€“ the intrigue, luxury, and harshness of the life, the progression of royal mistresses, the overwhelming personality of the King. And here, rising out of the criminal world of Paris, a miasma of fear and suspicion, is the gradual revelation of occult crimes â€“ covens of witches and warlocks practicing â€œthe old religion,â€ conducting black masses, arranging murders and abortions, concocting magic potions, aphrodisiacs, and poisons for their masked noble clients â€“ as a poison psychosis strikes Versailles, ultimately threatening the very person of Louis himself.,Most dramatic of all, the role of Montespan: the Kingâ€™s Favorite, mother of his five â€œlegitimizedâ€ children, an arrogant, highborn, voluptuous beauty, who dazzled Saint-Simon with the wit and brilliance of her conversation; whose intellect made her an arbiter of taste in a court embellished by a MoliÃ¨re (her protÃ©gÃ©) and a Lully; whose pearls outshone the Queenâ€™s; whose train was borne by a duchess; who by her strength and charm held the restless Louis bound to her for a decade.,In the massive Poisons Affair inquiry that brought the most ancient names of France to trial, the name of Montespan was by royal edict forbidden to be mentioned, and evidence was destroyed. But the day-to-day private journals kept secretly in shorthand by the able and meticulous chief of the Paris police, Nicholas de Lay Reynie, escaped destruction â€“ and they raise the question: To what extent was Montespan, the uncrowned Queen of France, implicated in these grave crimes?,Using â€“ brilliantly â€“ the technique that distinguishes her earlier works, presenting her story through the diaries and letters of the principal actors and their contemporaries, Frances Mossiker illuminates this mystery and brings richly to life the antithetical worlds â€“ the royal heights and the grotesquely sinister depths of seventeenth-century society â€“ that came violently together in one of the greatest dramas of French history. [From the book jacket.]
History,Cultural,France,Nonfiction,Literature,17th Century
The affair of the poisons