Customer Reviews

A Woman's Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d' Orléans, 1652-1722

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If you share the current love affair with Jane Austen, and still remember Emily Dickinson, or are intrigued by the attitudes and poses of the present 'royals' including Diana, you should try this woman for comparison. She is German in France, a Westphalian woman, wife of a distinctive modality to the brother of Louis xiv(/Monsieur'...but actually and defiantly herself: inward looking and observant ('my daughter's looks are quite haeslich=ugly, hateful etc...) everything you ever wanted to know about being a ruling-class woman, who is persecuted by Louis' mistress (de Maintenon, the 'old hag,' the trollop' etc.) and reports on the inner life of the most powerful and corrupt court of the period...without being absorbed or entirely downcast by its habits, its immmorality, or its imaginary piety or carried away from its bisexuality in relationship...mistresses who become duchesses, men who love boys and ignore their wives, kings who are terrified by the prospect of their own deaths and cannot allow the strength of other's actual philosophic or theological thought to penetrate his own ignorance or his dependence on the apparent orthodoxy of his mistress' hostilities. A woman's Book.
Witty, humorous, pithy and scatological, all at once in a lifetime of letter-writing, (four each day and 7 0r 8 each Sunday of which only a relative few of her 60,000 or so letters have survived. Note: Gekronte Schlaven='Crowned Slaves.'

Interesting insight into into the Louis "le roi soleil" Court. But at times it drags into one long lamentation.