Word: maintenon
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...limit to my desires," Mme. de Maintenon confided in a letter to a friend. Few women in history have brought that kind of ambition to such a satisfactory climax. Born in prison in 1635, the daughter of a well-born conman and habitual murderer reached for the moon from earliest childhood. By the age of 48 she had embraced the sun. Her marriage to his Coruscating Magnificence, the Sun King, Louis XIV, lasted for 32 years...
When the royal hunt of Mme. de Maintenon was turned into a piece of popular fiction in The King's Way (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 497 pages; $15.95), it reigned for 80 weeks on France's bestseller list. Françoise Chandernagor, 38, a French judge, has been more fortunate than most first novelists in the wealth of sources available for her imaginative reconstruction. She has drawn from the writings of two of France's great literary stylists and keenest chroniclers of the age, Mme. de Sévigné and the Due de Saint-Simon, as well...
...always so. Princes and potentates once treated the toilet seat as an extension of the throne; it was from the gilded cabinet that France's Louis XIV announced his engagement to Mme. de Maintenon. (Even Lyndon Johnson was not above conducting affairs of state while moving his bowels.) Indeed, there are few places so conducive to intellectual exercise as a well-appointed bathroom. Lord Chesterfield advised his son that he "knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the call of nature obliged...
...King's standards at that time. Even royal princes had to ask permission to visit. "Delicious gardens!" exclaimed that great collector of court gossip, the Duc de Saint-Simon. And in Louis XIV's day, the gardens did not stop at the doors; his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, liked to change color and perfume by rearranging the Trianon's million flower pots daily...
Recounting these personal details, Author Lewis also keeps track of great events-the massing of European sovereigns against Louis, the battle of Blenheim, where French military pride suffered its most decisive setback. He is persistently concerned with rectifying the long-distorted picture of Maine and Madame de Maintenon, both of whom are customarily presented as monsters of intrigue and ambition...