Madame de Maintenon : The Secret Wife of Louis XIV

London: Bloomsbury. Very Good/Very Good. 2008. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0747580987 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Red cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. Plates, xii, (12) 452 pages clean and tight. Francoise d'Aubigne was born in a bleak provincial fortress in 1635, her father a condemned murderer and traitor to the state. Yet during her lifetime she managed to make her perilous way from desperate poverty, via the bountiful and treacherous Caribbean islands, to a brilliant salon life in Paris and the centre of power at Versailles. Married at fifteen to 42-year-old Paul Scarron, the tragically disfigured and scandalously popular poet of the burlesque, Francoise encountered in her husband's famous salon all the brilliant, beautiful, comic and tragic characters of the seventeenth-century's glitterati. After his death, for ten years she led the life of a merry widow among her friends in the colourful Marais quarter of Paris, before being chosen by the King's voluptuous mistress, Athenais de Montespan, as governess for her growing brood of royal batards. Leaving the freedom and pleasures of the Marais behind her, Francoise began a new life at court, first at the genteel palace of Saint-Germain, then at the King's fabulous new folly of Versailles. This is the extraordinary story of Francoise's progress from governess to royal mistress and thence, in secret, to the difficult, compromised position of Louis's uncrowned Queen. Was Francoise an ambitious hypocrite, feigning piety to make her own reputation? Or was she merely the victim of circumstance? Through the rags-to-riches tale of the marquise de Maintenon - prison child, beggar-girl, colonist, salonniere and, finally, secret royal wife - Veronica Buckley reveals every layer of the vibrant and shocking world that was France in the age of Louis XIV. .