MEMOIRS OF MADAME LA MARQUISE DE MONTESPAN
Written by Herself
Being the Historic Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Madame de Montespan——Etching by Mercier Hortense Mancini——Drawing in the Louvre Madame de la Valliere——Painting by Francois Moliere——Original Etching by Lalauze Boileau——Etching by Lalauze A French Courtier——Photogravure from a Painting Madame de Maintenon——Etching by Mercier from Painting by Hule Charles II.——Original Etching by Ben Damman Bosseut——Etching by Lalauze Louis XIV. Knighting a Subject——Photogravure from a Rare Print A French Actress——Painting by Leon Comerre Racine——Etching by Lalauze |
BOOK 1.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
Historians have, on the whole, dealt somewhat harshly with the fascinating Madame de Montespan, perhaps taking their impressions from the judgments, often narrow and malicious, of her contemporaries. To help us to get a fairer estimate, her own “Memoirs,” written by herself, and now first given to readers in an English dress, should surely serve. Avowedly compiled in a vague, desultory way, with no particular regard to chronological sequence, these random recollections should interest us, in the first place, as a piece of unconscious self-portraiture. The cynical Court lady, whose beauty bewitched a great King, and whose ruthless sarcasm made Duchesses quail, is here drawn for us in vivid fashion by her own hand, and while concerned with depicting other figures she really portrays her own. Certainly, in these Memoirs she is generally content to keep herself in the background, while giving us a faithful picture of the brilliant Court at which she was for long the most lustrous ornament. It is only by stray touches, a casual remark, a chance phrase, that we, as it were, gauge her temperament in all its wiliness, its egoism, its love of supremacy, and its shallow worldly wisdom. Yet it could have been no ordinary woman that held the handsome Louis so long her captive. The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and fashion. If she set the mode in the shape of a petticoat, or devised the sumptuous splendours of a garden fete, her talent was not mer