There's plenty of detail and background colour, but you never really feel as a reader that you, or Hilton, has got truly close to Athenais, has understood not just her ambition, but the person beneath it. I'm not sure, however, that you can blame the biographer for this. As Hilton explains, the Versailles that Athenais played a big part in creating was Europe's perfect model of the baroque – "the expression of classical idea of life lived as spectacle, in which men conduct themselves as 'actors' before God and every public gesture becomes ceremonial." Louis himself acted the king so much, Hilton suggests, there may not have been anything left of the original man underneath. (Helped in the early years of relationship she suggests by the arrogantly confident Athenais – who always trusted that her fine breeding would see her through.)
One minor irritation in the book is that popular poetry, ditties and jokes are scattered through the text, but translated only in the endnotes. My reading French can just about stumble through them – although almost certainly missing some of the puns, but why not make these – in a text very much meant for popular consumption – immediately available on the relevant page.
But overall it is a rollicking, entertaining, even inspiring, spin through a life lived to the full. Hilton does a decent job of helping the reader keep track of multi- titled aristocracy and their complicated genealogy. And you'll emerge also with a clear sense of Versailles in its best days (the accounts of the undergardeners sprinting frantically from fountain to fountain to ensure they "played" as the king walked past will certainly stay with me whenever I think of those endless vistas, which still survive today. And if all of this is tinted for the modern reader with the knowledge of what comes next – the Revolution and all of that – Hilton has sensibly chosen to avoid that – putting Athenais in her own flawed but glorious time, and letting the future take care of itself. (Except to note, for those who care about such things, that through her daughter to Louis, Mlle de Blois, Duchesse d'Orleans, that her great-great-great grandson became King of France (the nation's only constitutional monarch). And by way of his 10 children, Athenais came to be related to the royal houses of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy and Luxembourg.
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