The Sun King and His Loves

This history surveys the private attachments of Louis XIV and the women who shaped his court: Louise de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon, and later the young Duchess of Burgundy, with Versailles itself treated as another passion. Norton follows how favour, piety, and scandal moved households inside the palace and how marriage and conscience altered the king's later years. Ministers and the queen appear as the public frame around those rooms. The book is a short narrative of royal intimacy and court faction, not a full political life of the reign.

Bound in blue cloth with colour-printed paper on the front board. Genealogical endleaves in colour. Glassine dust-jacket. The Presentation Volume for 1983.