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Pleasures and palaces are, of course, an enormously entertaining part of this vivid account of France under Louis XIV. More important is the author's exploration of the political, economic, social and artistic forces that developed during the long reign of the Sun-King. It was an age of contradictions and compromises and high taxes and formal manners. And to the day he died Louis XIV ate with his fingers and acted like God. The opening account of Louis XIV's private life and loves sets the pace for this witty, provocative account of a century that, like our own, was a time of transition, dissatisfaction and progress. This was the age of Moliere, Racine, Corneille...the age of the salons and the graceful correspondents. And also an age that sent thousands of Huguenots to the galleys, the notorious death ships that served as seventeenth-century concentration camps.
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Omen Hussein
reviewed Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV on October 04, 2010 Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV
As Lewis himself notes, the book is not a narrative history but a collection of essays of "aspects of French life in the days of Louis XIV." It is informative and funny. He is fair minded, showing us both the positive and negative sides of people and situations. Louis is famously thoughtful in some ways, as when he tells people who are abusing a valet for a mistake, "Let us remember...that he is much more upset about it than I am." But he can also be unkind from selfishness when unkindness is not his intention as when he will not allow grieving courtiers to show their grief because unhappiness upsets him.
He can be very funny as when he says of Racine "to Louis he must, I think, have borne a marked physical resemblance; for early in their acquaintance the King observed that Racine was one of the handsomest men at his Court." His skewers the medical profession in France at the time is also hilarious while also giving you a frighteningly vivid idea of what it was like to be ill then.
Highly recommended. Packs a lot of information into a short book.
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