Days of the Roi Soleil

THE LETTERS OF MADAME -Edited by Gertrude Scott Stevenson -Appleton ($5.00).

Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess Palatine, Duchesse d'Orleans, known at the Court of Louis XIV as "Madame," lived through most of the long reign of the Roi Soleil, which was fittingly commemorated many years later by Voltaire's Louis Quatorze.

This was an age of letter-writing among the ladies of the period. Most of them wrote about the trivialities of Court life and paid floods of compliments to the King and the "reigning mistress ;" few ventured upon criticisms. Those letters of de Scudery, de Sevigne, de Grignan or de Maintenon were obsequious in character, unless they engaged in abstract discussion of the Arts or turned to the contemplation of Nature, which was the rarest of expedients. The letters of de Maintenon (widow of the poet Scrarron) were naturally centred upon the King and in them can be seen the depths of her bigotry and the schemes she laid for securing and maintaining boundless influence over Louis.

But the letters of Madame are different. She was essentially a woman of the don't-give-a-damn-what-I-say type, and for this very reason her letters have for many years been invaluable to historians. In a letter to the Duchess of Hanover she says: "You may be sure that I am very much annoyed with the King for treating me like a serving wench. That would have been all right for his precious Maintenon.* She was born for that sort of treatment but I was not." Most people found it dangerous to write of their Sovereign in such terms even in private letters, which were always liable to be opened by the notorious Louvois and their contents communicated to the King.

When Louis came to the throne licentiousness was openly practiced. The King, indeed, set an example to the Court by his amours with the beautiful La Valliere and later with Madame de Montespan. But after the Queen's death and after the King had fallen a victim to the wiles of Madame de Maintenon, the whole Court became devout, and the courtiers remained libertine in Paris and became devout at Versailles. All this Madame's letters show most clearly.

A touch of Teutonic humor is not absent. Referring to a Royal visit to the Armies, she says: "Madame de Chartres, Madame la Duchesse and the Princess de Conti have all three returned from the expedition pregnant, so the King cannot pretend that this journey was a fruitless one. . . ."

Her life at Court was not happy. She was continually being placed in Monsieur's or the King's bad books by the scurrilous reports of her enemies, which were to the effect that she was carrying on an "affaire" with some gallant. These were but malicious lies, and that becomes plainer after reading Madame's description of herself: "I have always been plain, and since I had smallpox have become more so, and my figure is outrageous. I am as square as a dice, my skin is red, tinged with yellow; I am beginning to go grey and have pepper-and-salt tresses; there are wrinkles on my forehead and round my eyes, my nose is as crooked as it always was, and is pitted with smallpox to boot; as are also my cheeks, which are pendulous with large jaws and jagged teeth. My mouth is changed, too, having become larger and wrinkled at the corners. Behold what a beautiful object I am..." To be sure this was written when she was 46 years of age, but no one has even said that she was anything but ugly, even in her youth.

Signs of the lack of marital bliss are again made evident when she somewhat plaintively says: "I should certainly be a virgin again, if not having slept with my husband for 19 years could make me one."

Miss Stevenson has certainly done well to give to the English-speaking public such a diverting book, which presents the Court and the chief characters in the Court in their true perspective, without the bias of a La Bruyere, and which contains much sober comment on the depravities of the times, the inefficiency of doctors, and the wantonness of the French attack upon the Rhineland./- Moreover, it escapes the condemnation of reading like a translation, which is the best proof of the good scholarship of the editor and translator.

THE GREAT BETRAYAL -Edward Hale

Eierstadt -Robert M. McBride & Co. ($2.50).

The jacket of this book* says it is "a candid and impartial account of the real facts of the Near East situation of today." The content of the book shows it to be one of the most glaring of all partisan books that have ever been printed on the Near East tangle.

Mr. Bierstadt says in his preface that the State Department called his publisher's attention to "grave errors" in his work. He continues that, at the end of a day's discussion, "the Department was unable to point to any error in fact. They simply disagreed with the conclusions I had drawn." Any one who had only the vaguest idea of what the Near East stands for could hardly fail to side with the State Department.

The book in the main deals with the persecution of the Christian minorities by the Turks. There is little exaggeration here, and in the historical background, so copiously supplied, no major error of fact is detectable. The partisanship of the book lies in its grave omissions. This can best be shown by example:

"The Bosnian revolt had spread to Bulgaria, and the Turks put down the insurrection by massacring more than 12,000 men, women and children. Gladstone flamed out in his pamphlet entitled 'The Bulgarian Horrors' . . ."

All very true, but subsequent enquiries showed that the Turks had not been unprovoked and that Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrans had committed crimes undreamed of by the Turks. It was said of the Montenegrans that they "counted the prowess of their warriors by the number of Turkish noses they collected, those with a piece of hirsute [hairy] upper lip attached counting for most as being those of male opponents." After that, even Gladstone was forced to recant.

The book is interesting mainly in that it shows the extent to which the Near East can be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

...

A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE -Edward Maslin Hulme -The Century Co. ($4.00). The high enthusiasm with which this book ought to be received would fail to render it justice. Without any doubt, it is the best precis of British civilization which has appeared in recent years. Its clarity and simplicity, adumbrated by a romantic tinge, which lies in the way the author tells his story, raise this book almost to the rank of an epic of the British Isles.

* Madame de Maintenon, a mistress of the Kins, later his wife. She was known to the Parisiens as "Madame de Maintenant," meaning the mistress of the 'moment.

/-Louis' attempt to extend the boundaries of France to the Rhine, a policy said by some to have been followed by ex-Premier Poincare. To this day Germans remind the French of the unprovoked attack on the German principalities and duchies when they justify their present actions against Germany by the latter's conduct in the Franco-Prussian War. This is the danger of historical parallels.

'Appeared serially in The Christian Herald (TIME, Dec. 17).