The Lady Was a Bourbon

DAUGHTER OF FRANCE (336 pp.)--V. Sackvilfe-West--Doubleday ($4.95).

Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchess of Montpensier, Chatellerault and St. Fargeau, Sovereign of Dombes, Princess of Joinville and Laroche-sur-Yon. Dauphine of Auvergne, and Fille de France, was something of a royal office joke. But since the office was the 17th century French court--Louis XIII was her uncle, Louis XIV her first cousin--the lady left footnotes in the sands of time. Biographer V. (for Victoria Mary) Sackville-West, 67, has written a witty, informal, entertaining book about the bedeviled woman who was known not by her titles, but with simple Bourbon haughtiness as plain Mademoiselle.

Kings Must Please. Mademoiselle led a life of rueful anticlimax. In a setting where devious femininity was an accepted tactic, Mademoiselle was a blunt, soldierly Amazon famed for her huge nose. Obviously destined for a European throne, she rejected princes and kings who proposed to her or were proposed for her--Charles II of England, Alfonso VI of Portugal, Philip IV of Spain. With an annual income of nearly $1,000,000, she was the richest princess in Europe; yet the man who raided her fortune the most shamelessly was her own weak-spined father, the Duke of Orleans.

Self-cast as a latter-day Joan of Arc in the Fronde, a kind of comic-opera civil war of the disgruntled French nobility, Mademoiselle achieved only the boring martyrdom of five years' rural banishment from the Paris she loved. After 4-3 years of stalwart virginity in the most lascivious court in Europe, she fell passionately in love with a toy-soldier-sized captain in the king's guards, one Count de Lauzun, who was half a dozen years and a foot or so her junior. She wooed him ardently. For three happy days, Louis XIV gave his grudging consent to the match, then withdrew it when a storm of popular protest blew up. The Sun King broke Mademoiselle's heart with the wondrously uncharacteristic words: "Kings must please the public."

Gentlemen Don't Wait. Biographer West (the wife of British Historian-Diplomat Harold Nicolson) has skillfully woven Mademoiselle's figure, with her private ardors and ironies, into the larger tapestry of the history, manners, and morals of Bourbon France. Contemporary readers are likely to be more startled by the manners than the morals. The Queen's own gentleman-in-waiting thought nothing of dropping the royal hand for a moment "pour alter pisser contre la tapis-serie." Garbage filled the rank Parisian streets, but the stench of the dandies at court was almost as overpowering. The plumed and perfumed male of the era might choose from 50 shades of stockings with which to drape his shapely shanks. Some of the morosely fanciful hues: dying monkey, resuscitated corpse, lost time, mortal sin, and (says Author West primly) "others too squalid for polite pages."

Mademoiselle crammed her voluminous journals with vivid vignettes. One episode she understandably failed to record concerned Count de Lauzun who hid under the bed of Mme. de Montespan, mistress to Louis XIV, and later mimicked her conversation back to her word for word. Mademoiselle did describe the bloodiest battle of the Fronde, when she saw the Duke de la Rochefoucauld staggering toward her, "having received a musket-ball through his eyes and nose, so that his eyes seemed to be falling out, and he kept blowing the blood away as though he feared one of his eyes might fall into his mouth."

Like La Rochefoucauld, Mademoiselle was destined to die in bed. But even death did not spare her a final characteristic misadventure. Her body lay in state for several days. Gossipist Saint-Simon describes the "most ridiculous thing" that then happened: "In mid-ceremony, the urn containing the entrails exploded with a frightful noise and a sudden insufferable stink. Instantly, there were the ladies, some of them swooning with horror, others taking flight ... the monks ... in the act of singing psalms, all made for the doors ... the chaos was extreme."

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