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himself at summer nights of revelry with Henriette-Anne or travelling with her granddaughter Adelaide round the gardens of Versailles in a little pony cart when he was old.
    For the latter attachment he paid a terrible price: the Sun King who would not let there be clouds in his presence, forbidding mourning as a matter of principle, was brought to acknowledge his own impotence in the face of heaven's decrees and ‘submit’. In the dignity of this grief and the stoicism of his death, Louis XIV was entitled to call himself an honnête homme, a civilised man, that ultimate term of seventeenth-century praise.
    We must also remember that in the century when Louis XIV chose the sun as his symbol – ‘the most vigorous and the most splendid image of a great monarch’ – one of the declared attributes of the sun was ‘the light which it shines on those other stars which surround it like a court’. And those stars in their turn, the women in his life, lit up the court of the Sun King.
* This was no Henry VIII, the fate of whose six wives is traditionally recorded as ‘Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.’ With Louis XIV there were no divorces and certainly no decapitations: the mistresses who abandoned the court were not compelled to do so.
* It was appropriate that in the mid-nineteenth century Flaubert had Madame Bovary turn to La Vallière for inspiration when she attempted to recover her faith after being abandoned by her lover: ‘in the pride of her godliness, Emma compared herself with the great ladies of old, they whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La Vallière, those who … shed at the feet of Christ the tears of a heart wounded by the world.’ 3

NOTES
    Full bibliographical details of the works cited in short form will be found in the list of Sources.

SOURCES
Place of publication of French editions is Paris and of English editions is London unless otherwise noted. Translations from French editions are my own if the name of a translator is not given; the translator's name is supplied for German, Italian and Spanish material.
ABBREVIATIONS
AHG
Archives Historiques de la Guerre, Vincennes
AN
Archives Nationales, Paris
AST
Archivio di Stato di Torino, Corte, Real Casa, Letteri principi diversi, mazzo 26, Turin
BL
British Library MSS, London
BMV
Bibliothèque Municipale, Versailles
BN
Bibliothèque Nationale MSS, rue de Richelieu, Paris
Adamson, John, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe. Ritual Politics and Culture Under the Ancien Regime , 1500–1750, 1999
Adamson, John, ‘The Making of the Ancien-Regime Court 1500–1700', in Adamson, Courts
Adamson, John, ‘The Tudor and Stuart Courts 1509–1717', in Adamson, Courts
Additional MSS, BL
Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick, pbk, 1979
Ariès, Philippe, & Bégin, André, Western Sexuality. Practice and precept in past and present times , trans. Anthony Forster, Oxford, pbk, 1985
[Cahiers d'Aubigné] ‘Autour de Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon', 2 vols, Albineana, 10 & 11, Niort, 1999
[ Aumale] Mémoire et lettres inédites de Mlle d'Aumale, in Haussonville & Hanoteaux, II
Backer, Dorothy Anne, Precious Women, New York, 1974
Bajou, Thierry, Paintings at Versailles. XVIIth Century, Paris, 1998
Bandenier, Gilles, ‘Onze lettres inédites de Benjamin de Vallois à Nathan
d'Aubigné', in Cahiers d'Aubigné, I
Bardon, Françoise, ‘La Thème de la Madeleine pénitente au XVIIème siècle en France', Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, vol. 31, 1968
Barker, Nancy Nichols, Brother to the Sun King. Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Baltimore, 1989
Barthélemy, Edouard de, Les Filles du Régent, 2 vols, 1874
Barthes, Roland, Sur Racine, 1966
Bassenne, M., La Vie tragique d'une Reine d'Espagne. Marie-Louise de Bourbon-Orléans, nièce de Louis XIV, 1939
Beaussant, Philippe, Louis XIV artiste, 1999
Beaussant, Philippe, Lully ou Le Musicien du Soleil, 1992
Beaussant, Philippe, Le Roi-Soleil se lève