Memoirs of Madame la Marquise de Montespan — Volume 7

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Marquise de MontespanProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0

Word count: 111K words
Chapters: 12

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Memoirs of Madame la Marquise de Montespan — Volume 7 by Madame de MontespanAuthor: Montespan, Madame de, 1641-1707,Language: English, Class: DC: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: France, Andorra, Monaco, Release Date: Dec 2, 2004

Editor's review

This is Volume 7 of the Memoirs of Madame la Marquise de Montespan, the concluding part of the set. As a firsthand account left by someone who lived through the seventeenth-century French court, its value lies not in modern standards of historical rigor but in offering a court narrative steeped in a strongly personal voice and the sensibility of its era. This volume follows on from the earlier ones and suits readers already immersed in the whole work who wish to press on. Readers will notice the fragmentary, emotional quality of the narration, which is both a feature of the memoir form and an entry point for understanding how aristocratic women wrote at the time. For those studying French court culture, the details of aristocratic life, or the memoir as a genre, this volume works as part of a complete text and should not be judged in isolation as a standalone work. Being a public-domain e-book, its edition information is minimal, so readers need to do some background work themselves.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who have finished the first six volumes and want to complete the whole memoir
Readers interested in the details of seventeenth-century French court life
Students and researchers studying the memoir form and aristocratic women's writing
Readers used to public-domain electronic texts who can fill in background knowledge themselves

Not a good fit for

General readers hoping for a complete storyline from a single volume
Rigorous researchers expecting modern scholarly annotation and textual collation
Readers impatient with classical English sentences and fragmentary narration

Reading tips

Skim summaries of the first six volumes or a character list before starting this one to avoid losing the thread.
Keep a short list of French court figures on hand to check against while reading, lowering the effort of comprehension.
Read this volume as the closing part of the whole set rather than closely line by line, focusing on key scenes.
After finishing, look back over the narrative rhythm of the whole work to sense the shift in tone as the memoir closes.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Can this volume be read on its own?

It can, but the experience will suffer. This is Volume 7 of the whole memoir, and its characters and events largely continue from earlier volumes, so reading it alone easily leaves you without context. It is best to first learn the main figures and events of the first six volumes, then read this as the closing part.

How difficult is the English in this book?

The text is classical English with long sentences, a period sensibility in its narration, and no modern annotation. It poses a hurdle for readers used to modern English; reading alongside background material is advised, and you may want to look up figures and place names before continuing.

How reliable is it as a historical source?

The memoir carries a strong personal perspective and emotional coloring, so it should not be cited directly as objective historical evidence. It is better suited to observing how aristocratic women narrated at the time, the atmosphere of the court, and the author's own stance, and should be used in comparison with other materials.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Marquise de Montespan Author · French · 1641–1707

Madame de Montespan (Montespan, Madame de, 1641–1707), born Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, was a French noblewoman and one of Louis XIV's most celebrated mistresses. Renowned for her beauty and wit, she bore the king several children who were later legitimized. She fell from favor in connection with the Affair of the Poisons and retired to a convent in 1691. Her memoirs, published as Memoirs of Madame la Marquise de Montespan, survive to later generations; the collection here includes multiple volumes and a complete edition, nine items in all. These writings record court observations and personal experience and serve as primary material for understanding court life and political atmosphere in the age of Louis XIV. Public information is limited, and details of her life and the background of her works rest largely on the memoirs themselves and later scholarship.