The court of French King Louis XIV was not a safe place to be. It was filled with plots and intrigues, leaving observers and commentators with more questions than answers among speculation and innuendo. Funck-Brentano was a scholar, librarian and expert on the political climate of eighteenth century France. Backing up his work with research in the archives of the Bastille, he attempts to explain and throw light on the tumultuous times.
By : Frantz Funck-Brentano (1862 - 1947), translated by George Maidment
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TWELVE months ago I had the honour of introducing M. Frantz Funck-Brentano to the English public by my translation of his Légendes et Archives de la Bastille, and in my preface to that book I gave a rapid sketch of his career which need not be repeated. If history is to be continually reconstructed, or rather, perhaps, to undergo a process of destructive distillation, there is no one more competent than M. Funck-Brentano to perform the feat. We lose our illusions with our teeth; the fables that charmed our childhood dissolve in the modern historian’s test-tube, and the mysteries that fascinated our forebears become clear with a few drops of his critical acid.
In his former book, M. Funck-Brentano solved once for all the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, showed up the impostor Latude in his true colours, and gave us surprising information about the latter days of the Bastille. In the present volume, the fruit of several years’ research among the archives at the Arsenal Library, he conclusively dispels the cloud of suspicion that has hung over the sudden death of Charles I’s winsome and ill-fated daughter Henrietta; gives us for the first time the authentic history of that beautiful poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers; suggests a very plausible explanation of Racine’s hitherto inexplicable retirement from dramatic writing; and throws a strange light upon the private history of Madame de Montespan and other fair ladies of Louis XIV’s Court. If it be objected that some of the details of the ‘black mass’ and kindred abominations are too gruesome for print, it may be urged in reply that these details are related with the cold impartial pen of a serious historian, not coloured or heightened with a view to melodramatic effect. ‘Truth’s a dog that must to kennel,’ says Lear’s Fool; Louis the Magnificent tried to stifle the damning evidence against his jealous, passionate mistress; when Time and patient research among long-forgotten papers have combined to bring the truth to light, it would ill become us to blame a scholar like M. Funck-Brentano for not joining the monarch’s conspiracy of silence.
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