Author’s Note

As I said in the beginning note, this book’s Lulu is a fictional member of Louis XIV’s family, the Bourbons. I needed a “might have been” place to put her birth, and found it in the only gap in the birth order of the first five children born to Louis and Mme de Montespan. No actual child was born in 1671, so that became the year of Lulu’s birth. And because she exists only for the space of this story, loose fictional ends are not left dangling in real history.

Researching Louis XIV’s palaces of Versailles and Marly, which were within a few miles of each other southeast of Paris, was a fascinating part of writing A Plague of Lies. Versailles was constantly changing, so even if we’ve seen it as it is now, we haven’t seen it as it was then. Tony Spawforth’s recent book Versailles: A Biography of a Palace was immensely helpful, and is a great read for anyone who wants to know more.

I was so astonished by the Marly Machine that I had to use it. Built on the Seine near the palace of Marly, the Machine had fourteen huge water wheels, each twelve meters in diameter and operated by pistons. It pumped water up a long steep hill to a holding pond and aqueduct, and then to the gardens of Marly and Versailles. It extended far out into the river, like a rectangular peninsula, and was enclosed in a vast wooden casing with many levels and walkways. The Machine operated mostly unchanged until 1817, and then in various updated configurations until 1968.

The seventeenth century was a better time for watering your garden than for getting sick. In 1687, French doctors had been arguing about the medicinal use of antimony for a hundred years. Originally called stibium, antimony was a metallic substance that could be used in the making of medicinal cups. These cups were then filled with white wine, which broke down and absorbed some of the metal. When the wine was drunk, it irritated the digestive system and caused vomiting, which was thought to rid the body of illness. The medical faculty at the University of Paris supported its use, but other doctors (notably Guy Patin, who died in 1672) were violently opposed to it, insisting that it killed more patients than it helped.

As for other parts of this book that are real, the flogging the king gave Bouchel’s fictional grandmother is real—a woman whose son was killed during Versailles’ construction was flogged for confronting and loudly blaming the king on one of his inspection tours. The belief that “demons of the air” caused thunderstorms and were fought off by ringing baptized church bells is also true. In a letter about the baptism of a Paris bell, the king’s sister-in-law Liselotte remarked that the bell, garlanded with flowers, looked exactly like a hefty court lady of her acquaintance wearing a new and overdecorated gown. And “the most Christian king” Louis XIV really did covertly support the Moslem Turks in their attack on eastern Europe, because they were keeping his European enemies occupied and out of his hair—or wig, since he was probably bald by that time.

As I wrote this book, I grew very fond of Anne-Marie, daughter of the Prince of Condé and granddaughter of Claire Clemence, the princess of Condé, whose story is partly told in the second Charles book, The Eloquence of Blood. Anne-Marie and her three sisters were Bourbons and Princesses of the Blood, but because they were so small—like Claire Clemence—the court called them Dolls of the Blood. Anne-Marie, who never married, died of lung disease at twenty-five. The Duc de Saint-Simon wrote that she had “great wit, kindness, and piety, which sustained her in her very sad life.”