Princes and Poisoners: Studies of the Court of Louis XIV

The glittering court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, concealed a shadowed world of arsenic-laced继承 and blood money. Funck-Brentano excavates this underworld with forensic precision, centering his study on the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a noblewoman who systematically poisoned her father and brothers to inherit their fortune, then fled to England and Italy before her dramatic arrest and execution in 1676. The resulting work reads less like dry academic history than like a true crime thriller rendered in 17th-century France, revealing how poisoning became almost fashionable among Parisian high society, how the Affair of the Poisons (1679-1682) implicated hundreds of aristocrats including the King's own mistress, and how the judicial system cracked down with spectacular public executions. Funck-Brentano writes with evident relish for the grotesque details while maintaining scholarly rigor, making this an essential window into the rotten heart of absolute monarchy.