The Love-Affairs of the Condés (1530-1740)

Two centuries of passion and poison at the French court, told through the bedrooms of one of Europe's most powerful dynastia. The Condés were not merely players in the great game of throne and altar - they loved recklessly, betrayed spectacularly, and paid for both with their blood. Beginning with Louis de Bourbon's marriage to Éléonore de Roye amid the gathering storms of the Reformation, H. Noel Williams traces a family whose marital affairs ignited wars, toppled ministries, and entangled the fate of France with the most dangerous men and women of their age. This is history from the inside out: not the dry chronicle of treaties and battles, but the intimate, often scandalous story of how the Condés loved, lusted, and leveraged their way through two hundred years of civil war, royal favor, and aristocratic tragedy. For anyone who has ever suspected that the history of dynasties is really the history of their bedchambers.