ANGELIQUE AND THE KING

Further in the career of Angelique, who has already lived more lives than any one woman is entitled to, finds her now at Versailles, with an ""insatiable sensuous desire for all the exquisite and precious things of life"", and two months' married to her cousin Philippe who humiliates her and hides her away. But he saves her from death (a wolf) and she intercedes for him (the Bastille) with Louis XIV, and after several intimate sessions in which her volupte is overwhelming, he admits his love for her just before he is killed. Now a widow, she is vulnerable to the abiding attraction she exercises for the King, who first uses her on a diplomatic mission (the seduction of a Persian prince), then finds her ""resistless, yielding"" in the arms of a Hungarian revolutionary, and then proceeds towards his own appropriation of her which makes her the target of Mme. de Montespan who tries to poison her. The King takes her to the Trianon, and she is again ""resistless"" when she suddenly accuses him of the murder of her first husband, learns that he has not died at the stake, and is now ready to look for him- presumably in the next......If this successor to the earlier success is only about half as long, there are just as many passages at arms of all kinds- with the ""transcendent transfiguration"" of the flesh adding its radiance to the splendor of 17th century court life and intrigue in probably its most permissive treatment to date. And the market would seem to be about as well-developed as its heroine.