Secrets About As True As True Gets.

One of the themes I explore in my fiction, poems, and nonfiction is secrets. Another thing I love to do with my writing is to pit truth against fiction. What, after all, is the truth? No matter how hard a writer tries to be unbiased, their own truths will infect what they write if in no other way than through the viewpoint the author uses to tell the story.

Thank heaven that Veronica Buckley allows herself to transmit some of her own truths to The Secret Wife of Louis XIV. Without that, this would be but another textbook on European history.

Still, lovers of nonfiction will be entranced by The Secret Wife of Louis XIV. Even those who love textbooks. We know well from the writing, the index, the notes, and bibliography that what we are reading is well researched and about as truthful as a writer can get.

The thing is, pure nonfiction—no matter how well written—will never be as entertaining as a good story that has been tucked and tailored so that the plot points come just at the right places to keep the reader turning pages. Nor will it be as entertaining as a good story with lots of dialogue and action inserted just where the story requires it. So, if you are a reader who must have those elements of fiction to keep you entertained, this book may be 100 pages too long and much deeper in specifics (some might call it trivia) than you’ll want. Especially if you buy it only because you’re titillated by that great title that would call to anyone with a romantic soul.

If, on the other hand, you love to know the truth and hate sifting through details to know where the author has embroidered the story, this book is definitely for you. You will come away knowing much about the times—feeling them, in fact. You may—on rare occasions—wish you didn’t have to be bothered with the family trees and political relationships (I eventually gave up on much of that), but you will adore it when Author Buckley lapses into descriptions of the prisons, the food, and the bosom-pushing fashions. You’ll also love the sense you get of just what makes the French, well... French. What makes them that way to this day.

Buckley was both lucky and smart in selecting this story. There is enough surviving information that she was able to make the story potent. As an example, Madame de Sévigné is the Hedda Hopper of her day. Every biographer should be fortunate enough to have a good gossip columnist at her disposal.

And then there is acerbic Liselotte, the German wife of the dauphin, next in line to the Sun King’s crown. What a little snot! And what insight she gives us into Versailles and about everything else in those times, including the wars raging through Europe.

So, will an inveterate reader of light romances like this book? Maybe not. But will readers who want meat and potatoes, but don't mind their being mixed with a little chocolate and a few petits fours like it? They will adore it. They will shovel it in, in fact. With or without forks—which, by the way, didn’t show up in France until the time of Louis XIV.