Five-minute digest

Louise de la Vallière

Alexandre Dumas

Summary

Louise de la Vallière is the third of the four Project Gutenberg volumes of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, containing chapters 141-208 of Dumas's last d'Artagnan novel. It tells how the young Louis XIV falls in love with Louise, the gentle maid of honor whom Raoul, the Vicomte de Bragelonne, has loved since childhood. While Raoul is sent away to England on the king's business, the king and Louise draw together through a series of meetings at Fontainebleau and Paris, helped by courtiers such as Saint-Aignan and Malicorne. Madame, jealous of the king's attention, turns against Louise, and at one point Louise flees to the convent at Chaillot before the king brings her back. Raoul returns to find that he has lost her and that the whole court knew before he did; his grief, and Athos's dignified protest to the king, are among the most moving scenes in the series. Around this love story the political plot tightens. Colbert gains ground against Fouquet, who struggles to raise money for the king's demands, and Aramis, now Bishop of Vannes, works with Porthos and the governor of the Bastille, Baisemeaux, toward a secret plan concerning a prisoner, which will come to light in the next volume. D'Artagnan, captain of the musketeers, watches everything with a soldier's irony and remains loyal to his friends. Dumas treats the affair with sympathy for Louise but without hiding the wrong done to Raoul, and his portrait of a young king who takes whatever he wants is a study in the abuse of power. Because the central story is an adulterous royal romance, the volume suits readers in grades 10-12. It is part 5 of six in the Project Gutenberg division of the d'Artagnan Romances: The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Ten Years Later, Louise de la Vallière, The Man in the Iron Mask.

Top Lessons

Power and desire
The king takes the woman another man loves. Dumas shows how unchecked power makes wrongdoing easy.
Related across the library
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Lesson: Power without humility
  Power without humility. Sun can cross eighteen thousand li in a leap, yet his boast that he can jump out of Buddha's palm ends with him writing his name on Buddha's finger. The early chapters show great gifts turned to disorder by pride, and the rest of the book shows the same gifts put to service.
- Till We Have Faces, Lesson: Love that devours
  Love that devours. Orual's love for Psyche, for the Fox and for Bardia is real, but it wants to possess. Lewis shows natural affection turning jealous when it cannot bear the beloved to belong to another, even to a god. Only when Orual sees what Ansit and Tarin see does she recognise the hunger in her devotion.
- Henry V, Act 3, Scene 6
  Fluellen describes Bardolph's face as all bubukles and whelks just before he is hanged; Henry admits his people are much enfeebled with sickness.
- Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, Lesson: A king asks his people
  A king asks his people. Pelasgus will not choose between sacrilege and war on his own authority. Aeschylus stages an early picture of a ruler binding his city by consent, while showing that consent does not make the choice painless.
- On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Lesson: Reformer at Worms, ruler at Whitehall
  Reformer at Worms, ruler at Whitehall. The fourth and sixth lectures pair a priest who refuses to recant against conscience with a ruler who seizes power to impose order. Carlyle admires both, but their cases differ: Luther stands alone and suffers; Cromwell commands armies and dissolves parliaments. Comparing them tests where courage ends and domination begins.
Athos's rebuke
Athos tells the king plainly that he has wronged his son. Students can discuss speaking truth to power.
Related across the library
- White Nights, Fourth night and morning
  The dreamer's sudden hope and loss form a compact study of attachment, disappointment and depressive return.
- The Leipzig Disputation, Lesson: The disputation as a school of argument
  The disputation as a school of argument. Leipzig was a formal university disputation with agreed rules, notaries and appointed judges. It shows how late medieval scholars tested claims publicly, and how much depended on preparation, memory and command of authorities.
- Richard III, Lesson: Religion as a mask
  Religion as a mask. Richard boasts that he clothes his villainy in scraps of Holy Writ and appears to the citizens with a prayer book between two bishops. The play shows the special wickedness of using piety as a tool of ambition.
- White Nights, Medical lens
  White Nights is useful for loneliness, fantasy life and emotional dependency. The dreamer's night wandering and self-description resemble melancholic isolation and maladaptive daydreaming, though the novella's sentimental mode resists clinical reduction. Nastenka's grandmother adds a mild caregiving/control dynamic around blindness and age.
- The Roman History, Medical lens
  Ammianus is a rich source for late-Roman ideas of disease and for the deaths of emperors. His digression on pestilence at Amida (XIX.4) summarizes the inherited theory that extremes of heat, cold, moisture and drought, or air corrupted by corpses, cause epidemics, and sorts plagues into pandemic, epidemic and a fast-killing third kind; he cites Homer and Thucydides and says the garrison's sickness lifted after rain. Julian's spear wound to the liver, the physician's attempt to help him and his death by blood los...
Grief and faithfulness
Raoul's love does not change when he loses Louise. His sorrow raises questions about how to bear disappointment.
Related across the library
- The Golden Bowl, Lesson: People as possessions
  People as possessions. Adam collects art and, in a sense, people. The novel questions what money can buy.
- Fahrenheit 451, Lesson: Memory as a library
  Memory as a library. Granger's exiles keep books alive by memorizing them, so that each person becomes a book waiting to be written down again. The ending argues that what matters is not paper but the words and the people who carry them, and that culture survives disasters through memory and patience.
- The Muqaddimah, Lesson: Solidarity builds and luxury dissolves
  Solidarity builds and luxury dissolves. Group feeling gives a hardy people the cohesion to win power; settled rule brings wealth, comfort and reliance on paid troops, which weaken that cohesion until a new group with stronger solidarity takes over. The cycle is presented as a pattern of human nature rather than a moral fable alone.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book V. That the Laws Given by the Legislator Ought to Be in Relation to
  burdensome than the people themselves They have broken their numerous guards mitigated criminal punishments erected tribunals entered into a knowledge of the laws and instructed the people But there are particular causes that will probably once more involve them in the very misery which they now endeavour to avoid In those states religion has more influence than anywhere else it is fear added to fear In Mahomedan countries it is partly from their religion that the people derive the surprising veneration they hav...
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Lesson: The law as guardian of those who cannot guard themselves
  The law as guardian of those who cannot guard themselves. Chapter 8's account of idiots and lunatics shows the crown acting as trustee for people unable to manage their affairs, preserving their property for them and forbidding the next heir to be the keeper of a lunatic, since he would gain by the person's death. Blackstone presents this protective duty as part of the king's office as general conservator of his people.

Verified Quotes

“Since I have become a bishop, I have looked for these primeval natures, which make me love truth and hate intrigue”

— Alexandre Dumas, Louise de la Vallière, Chapter IX, trans. Anonymous 19th-century translation.Quote card

Speeches on the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay: Compromise Resolutions and Speech (February 5-6, 1850)
referred that each of the parties at the North in its turn has moved and endeavored to obtain the assistance of a small party called Abolitionists in order that the scale in its favor might preponderate against that of its adversary And all around us every where we see too many evidences of the existence of the spirit and intemperance of party I might go to other legislative bodies than that which is assembled in Congress and I might draw from them illustrations of the melancholy truth vipon which I am dwelling...
Confessions, Book I
none to tell me neither father nor mother nor experience of others nor mine own memory Dost Thou mock me for asking this and bid me praise Thee and acknowledge Thee for that I do know I acknowledge Thee Lord of heaven and earth and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being and my infancy whereof I remember nothing for Thou hast appointed that man should from others guess much as to himself and believe much on the strength of weak females Even then I had being and life and at my infancy's close I could seek for...
Till We Have Faces, Lesson: Seeing and not seeing
Seeing and not seeing. Psyche sees a palace where Orual sees only heather and rock. Lewis leaves open whether Orual's blindness is inability or refusal, and why each piece of evidence leaves her unpersuaded. Lewis ties her uncertainty to her wishes: if the god is real, Psyche belongs to him and not to her.
Confessions, Book I
inspired me through the Incarnation of Thy Son through the ministry of the Preacher And how shall I call upon my God my God and Lord since when I call for Him I shall be calling Him to myself and what room is there within me whither my God can come into me whither can God come into me God who made heaven and earth is there indeed O Lord my God aught in me that can contain Thee do then heaven and earth which Thou hast made and wherein Thou hast made me contain Thee or because nothing which exists could exist with...
Confessions, Book Iv
it converted and follow thee Whatever by her thou hast sense of is in part and the whole whereof these are parts thou knowest not and yet they delight thee But had the sense of thy flesh a capacity for comprehending the whole and not itself also for thy punishment been justly restricted to a part of the whole thou wouldest that whatsoever existeth at this present should pass away that so the whole might better please thee For what we speak also by the same sense of the flesh thou hearest yet wouldest not thou ha...

“In fact the poor girl was in love, and she reveled in her innocent affection”

— Alexandre Dumas, Louise de la Vallière, Chapter XXII, trans. Anonymous 19th-century translation.Quote card

Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. I, Ch. IV (Ch. 4)
I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent Bathsheba refuses Gabriel's first proposal.
The Story of a Soul, Chapter XI
O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love! After reading St. Paul on the body of Christ and the more excellent way of charity.
Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 3
The second trance in Constantinople, a doctor's useless remedies, and the waking change of sex announced by the trumpets of Truth.
Orlando: A Biography, Lesson: Biography as comedy
Biography as comedy. The narrator poses as a sober biographer with documents and portraits, then complains when the documents are burnt or the subject only thinks. Woolf mocks the confident lives-and-letters biography of her father's generation and asks what a life really consists of.
Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 3
Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. After the trumpets of Truth wake Orlando in Constantinople, the biographer pauses to state the fact of the change and that memory and identity are unbroken.

Louise de la Vallière

Summary

Top Lessons

Power and desire

Athos's rebuke

Grief and faithfulness

Verified Quotes