Psychic Pulls

In the meantime, at the local public library, I found a way to entertain myself by browsing shelves of books, and one of those automatic remote control type things kept occuring within me to return to a given shelf to look at books there. It is probably similar to divining for water with divining rods as my solar plexus kept taking me back to a shelf whereupon I finally gave in and checked out a book about Louis XIV by Olivier Berniere.

Another book by Nancy Mitford attracted me as well, so I checked it out after reading Berniere's book which is the first introduction to the Sun King that I had ever read. In a short resume of many French kings and queens I had probably read a thumbnail sketch type version of his life, but until I read the book by Olivier Berniere, I had not know one thing about him at all.

I had struck gold! I read his life through then and there, and while earlier I had been reading a book by Lynn Hunt, called the Romance of the Family, which is about Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and the Bourbon clan, I had not really ever had any interest in the French kings and queens until now.

Louis XIV did not exactly catch my fancy until I happened upon a chapter that strangely enough excited me. It was about one of the wars where I felt an emotional need and I did respond to that, and then later I read a statement which set me on edge as I read a description of Louis XIV that I had already said about myself. Immediately, I was suspicious. I had used that statement when I lived in California and I wondered at how it could be that something that I had said so long ago could now come up in a book about a French king, someone who is totally alien to me.

Naturally, that made me wonder so I did then check out the book by Nancy Mitford which has many wonderful illustrations in it. The Bourbon Family is fascinating once you finally come to know of them, and the French King who is lampooned as a bigot and fop is actually a very credible and worthwhile being again when one gets to know him. But before one can do that well, one has to ignore tons of prejudice and bias about his lifestyle, his reign, his mistresses, and his extravagance.

So I embarked on the study...and this is how...