Louise de La Vallière
Raoul's former fiancée and the king's mistress, who comes to the double grave at Blois and is riding alone behind the king by the Epilogue.
To love the king without remorse, which she tells d'Artagnan in Chapter LX she can no longer do.
The book
At a glance
- Maid of honour to Madame; the king's mistress
- Louise de La Vallière, mistress of Louis XIV, later a Carmelite nun
- Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière · 1644–1710 · Tours
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLouise de La Vallière was engaged to Raoul de Bragelonne and is now loved by the king. In this section she is mostly absent and always present. A letter Fouquet once wrote her starts the king's fury, and Raoul's last letter is addressed to her. She is the one visitor at the grave of the two men her choice killed.
How Louise de La Vallière Is Portrayed
- The letter that starts itIn Chapter XVII the king's rage at reading Fouquet's old love letter to her is what sends him to bed exhausted and asleep under the painted dome, where Aramis is waiting.
- The sentence on the tabletIn Chapter XXXII Raoul's final message to her, to be delivered on the day a date can be placed under it, says that he writes to tell her once more he loves her and dies to punish himself for it.
- A religionIn Chapter LX she kneels at the grave of Athos and Raoul and tells d'Artagnan that such love is a religion and that she will be punished for it. She strews flowers on the fresh earth before Saint-Aignan fetches her back to the jealous king.
- The second carriageIn the Epilogue she rides alone with two dull women in the second carriage while the king rides beside Madame de Montespan. Aramis points out how her eyes follow the king.
If you like The Man in the Iron Mask
If you like Alexandre Dumas
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Mark Twain
The Missouri newspaperman who became America's most famous writer, and whose first book made its reputation partly out of Paris: in 1867 he arrived with a shipload of American tourists, renamed his guide Ferguson, watched the high-kicking can-can through his fingers and wrote it all down. He kept coming back — and was living in Paris in the mid-1890s, broke, while finishing the novel he considered his best, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
View author
Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.
View author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author