1895. A study of the Sun King, one of the most powerful rulers in Western history, whose court and reign was riddled with intrigue, passion, jealousy, and political skullduggery. As the author writes in the prologue: The French people during more than two-thirds of his long reign made him into a god and worshipped him, while at the time of the Spanish Succession war a generation had grown up in England which, says Mr. Wyon in his History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, regarded Louis XIV as a monster of ambition with a mission from the devil to make slaves and Papists of the whole human race, a perfidious tyrant with whom it was useless to think of entering into a compact, whom it was absolutely necessary to bind with chains of iron.