When the child turned out to be a boy, his ecstatic parents named him “Louis Dieudonné” (Louis God-given).
The hyperbole that surrounded Louis XIV is neatly conveyed on the first page, with the very title-“King of the World”-swiftly followed by an epigraph penned by one of Louis’s many fawning courtiers: “You are destined to command the entire universe.” The first chapter is titled “The Gift of God,” as Parisians reacted to the news of the royal pregnancy early in 1638, as if, we learn, “the Messiah was about to be born.” The 36-year-old queen’s conception was seen as a miracle, a divine reward for King Louis XIII’s dedication of his kingdom to the Virgin Mary the previous year.
