AGNES SOREL MISTRESS OF BEAUTY - Tapa blanda

The Queen of Four Kingdoms is dead. Agnès Sorel, her beautiful and innocent twenty-year-old maid of honour soon catches the attention of the mourning court. As a trusted confidant of the deceased Queen Yolande, and despite her shyness, Agnès captivates all whom she meets, but none more so than the King of France, Charles VII, twice her age.

Appointed a demoiselle to his wife, Queen Marie d Anjou, Agnès finds herself firmly ensconced in the royal court, and in the midst of her duties slowly discovers a burgeoning love for the king that she can no longer refuse or deny. As their relationship deepens and Agnès s gentle influence over the king is recognised, she is viewed with suspicion by the court. Plagued by guilt but unable to deny her feelings, Agnès is overwhelmed to find herself to be his first true love. Her emotion clouds her good sense and she embarks on a dangerous expedition that will prove her undoing.

In this extraordinary historical novel, Princess Michael of Kent tells the little-known story of Agnès Sorel, the first official royal mistress at the court of France. It was the king s own mother-in-law, Queen Yolande who trained Agnès to help him once she was no more, to use her knowledge as much as her famous beauty, as the source of her power to guide him.