Just finished Simone Bertière's (I don't think anyone besides Camilla shares my interest in her... maybe Dom?) book "Les Femmes du Roi Soleil" - about the women in the life of Louis XIV. Fascinating stuff, and a good number of anecdotes ranging from the slighty bizarre to the utterly hilarious. Apparently the Marquess de Montespan, one of the king's mistresses, owned two pet bears (I guess cats or dogs weren't exotic enough for her tastes...), whom she set loose overnight in the newly redecorated rooms of a rival; the result drew crowds of curious viewers, and the young Jean Racine somehow managed to get himself locked inside the rooms with a friend after lingering too long admiring the ravages, so he was forced to spend the night, "camping in the same place the bears had done the previous night".

Next up - no idea yet. Still have a book on the Thirty Years War laying around ("Europe's Tragedy" by Peter H. Wilson), but there are also a dozen or more other books that I still need to get to.