Stand by your sovereign

Ah, but while mistresses had power, pensions, and palaces, it wasn't all a bed of kingly roses. Pandered-to kings wanted their playmates perpetually sunny and healthy, and heaven help the mistress who might want to respond to the call of nature during a daylong carriage ride.

Herman's writing sparkles off the pages, introducing us to a ribald roster of infamous characters. There's Madame de Pompadour, the paramour of France's Louis XV, who became the unofficial minister of war and kept her position for 19 years even though she was frigid. There's Henry IV of France, who insisted to his wife that his mistress's swelling belly was the result of too much good food and then, nine months later, wanted her to help with the delivery.

The power and the pensions might be gone for modern-day mistresses and their kings, but there are other, richer rewards. Don't pity Great Britain's Edward VIII, the duke of Windsor, for abdicating his throne for commoner Wallis Simpson, because, Herman notes, he never wanted the responsibility of ruling. Feeling angry at Prince Charles for favoring plain Jane Camilla Parker Bowles over his dazzling Diana? That pair has lasted over 35 years, and there's now no law that says he can't marry her and make her queen.

But it's not just kings who make bad decisions about love. So does young journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen, mixing up love with politics in her fascinatingly moving memoir, ''Lying Together: My Russian Affair" (University of Wisconsin, $22.95). Told in an engagingly intimate voice, the book starts with Cohen pursuing a story about the sexual trafficking of young Russian girls. She contacts and hires Kevin, a man in Russia she used to know, and before you can say glasnost, they're burning up the phone wires, falling in love, and she's ''flying 600 miles into the arms of a man she's never kissed."