The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (68 page)

Marie Thérèse died in the convent in which she spent most of her later years.

Louis, of whom Voltaire said, “He liked the ladies, and it was reciprocal,”

conducted his court as a never-ending party. Surrounded by fawning attendants from the time he woke in the morning until he retired at night (when he used Versailles’ labyrinth of secret passages to visit one of his current lovers), Louis

directed every detail of the continuous round of hunts, dances, and royal dinners that established his court as the center of European culture. A court observer wrote, “One should have some indulgence for this prince if he should fall, surrounded as he is by so many female devils, all seeking to tempt him.” And the women were encouraged in their prestige-seeking flirtations by “their families, fathers, mothers, even husbands.”

While romancing his homosexual brother’s wife, Louis fell in love with one of her attendants,
Mme.
Louise de La Vallière, who became his secret, then official, mistress. A frail, almost homely woman, La Vallière’s place in the king’s heart and court was usurped by one of her closest friends, Madame de Montespan, wife of the Prince of Monaco. A woman of intelligence and voluptuous beauty, the Marquise de Montespan used her influence as Louis’ mistress to rule the social life of the palace for many years.

Since she had gained the king’s affection and ascended to his bedchamber by treachery, Madame de Montespan was well aware that there would be romantic plottings against her by the other women of the court. Her attempt to keep Louis faithful led to the most famous scandal of their day, the “affair of the poisons.”

In her anxiety, Madame de Montespan first resorted to love potions and charms. Then, despairing of their effectiveness, she submitted to Black Masses conducted by a mad priest. During these secret ceremonies, she would lie naked on an altar (with her face and breasts covered in deference to her rank) while priests chanted and fondled her body. It was alleged that she even participated in the sacrifice of infants, whose hearts and entrails were burned, powdered, and added to love potions which were slipped into the king’s food.

Finally Madame de Montespan was accused of attempting to poison her rivals and of planning, out of frantic jealousy, to poison the king himself, reasoning that if she couldn’t have him, no one else would either. Louis never gave public recognition to these accusations, but he dismissed her from his bed and court after providing her with an ample estate as a token of their affair.

There followed numerous shortlived romances before Louis became enthralled with Madame de Maintenon, widow of satirist Paul Scarron and former governess of the king’s children. A deeply religious woman who had been disgusted by the sexual demands of her crippled husband (in his partially paralyzed state, he was forced to consummate their marriage orally), Madame de Maintenon at first rejected Louis’ attentions and his request that she become his mistress.

Because she burned all of their love letters following Louis’ death, it is only speculation that they slept together before they were secretly married, when she was 48 and he 45. (It has even been suggested that she was technically a virgin when they married.) Their morganatic marriage ceremony, during which the king gave her his left hand instead of his right, entitled this woman of common birth to be the king’s wife without the rights or inheritance claims of a queen.

Considered frigid by nature and morally repulsed by Louis’ extramarital affairs, Madame de Maintenon struggled to reform the king and save his soul, while still satisfying his amorous nature. “Imagine,” she said, “the slavery of having to amuse a man who is incapable of being amused.”

Still, the “peasant queen” did her best, and she shared the king’s bed until he died of gangrene five days before his 77th birthday. A true voluptuary, Louis XIV remained lusty and vigorous until the end, both in and out of bed.

—R.S.F.

The Well-Beloved

LOUIS XV (Feb. 15, 1710–May 10, 1774)

HIS FAME:
King of France from the age

of five until his death at 64, Louis XV

was a relatively passive ruler under

whom the monarchy suffered a number

of blows, including the loss of its North

American colonies to England and an

involvement in various debilitating wars.

This paved the way for the revolution

that toppled his successor, Louis XVI.

When young, Louis was affectionately

nicknamed “the Well-Beloved” by his

people. Toward the end of his reign,

however, his scandalous private life made

him very unpopular. His fame today

derives more from his love affairs than

from his political achievements.

HIS PERSON:
Because Louis inherited the throne as a child, the first years of his reign saw a regent and ministers in control of France. As a youth Louis dedicated himself to hunting and regular church attendance, pursuits he followed throughout his life. Official occasions required, however, that the boy-king appear before his thronged subjects. Those appearances scarred the child, leaving him forever fearful of crowds, extremely shy, and consistently aloof in his dealings with strangers.

In 1723, under prevailing French law, Louis reached his majority. Two years later, at the bidding of his chief minister, the Duc de Bourbon, Louis wed Maria Leszczyñska, daughter of Stanislas I, the deposed king of Poland. Adult or no, Louis still did not assume the full duties of the throne. In 1743, upon the death of Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, who had replaced the Duc de Bourbon as chief minister, Louis insisted he would take complete control. Nonetheless, Louis still preferred pursuits more pleasurable than ruling—in particular, making love. His mistresses, and there were many, often meddled in the affairs of state. The Marquise de Vintimille is blamed for France’s involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748).

SEX LIFE:
Strikingly handsome, Louis had a sensuous face and a well-developed body. At 15 his sexual maturity was apparent. Since he loathed his five-year-old fiancée, the Spanish infanta, his chief minister affianced him instead to the 23-year-old Maria Leszczyñska. While preparations were under way for the scheduled wedding, Louis’ tutors worried about how he could be taught the art of lovemaking. They decided to hang pictures of sex acts on the walls of his study. For firsthand instruction, Louis turned to a certain Madame de Falari and lost his virginity in her bed. Although Louis’ intellect is occasionally belittled, he learned the subject of sex thoroughly. On his wedding night, Louis made love to his wife seven times.

Maria dutifully gave Louis 10 children (seven survived childhood), but her enthusiasm for sex paled beside his hearty appetite. As she pointed out, she was always “in bed, or pregnant, or brought to bed.” She retreated within a small circle of staid intimates to whom she complained that Louis came to her in the night stinking of champagne, and soon she bored the king.

Maria and Louis remained wed until her death in 1768; however, their marriage, for all practical purposes, ceased to be in 1738. Maria, having suffered a miscarriage, was told by her doctor to refrain from sex. As a result she locked Louis out of her bedroom. Shortly thereafter he made public his affair of some duration with Madame de Mailly, one of the five De Nesle sisters. Within months Louis’ fickle affections had turned to Madame de Mailly’s sister, the Marquise de Vintimille. That affair ended when she died giving birth to his child. Louis turned next to a third De Nesle sister, the dazzling Madame de Châteauroux. She, too, soon died, after emerging from a sickbed to heed Louis’

call. The youngest sister amused Louis briefly but found herself rewarded by being married to a duke. Only one sister escaped Louis’ attentions. Her husband objected to sharing her with the king.

In 1745 Louis took as his mistress Jeanne Poisson, who became the Marquise de Pompadour—perhaps the central figure in his life. Pompadour, an accomplished and charming woman (even Maria liked her and said, “If there must be a mistress, better this one than any other”), had long dreamed of becoming part of the royal family. When she was nine, a fortune-teller thrilled her by predicting she would one day be the king’s mistress. After contriving to draw Louis’ attention to her at a ball, she became his “official mistress.” Her husband grudgingly accepted a legal separation from her. Besides sharing the king’s bed, Pompadour shared the secrets of state and the resources of the nation’s treasury. Her love of luxury and her interference in politics caused the people to resent her as well as the king.

Described by Louis as “the most delicious woman in France,” Pompadour valiantly tried to keep pace with his unflagging sex drive. She took aphrodisiacs and lived on a diet designed to heighten her passion—a menu of vanilla, truffles, and celery. It was to no avail. As she herself confessed, she was “very cold by nature.” In 1751, her health weakened by a chest infection, she ended her sexual relations with Louis. It was not the king’s body she wanted—“it’s his heart,” she said. She got her wish. Pompadour remained Louis’ closest confidante and, until her death in 1764, lived in apartments connected to his by a staircase.

After the break in physical relations with Pompadour, the virile king turned to a succession of lovers—often young prostitutes. At the Parc aux Cerfs, a four-room hideaway in Versailles, a parade of mistresses satisfied him. Very few knew that their lover was the king. They were told that he was a rich Pole. Girls were nearly always in residence there, but few stayed long; new lovers moved in to replace old ones whose charms had waned. Only Louise O’Morphi, a former model for the painter Boucher, achieved a long tenure at the Parc aux Cerfs. The libertine Casanova claimed in his memoirs that he had procured her for the king, but she may have been brought to Louis by his regular pimp, his valet Lebel. She arrived when she was 15 1/2 years old and instantly captured the king’s affection. Several years and one or two children later, however, she indiscreetly asked the king about Pompadour. “On what terms are you, then, with your precious old girl?” she inquired. Louis sent O’Morphi packing for her bold-ness, although he did arrange a marriage for her with a minor noble.

In 1768 Louis took his last mistress of importance, the voluptuous Comtesse du Barry. The reputed daughter of a monk and—or so Parisian gossips claimed—a former prostitute, Du Barry’s affair with Louis outraged the French. Louis was not to be shaken, however. When the Duc de Richelieu asked why he kept her, Louis replied: “She makes me forget that soon I will be 60.”

Du Barry remained with Louis until his death from smallpox.

HIS THOUGHTS:
In inquiring into the attributes of a woman touted to him by a courtier, Louis asked whether she had “a good bust.” The official admitted that he had not looked. “You are a booby!” Louis rebuked the man. “That is the first thing one looks at in a woman.”

—R.M.

Spain’s Doña Juana

QUEEN MARIA LOUISA OF SPAIN (Dec. 9, 1751–Jan. 2, 1819)
HER FAME:
Maria Louisa, who was queen of Spain during the turbulent era of the French Revolution, scandalized the courts of Europe by using her royal bodyguards as a recruiting ground for sexual playmates. She elevated her most enduring paramour, Manuel de Godoy, from guardsman to prime minister of Spain. When the Spanish monarchy was overthrown in 1808, the queen went into exile accompanied by not only her husband but her lover as well.

HER PERSON:
Maria Louisa was a Bourbon by birth and by marriage. Her father was the brother of Charles III, king of Spain; her mother was the eldest daughter of Louis XV of France; and Maria Louisa was married at the age of 14 to her cousin Charles, heir to the Spanish throne. Having been educated by the philosopher

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the aggressive

and articulate Maria Louisa was considered

twice the man her amiable but slow-witted

husband was. She was also said to be an imperious woman with an unquenchable sexual