Monarchs’ rampant sexual appetites laid bare
For a country that beheaded its king and queen more than two centuries ago, France shows a stubborn attachment to royalty. The latest example of this obsession is a book about the sex lives of French monarchs.
The new book has raised eyebrows with revelations that courtesan Madame de Montespan stripped for Louis XIV in the Hall of Mirrors, while his brother led a secret life as a transvestite in blonde wigs and ribbons.
It reinforces the view that then – as now – French politics revolved around sex.
‘‘A king’s political and military power come from his sexual power,’’ Michel VergeFranceschi and Anna Moretti write in An Erotic History of Versailles.
Louis XIV, who ruled for 72 years and had at least 16 illegitimate children with a variety of mistresses, has gone down in history as ‘‘Louis the and ‘‘the Sun King’’.
This year’s tricentenary of his death on September 1, 1715, is being marked by books and films about the Palace of Versailles. But An Erotic History is the first to focus exclusively on the debauchery of the court.
Some like
Great’’
to compare
the Elysee Palace in Paris to the royal court – modern political rulers have exercised their droit de seigneur (right of the lord) as much as the monarchs did – but life in today’s seat of power seems tame by comparison.
Louis XIV’s mother, Anne of Austria, ensured her son got off to a good start by encouraging Catherine Bellier, her favourite maid and a famously skilled prostitute, to initiate him at 16. Louis gratefully made the oneeyed Bellier a baroness and gave her husband, a cloth merchant, a chateau.
The king was married to Maria Theresa of Spain, who would clap when the courtiers trooped into the royal bedroom to salute the king each morning, as was their custom. Her clapping was a signal that he had ‘‘honoured’’ her the night before.
He soon tired of her, however, finding pleasure in the arms of others from Louise de La Valliere, with whom he had six children, to the Marquise de Montespan, with whom he had eight. Montespan is said to have dismissed courtiers from the vast Hall of Mirrors one day to satisfy the monarch’s sudden craving to gaze on her breasts.
While the queen amused herself with Nabot, a black dwarf ‘‘given’’ to her by a courtier, Louis frolicked in the gardens. He told everyone that Madame de Maintenon, a mistress of several decades, had worn nothing under her skirts for their first encounter in the grounds.
Things degenerated under Philippe d’Orleans, regent from 1715. He enjoyed orgies after dinner and was rumoured to have had incestuous relationships with two of his daughters until he died in the arms of a duchess in 1723.
Louis XV, who had attained his majority a few months earlier, had conducted affairs with four young sisters before graduating to Madame de Pompadour, who introduced the first bidet to Versailles.