The palace of lust
A racy BBC drama about Versailles portrays a VERY libidinous Sun King
THE NAUGHTY Princess of Monaco, beautiful but catty Catherine Grimaldi, was dismissive of Louis XIV’s ability to satisfy her. His ‘sceptre’, she gossiped recklessly around the French king’s court at Versailles, was ‘tres petit’. she claimed to have this intimate knowledge of what lay beneath the royal culottes because, like countless others, she was the glorious sun King’s lover.
In her case it was for just a few months until he tired of her and not only dumped her but, as a punishment for her impertinence, banished her back to unglamorous Monaco, then no more than a castle and a small coastal village.
But was her dissatisfaction because — as a bit of a ‘swinger’ herself, in the words of one historian — she preferred women? Among her supposed female conquests was Henrietta, the king’s sister-in-law.
Henrietta was also courted by Louis and taken to bed by him in one of those illicit apres- midi affairs he liked to indulge in.
Anything was possible in the sexual merry-go-round that characterised the lavish court of the most flamboyant monarch in European history, who occupied the throne of France for 72 years, from 1643 (when he was just four) to his death in 1715.
And now its highlights are to appear in a spectacular and raunchy tenpart drama series, Versailles, beginning on BBC2 on Wednesday.
Expect exposed body-parts, nipples for sure (though perhaps not ‘sceptres’), bouncing buttocks, queens (of all sorts) in flagrante, spiced with a lascivious dwarf, a cross-dressing heir to the throne, naked frolics in the fountain and lungfuls of heavy breathing.
It is all very unlike the life of our dear Queen (though similar to what Charles II and his court were up to at the same time in England)!
The series has already been described as among ‘the filthiest TV ever’.
More akin to Game Of Thrones than Downton, it’s brutal stuff. In the first of its ten episodes, there are torture scenes, eye-gouging, rape and selfflagellation, plus explicit sex scenes that leave little to the imagination.
SQUEAMISH folk must prepare to look away. The curious will be diverted by the sumptuous clothes (where worn), the plot (complex, but fascinating as Louis imposes his will on rebellious nobles) and all those ‘filthy’ shenanigans.
Was it really like that? Well, sex was a preoccupation and a currency in the French court. The sun King spread his rays with total abandon, and all around him schemed to catch the light from his wandering eye.
Aristocratic mothers pushed their daughters towards him, minor princes and dukes their wives, in the hope of advancement.
It could be a life- changing move. The rise of the soubise family, for example, was put down to its princess’s beauty, and, according to her grateful husband, ‘ the use she made of it’.
The nobility was at it all the time with ‘adultery a way of life at court’, in the words of one historian of the era. ‘ Loving one’s husband was considered positively declasse.’
The young king must always have been conscious of this. He grew up in a sexually charged atmosphere amid tongues wagging about the secret love life of his widowed mother, Anne of Austria, Queen Regent until he came of age.
she was very close to her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin — body and soul, the gossips said — and it was with the cardinal’s flirty Italian nieces, the five Mancini girls, that the young monarch first dabbled in romance, and possibly more.
But his actual initiation into intercourse, at the age of 15, was a tackier business, in the voluptuous arms of one of his mother’s ladies-inwaiting, the 40-year-old Baronne de Beauvais, known as ‘One-eyed Kate’.
she first pleasured the king on the prompting of his mother, and he obviously liked what had happened and went back for more. she was rewarded with a pension for life.
But it wasn’t just sex that turned the young King on.
With girls of his own age, he was drawn to the slender ones he could dance with — ballet was a ‘violent’ royal passion — and clever ones he could talk to, such as the plain but entertaining Marie Mancini.
she sang to him while he played the guitar, and it is said he wanted to marry her — until the idea was quashed by his mother and he was betrothed instead to the dumpy and dull Marie-Therese, daughter of the King of spain.
she was pampered and pasty-faced, because she had never been allowed out in the sun, and went everywhere accompanied by her pet dogs and a pet dwarf.
This was a political union, supposedly ending the traditional enmity between the two countries (though it didn’t). But it was also a love-match to begin with, in bed at least. They spent almost every night together and couldn’t get enough of each other.
But then the new Queen got pregnant, and Louis’s eyes, hands, and everything else strayed, alighting on the 17- year- old Henrietta, daughter of England’s executed Charles I and sister of the recently restored Charles II. she was married
to Louis’s younger brother Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, second-in-line to the throne and addressed at court by the courtesy name of ‘Monsieur’ (as was tradition for the King’s younger brother).
No matter. He was gay, with a ‘monsieur’ of his own, the handsome but conniving Chevalier de Lorraine, whom he openly paraded around court.
Philip did his duty and sired two children with Henrietta, but otherwise let her get on with her deepening affair with his brother.
Beautiful with perfect teeth and sparkling eyes, she was a perfect match for 22-year- old Louis. They swam in the lake, ate supper to the sound of violins and rode horses through the night.
Historian Antonia Fraser reckons the two were very much in love but she doubts it was a full- blown sexual affair — that Henrietta’s religious scruples held her back from sinning, and with her brotherin-law, of all people.
The Versailles series takes the opposite view. No holding back on its part — or hers.
It was too blissful to last. After a summer of love, his mother put an end to this excessive intimacy. Even her gay husband was getting jealous. Henrietta was warned off, and Louis’s attention was diverted to one of her companions, the tomboyish Louise de La Valliere.
Surely she wasn’t really his type? But it was becoming apparent the Sun King didn’t have a type. His taste in women was all-encompassing.
Louise danced, she rode horses bareback, and was sweet-natured and submissive. According to Antonia Fraser, there was one drawback — she was flat-chested, which she tried to conceal with padding.
This was offset by ‘her huge blue eyes with a melting regard, fair hair and soft voice. Her childishly thin throat gave her an air of defencelessness.’ The king was quickly smitten. Louise pretended to resist — as any well brought-up girl would do — but then, convincing herself it was her religious duty to satisfy the king, she succumbed. Louis borrowed a friend’s apartment at Versailles — that’s how difficult it was for him to get privacy — to relieve her of her virginity.
‘Have pity on my weakness!’ she was said to have cried, a red rag to the royal bull.
Louise’s religious scruples frequently interrupted the affair. She ran away. He begged her to come back. She sinned again. And again. She had four children by him.
The Queen was also producing offspring, and over seven years from 1660, the rampant Louis sired in total nine babies, the legitimate ones acclaimed as blood heirs, the bastards discreetly acknowledged and given aristocratic titles.
Not that Louise was ever the king’s only dalliance.
There were scores of eager girls in what one historian describes as the royal ‘seraglio’ — his harem. They could expect to be well treated, as long as they were discreet, unlike the scoffing Princess of Monaco, now claiming that the King’s cousin, Charles II of England, was much better endowed than little Louis.
One court custom was the afterdinner lottery, where tickets were handed out and rewarded with cash and jewels.
It was fixed to pay off his pets, the willing Isabelles, Maries and Charlottes who served his needs.
But there was always a No. 1 mistress, acknowledged as Maitresse en Titre and honoured at court. On state occasions, she sat next to him.
That position passed from Louise (who became a nun) to the stunning Francoise-Athenais, Marquise de Montespan, so beautiful that the king secretly spied on her in the bath. Realising he was there, she obligingly dropped her towel.
Long ringlets, pouting mouth, curved figure, a knowing look that was both sexy and imperious, she was a complete contrast from the fey Louise.
Witty and clever, with a forceful personality. Louise didn’t stand a ch chance — nor did the king. With her he embarked on what Antonia Fraser de describes as ‘the great sexua ual adventure of his life’.
A As he grew more and more in into the all-powerful Sun Ki King, she was the goddess at hi his side, but an earthy one wi with no inhibitions about ‘co ‘commerce’, the contempora rary word for sex, which she en enjoyed to the full and withou out remorse, three times a dayda if she could get it.
SheS got her reward in terms of court status but also in richesric beyond dreams. Louis toldtol his finance minister: ‘She mustmu have anything she wants.’wa Jewels, money and grandgra houses were showered on her.
Hers was the second finest apartment at Versailles, with dir direct access to the king’s, where she lounged in her highheel mules, massaged and perfumed, waiting for him. A rare con contemporary portrait shows her as a ‘voluptuous, gorgeous toy’, reclining with a ‘courtesan san’s carelessness’, according to her biographer, Lisa Hilton. Cupids swing above her head.
It was said the king scheduled two-hour sessions with her and couldn’t wait for her ladies to properly undress her before throwing himself on her, such was his passion.
Their favourite place to make love was a suite on the ground floor at Versailles with an enormous bed, a huge mirror and an octagonal bath carved from a bloc block of marble. The room resembled a sultan’s palace. The only cloud hanging over this extravaganza of sensuality was Athenais’s cuckolded husband, a loathsome fellow who threatened to infect himself at the brothels he frequented and pass the disease onto his wife and to the king.
Louis sent him to prison and then banished him to his estates. Rumour had it he also tried to buy the man’s silence with money, but Montespan continued to rail against the king, stoking up the fires of pious figures in Paris who threatened eternal damnation on Louis and his ‘whore’ for their sins.
LIKE her predecessor, Athenais produced a crop of semi- royal children, seven in all, of whom four survived. For all her wiles — and the secret aphrodisiacs she allegedly administered to keep up his interest — even her days were numbered as the king’s head mistress.
Her ‘reign’ lasted more than ten years, but, now in her late-30s, though her face was as beautiful as ever, her weight had ballooned with all those pregnancies and a gluttonous appetite for food.
The king still came visiting, but his appetite for her had gone. There was a vacancy.
It was not going to be filled by any of the younger girls who now came forward to gee up the 40-year- old king’s flagging sexual energy — the likes of Angelique de Fontanges, 18, embarrassingly the same age as his own eldest son, the Dauphin.
She served his purposes for a while, but for his new maitresse en titre he turned to Francoise de Maintenon, his love- children’s governess, more his age, a serious, slightly austere woman.
Although a strange choice, she reflected his own increasingly pensive nature after four decades of kingship.
By now, Marie-Therese, the wife he so long disregarded, was dead, and there were rumours he married Mme de Maintenon in secret.
Slowly, the vigour was slipping away from his court, along with all that sexual potency and energy.
Increasingly, Louis turned to his other passion — building Versailles into a palace of dreams.
It would last longer than all those love affairs, a fitting monument to reflect the unrivalled majesty of the Sun King.
Versailles is on BBC2 at 9.30pm on Wednesday.