Royal Babylon (10 page)

Although Madame de Maintenon was a middle-aged woman, she was probably a virgin when King Louis first slept with her: her previous marriage with a disabled poet had not been consummated. Even if she had been sexually experienced, the unflagging virility of her syphilitic little husband would have been a major shock to her system. When she was seventy-five years old and Louis was seventy, she complained to her confessor that she found the effort of making love to him twice a day rather tiring.

The King's health was badly weakened by assaults from the popular medicinal cures of the day, including indiscriminate bleeding, purging, enemas and massive doses of opium and quinine, but they barely dented his appetite for food or sex. In
1715, sores broke out on the King's left leg, and soon the leg began to stink and turned black with gangrene. It led to a slow and agonizing death. The whole country rejoiced: his coffin, as it traveled to Saint-Denis, was hooted at by a drunken mob, and people drank and sang along the route.

         

Louis XIV's nephew, Philip, Duke d'Orléans, was Regent to the boy-king Louis XV for nine years and ruled the country in all but name. The myopic little Regent was generally considered to be the most debauched man in French history. Although he had demonstrated himself to be an intelligent and very gifted politician, his chief interests were women and wine. At the age of fourteen he became the father of a baby girl when he raped the head porter's daughter at the Palais Royal. He made an actress and his wife pregnant at about the same time, mistress and wife simultaneously giving birth to an illegitimate son and a legitimate daughter.

His mistresses were legion; it was reckoned that he kept over a hundred at a time. His choice of women drew comment too, as all of them were very plain. When he was chided by his mother for his lack of taste, he famously replied, “Bah, Mother, all cats are gray in the dark!” His personal harem and his “daily filthiness” were the talk of France, but he was similarly famous for his drinking binges. The Regent was a desperate alcoholic, particularly partial to the new fizzy champagne recently invented by Dom Pérignon. To the very end he continued to consume seven bottles of champagne almost every evening.

The Regent's regular orgies in the Palais Royal scandalized
Paris. Every evening he would shut himself away with a few male and female companions, then get himself wildly drunk and sleep with whoever took his fancy, while naked prostitutes were served upon silver dishes for his guests. Even more controversially, he was an atheist and proud of it: he held orgies on Good Friday and it was alleged that he dabbled in the occult. The single most shocking allegation against the filthy old Regent, however, concerned his incestuous relationship with his eldest daughter, the Duchess de Berri. The abominable Elizabeth, short, obese and badly marked from smallpox, was almost as debauched as her father. Married at the age of fourteen to her cousin the Duc de Berri, the youngest grandson of Louis XIV, within four years she became a wealthy teenage widow interested only in drinking herself senseless and running up huge gambling debts. Daily she drank herself into a stupor and could often be found rolling in her own vomit on the carpet. Eventually she became so fat that she found it impossible to mount a horse.

It was widely rumored that she was sleeping with her father, gossip which the Regent encouraged by inviting her to his all-night orgies and painting her in the nude. She died aged twenty-four, most probably from cirrhosis of the liver and weakened by a difficult and illegitimate childbirth, although her death certificate stated that she ate herself to death. It was commented at her funeral that the Regent's unusually intense display of emotion at his daughter's early demise was motivated by something other than parental grief.

In his forties, the Regent took on the appearance of a senile and purple-faced old man. When he first showed himself in England, London's bookmakers offered odds that he would be dead within three months. In 1723, against the advice of his
physicians, he took a new mistress thirty years his junior. The effect on his heart was predictably disastrous. They were sitting by the fireplace of his drawing room at Versailles one December evening when he had a massive stroke and slumped unconscious. When a doctor tried to bleed him, a lady courtier warned, “No! You'll kill him.  .  . he has just lain with a whore.” Two hours later he was dead, aged forty-nine. Most people thought it was a miracle that he had lived that long. Although it was quite obvious to everyone what had killed him, court etiquette demanded that there should be an official postmortem. Unfortunately, while the physicians were carving him up, the Regent's favorite dog snatched his master's heart and ate it.

         

There were risks attached to royal free love. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, syphilis replaced the battlefield as the slayer of princes. Most forms of venereal disease, including gonorrhea, soft chancre and syphilis, were collectively known as “the foul disease” or “the pox.” In the early part of Queen Victoria's reign, doctors were still unable to differentiate gonorrhea from syphilis.

Gonorrhea was also known as the “Preventer of Life” because, although it rarely led to death, it frequently resulted in sterilization in both sexes. Syphilis was the more pernicious of the two and a far more dangerous disease than it is today. It remains live in human tissue for a lifetime unless it is destroyed by treatment. When primary syphilis goes untreated it develops into the second stage, resulting in hair loss, gum disease and loss
of teeth, painful joints, indigestion, fever, headaches, circulatory problems and cardiac palpitations. The third stage can lie dormant in the system and erupt anything up to thirty years later. It can damage vital organs, including the heart, and cause paralysis, blindness and deafness. Without treatment it results in paresis, a softening of the brain. The brain-damaged victim may not quite qualify for modern psychiatry's precise meaning of the term “insane,” but the victim nevertheless appears to be mad.

In 1909 the commendably persistent Paul Ehrlich discovered Salversan, the first ever treatment for syphilis. It was also known as “Treatment 606” because it was Ehrlich's 606th attempt to find a cure. In the nineteenth century there was no treatment except massage with mercury, a medication which was sometimes worse than the disease. The risks of prolonged mercury use were great: gums became swollen; teeth fell out; mouths became terribly ulcerated. These side effects were considered to be appropriate because they were likely to deter syphilitics from further reckless sexual adventures. This unfortunately did not allow for the various other ways that syphilis could be passed on independently of sexual intercourse: in England, for example, the custom of kissing a Bible when taking a judicial oath often led to syphilitic infection.

Syphilis was able to rampage through most European courts assisted by the filthy conditions that even royalty lived in. The eighteenth-century Prussian King Frederick William I was considered by his contemporaries to be most eccentric, not because he was a demented, vicious psychopath, but because he washed his hands regularly. Eighteenth-century English nobility, when faced with newfangled ideas about disease and personal hygiene, clung to the belief that washing was decidedly not for
them. A duchess at a society dinner once sat down to eat with noticeably filthy hands. When the grubbiness of her fingers was remarked upon, she replied, “Madam, you should see my feet.” When Queen Victoria inherited Buckingham Palace in 1837 it didn't even have a bathroom. Her predecessors, the Georgian royals, believed it was “sweat, damn it, that kept a man clean.”

Versailles was considered to be the very pinnacle of fashion and culture. It made a quite different first impression on the Austrian-born Duchess of Orleans, who wrote home in 1694: “There is one thing at court that I shall never get used to .  .  . the people stationed in the galleries in front of our rooms piss into all the corners. It is impossible to leave one's apartment without seeing someone pissing.” Although Louis XIV was an enthusiastic lover, the King's advances must have been a trying time for his mistresses: he took only three baths in his lifetime, and each of those under protest. His great-grandson Louis XVI was the first French king to use a knife and fork, take a regular bath and brush his teeth. An Italian ambassador noted the King's “peculiar” interest in hygiene. After the first Spanish civil war, the Carlist Pretender Don Carlos and his wife lived briefly in exile in London at Gloucester Lodge, Brompton. The Duke of Wellington visited them and was appalled by the stench, complaining that they could at the very least have brought with them “a little soap and water.”

The Russian court was the dirtiest of all, a mixture of fantastic extravagance and medieval squalor. Catherine the Great noted that it was not unusual to see a woman exquisitely dressed and covered in jewels emerging from a courtyard ankle deep in sewage “and horrors of every sort.” The Winter Palace of St. Petersburg during the reign of Czar Nicholas I was
considered to be one of the biggest and most opulent royal residences in the world, with 1,600 rooms and 4,000 inhabitants. It was, however, perpetually alive with vermin, mostly because of the Czar's reluctance to get rid of the herd of cows he always kept on the top floor to ensure a regular supply of milk for his family. When the Imperial Annanhof Palace in Moscow burned down, bystanders were amazed by the mass evacuation of rats down the grand staircase.

The crowned heads of Europe held their breath when Peter the Great became the first ever Russian czar to travel west in 1697. The filthy Czar was noted to be blissfully unaware of rudimentary personal hygiene, table manners or even basic potty training. When Peter's son Alexis went to Dresden in 1712 to marry a German Princess, the Elector of Hanover, Ernst August, noted with distaste in a letter to his wife that the Czarevitch defecated in his bedroom and wiped his backside with the curtains. The assembled throng of “civilized” Europeans were also amazed by his lack of familiarity with the handkerchief. The Electress Sophia wryly observed that, if the King of France took to blowing his nose on his fingers, it would immediately be considered the height of fashion by all Europe.

         

In the first half of the twentieth century, students of history were always told to look out for signs of syphilis at the onset of premature physical or mental decrepitude. Frederick the Great suffered badly from it, as did King Christian VII of Denmark. The Romanovs were particularly hard hit by syphilis. Catherine the Great contracted syphilis despite taking
elaborate precautions to avoid it by screening her myriad sleeping partners through a committee of female courtiers and doctors. Catherine's mad son Paul I showed all the classic signs of congenital syphilis, including a saddle nose.

The British royal family has from time to time also found itself to be venereally challenged. Medical historians speculate that Queen Anne's Danish consort, Prince George of Denmark, may have been congenitally syphilitic, resulting in his wife's catalogue of disastrous pregnancies. The “water on the brain” from which one of her sons died suggests a low-grade congenital syphilitic meningitis. The premature death at twenty-eight of Edward VII's eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, was officially attributed to pneumonia, but was rumored to have been caused by syphilis of the brain. King George V's cousin Prince Alfred of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha caught syphilis and was subsequently shunned by the royal family and his regiment. He lived in exile in Romania attended by only one servant and his tutor, and died of cerebral syphilis aged twenty-four in 1899. According to
The Times
he “had been suffering from a chronic cerebral affection.”
The Complete Peerage
recorded that he shot himself.

As far as retrospective diagnosis will allow, it is possible to judge that the family history of schizophrenia wasn't the only factor in the devastation of the Bavarian and Austrian royal families in the nineteenth century. The mental breakdowns of Bavaria's “Mad” King Ludwig II and his brother King Otto may have been partly attributable to syphilis. Ludwig's postmortem referred to a non-specific organic disease of the brain. Ludwig's father was believed to have died of typhoid, but he caught syphilis as a young man during a fling with a Hungarian prostitute: he could easily have passed it on to his sons.

Syphilis also provides one of the more plausible motives for the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf's suicide in 1889. There was considerable speculation that the Crown Prince might have decided to take his own life rather than face a slow and lingering death from venereal disease. The health of Rudolf and his mad Bavarian cousins Ludwig and Otto deteriorated markedly when they were still quite young men. Each aged prematurely; each suffered early tooth loss. In his early thirties, the narcissistic Ludwig became very flabby, began to lose his hair and could no longer bear to be seen in public. He shunned court dinner parties, and when he was absolutely forced to attend he hid behind huge flower arrangements so that the other guests couldn't see him. These are classic signs of untreated syphilis.

         

King Louis XV of France had more reason than most to live in perpetual fear of syphilis. Of all the Bourbon monarchs, his sex life was the most astonishing. The King had started his reign with the epithet “Louis the well beloved,” but this undeserved popularity waned when the stories about his relentless debauchery began to circulate. Even the relatively small amount of sexual congress that his subjects got to hear about—in actual fact only the tip of the iceberg—led to rumors that the King had to bathe daily in children's blood to renew his exhausted body.

Louis XV was a king at five, a husband at fifteen and a father at sixteen. By the time he was in his early twenties his valets were regularly procuring whores for him, although he continued to keep in touch with his drab Polish wife, Maria, by
sleeping with her when the mood took him. The King's peccadilloes became the talk of Versailles, not for the sheer quantity of sexual activity he enjoyed, but because of whom he was doing it with. Remarkably, he took five of his mistresses from the same family, all of them sisters.