Royal Babylon (11 page)

His first official mistress or “left-handed queen” was a twenty-seven-year-old married woman, the Comtesse de Mailly, one of five daughters of the Marquis de Nesle. A contemporary court diarist described her as “well built, ugly, stupid looking but with good teeth.” Her plainness surprised many foreign visitors to Versailles, who naturally expected a flamboyant Bourbon king to keep a glamorous mistress. As the Comtesse's mother was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, her four sisters were all attached to the French court. To the Comtesse's everlasting horror, the King slept with all of them.

The first sister to be seduced was Madame de Vintimille, a huge woman described as having “the face of a grenadier, the neck of a stork and the smell of a monkey.” She died in childbirth while giving him an illegitimate son who bore such an obvious resemblance to the King that he was to be known as Demi-Louis for the rest of his life. Louis then transferred his affections to her obese and even more repulsive sister Adelaide, who held his attention briefly before it strayed to the next sister, Hortense. By this time the King's soft spot for the incredibly ugly Mailly sisters en masse had become the inspiration for a number of lewd popular songs. Having gone thus far, Louis figured he might as well go for the full set. The last member of the family to be visited upon by the King was Marie-Anne. She was more attractive and considerably more ambitious than her sisters. She ruthlessly evicted the rest of her family from the court, and considered her position so unassailable that she dared to be openly abusive to the
Queen. Unfortunately, this mistress was struck down with peritonitis and died in her twenty-eighth year.

The King's sister Louise caused a sensation when she walked out of the palace to become a Carmelite nun, announcing as she left that she would shut herself away to pray for the King's soul. As no member of the French royal family had been anywhere near a convent since the Middle Ages it was a damning indictment. Soon half of France was talking about how the evil, dissipated King had turned Versailles into a huge brothel.

His next mistress, the grandly styled Madame de Pompadour, was suspected of having an undue amount of political influence over him, and consequently made more than the usual amount of enemies at court. The King met her at a masked ball in Versailles's famous Hall of Mirrors. He had taken elaborate precautions to remain anonymous, arriving dressed as a yew tree, just like eleven of his friends. Although the King was completely enraptured with his ravishing new
maîtresse en titre
, she wasn't very keen on sex. This was naturally a handicap for someone whose position depended upon her ability to guarantee the royal pleasure, especially when the lover happened to be the most libidinous of a long line of oversexed Bourbons. Madame de Pompadour was not a strong woman and she found the King's sex drive physically exhausting. To make matters worse, Louis had finally stopped sleeping with the Queen, who had become prematurely aged and paunchy, and increased his demands on his mistress's time to satisfy his needs. When the King remarked one day that Madame de Pompadour was “as cold as a coot,” it dawned on her just how precarious her privileged position was.

Consumed with the fear that she might lose her royal lover and her gilded lifestyle, she stuffed herself with aphrodisiacs,
living for months on chocolate, truffles, vanilla and celery soup. Instead of increasing her ardor, however, this particular F-plan diet merely made her vomit. The royal mistress finally arrived at the conclusion that the only way to retain her position and get a decent night's sleep now and then was to turn a blind eye to the King's indiscretions. A sensible solution to her dilemma was found in the infamous Parc du Cerfs.

Previously, the girls procured for the King by his trusted valet, Lebel, would be taken to a small apartment in the palace of Versailles known as the “Bird Trap.” If the King liked what he saw, they were then lodged at the apartment, usually one or two at a time, under the supervision of a housekeeper, Madame Bertrand. The girls were nearly always “high-class” whores, but the only firm rule was that they had to be young and disease free. As the King's popularity declined and the stories about his private life increased, Louis felt it necessary to keep some of his seedier affairs away from the prying eyes of his courtiers, especially as he had acquired an unhealthy taste for very young girls, sometimes bedding several at a time. So he set up the Parc du Cerfs in a discreet little building with just five or six rooms set in a quiet street in Versailles.

Most of the post-revolutionary stories about the Parc du Cerfs were wildly exaggerated: tales of naked underage girls being hunted through the woods by the King and his hounds; Thomas Carlyle wrote of the King as “a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works of men, daily dragging virgins into thy cave.” But the truth did not require embellishment.

The Parc du Cerfs was not a unique concept. Many wealthy Frenchmen of the period kept their own private brothels. Louis XV's personal harem, however, was probably the grandest ever to service the needs of one man, costing
£
200,000 a year to
maintain. Lebel and others were expected to make available to the King a constant supply of healthy girls aged between nine and eighteen years. Only from the age of fourteen years upward were they obliged to be “in active service.” Louis, fortified by an opium-based mixture known as “General Lamotte's Drops,” would sneak off to his private brothel in the early evening and return to the state bed at dawn.

Madame de Pompadour did not, as was popularly alleged, become his procuress, but she accepted the existence of her lover's private brothel as the lesser of two evils: at least if he was sleeping with peasant girls it would keep him out of the beds of her rivals at court. As for the prostitutes in the Parc du Cerfs, Madame de Pompadour assured a friend, “All those little uneducated girls would never take him from me.”

It may have been due to Louis's fear of catching syphilis that he took to sleeping with very young girls, believing it would lessen the risk. When the girls outstayed their welcome by reaching the ripe old age of nineteen, they were either married off or dispatched to a convent. There was apparently no shortage of volunteers. Parents considered that a relatively brief period of dishonor was a price well worth paying for the guarantee of lifelong security for their daughters. Little is known about who, or even how many girls, passed through the Parc du Cerfs, but over a period of thirty-four years it probably ran to several thousands. Remarkably, most of the girls had no idea at all who they were sleeping with. They were usually told that the man they worked for was a foreign dignitary. More often than not their client passed himself off as a wealthy Polish nobleman.

A few we do know about. The most famous was Louise O'Murphy, a fourteen-year-old, half-French, half-Irish girl, her
bare backside immortalized in several paintings by Boucher. She was resident in the Parc du Cerfs for four years until she was dismissed for making an unflattering remark about Madame de Pompadour. Miss O'Murphy had at least two, possibly three, children by the King. Another, Madame de Romans, was one of the King's personal favorites. She objected to being hidden away in the Parc du Cerfs and was rewarded with her own residence. The son she gave him was the only illegitimate child he ever acknowledged as his own. All things considered, he fathered very few bastards—probably only about twenty.

Lebel found it increasingly difficult to maintain a steady intake of fresh young girls. It also became even more difficult to excite the King's jaded appetite. As a result, the building was finally sold off in 1771. From then on, the King's new official mistress, Madame du Barry, monopolized his sexual requirements to the end of his days. For, by 1756, time and tuberculosis had destroyed the health and the looks of the proud Madame du Pompadour. She had been severely weakened by several miscarriages and she also suffered from bronchitis, which caused her to cough blood incessantly. Her gaunt, ravaged features were masked behind several strata of highly toxic lead-based cosmetics which were also slowly killing her. The court diarist, D'Argenson, recorded that her skin was yellow and withered. “As for her bosom,” noted D'Argenson, “it is kinder not to mention it.” In 1764, the King's mistress of some twenty years standing coughed her last.

At this time there operated in Paris an infamous pimp named Jean Baptiste du Barry, widely known as “Mahomet” because of his huge harem of prostitutes. He specialized in picking up good-looking shop-girls and unemployed actresses, and grooming them into courtesans for his rich clients. It was
his dream that one of his more upmarket protégées would eventually strike it lucky and become the mistress of an aristocrat. His star pupil was to exceed even his wildest expectations. Marie Jean Bécu was the illegitimate daughter of an unmarried seamstress; her father was a friar. After a brief spell working as a Paris shop assistant she was spotted by Monsieur du Barry. She took her pimp's surname and, via a string of noblemen, bed-hopped her way to Versailles.

Jean du Barry had already slept with several members of the French court before King Louis met her. Finally she was ushered into the royal presence. She made the obligatory three curtsies, then walked up to the King and kissed him full in the mouth. The sexual chemistry for the old Bourbon was immediate, especially as she also came complete with a health certificate which stated that she was free from venereal disease. Louis XV began sleeping with his new official mistress as his wife, Queen Maria, lay on her deathbed.

Madame du Barry was immediately written off by the French court as a shallow girl whose good looks alone would not hold the King's attentions for long. They had underestimated her considerable sexual expertise. Richelieu once dared to ask Louis what he saw in her. The King replied, “She is the only woman in France who has managed to make me forget I will soon be sixty.” Louis confided to the Duke d'Ayen that thanks to Madame du Barry he had “discovered some pleasures entirely new to him.” The Duke replied that this was probably because the King had never been to a decent brothel. Madame du Barry stayed with the King for the next four years, until his death. She chose his ministers, dictated French foreign policy, and used the royal treasury as though it was her own personal expense account. She was in effect the uncrowned queen of France.

The King had aged prematurely—his doctors complained that the new official mistress left the sixty-four-year-old Bourbon “sucked dry.” Alarmed by his decline, they appealed to him to take an older, less energetic mistress who would be less of a strain on his heart. The King reluctantly promised that he would “rein in the horses.” The doctor replied, “You'd do better to unharness them.”

The King's doctors had always mistakenly believed that Louis had survived a slight attack of smallpox when he was young and was therefore immune. In 1774, however, the King developed a severe headache which was swiftly followed by a sinister and familiar rash. As no one dared admit the mistake, they kept him away from mirrors, but the King became suspicious. One morning he saw spots on his hands. He cried, “This is smallpox .  .  . at my age one doesn't recover!” In spite of the obvious high risk of contagion, he insisted that his mistress stay by his bedside and mop his forehead. His face quickly became black, covered with encrusted scabs, and swollen to twice its normal size. On May 10, 1774, Louis died painfully, but not before making his first confession in thirty-eight years. A courtier timed it at a suspiciously brief sixteen minutes. Nineteen years later the French revolutionaries remembered Madame du Barry's four-year spree of power and profligacy, and removed her head.

         

The grotesquely bloated Louis XVIII was probably the only homosexual Bourbon king of France, but his successor, the last reigning Bourbon, was truer to family form. The charming but
useless Charles X came to the French throne in 1824 and abdicated six years later. As a young man he was a violent and abusive drunk, was known in almost every brothel in Paris, and had seduced half the ladies in court. In time he was transformed from an oversexed lout into a witless dandy. When the Austrian Emperor Joseph visited the French court he described Charles as “a fop” and his wife as “a complete imbecile.” Louis XV and his mistresses had long since left the French monarchy in a state of near-bankruptcy and Charles blew what little was left on an unfeasibly large personal wardrobe which included a new pair of shoes for every day of the year. His biggest single expense was the Etruscan-style building known as the Bagatelle, which existed as a result of a bet: he wagered 100,000 livres that he could build, decorate and furnish a house in Bois de Boulogne in nine weeks.

Charles X's son Ferdinand, the Duke de Beri, was also a notorious libertine. After his assassination in 1820, his wife, Caroline, was visited by a score of women from Nantes, every one of them claiming to be pregnant by her husband. The Duchess couldn't believe it, and asked one of her household how long her husband had stayed there. She was informed that the Duke had been in Nantes for one week. “Ah, then,” said the Duchess, “in that case it's quite possible.”

         

At the end of the nineteenth century, Spain was ruled by another Bourbon in the person of the promiscuous King Alphonso XII, whose life was brought to a premature end in 1885 when he was only twenty-eight years old. Officially he
died from consumption, but there was little doubt that the real cause of death was venereal disease. At the age of seventeen, Alphonso had fallen in love with the beautiful Princess Mercedes, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier. Although his bride was also his first cousin it was a rare royal love match. Within six months of their wedding day, however, she was struck down dead with gastric fever. As she was also related to the unfortunate Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, superstitious Spaniards blamed her death on the so-called Habsburg Curse.