Sex with Kings (10 page)

Madame de Parabère told her husband that some friends in financial embarrassment wanted to sell the items at a ridiculously low price. Her generous spouse immediately gave her the money to buy them. When she displayed her glittering gems proudly in public and courtiers asked her where she had obtained them, she replied that her kind husband had bought them for her. No one was fooled except her husband. Basking in his wife's seeming fidelity, Monsieur de Parabère replied that a husband should be generous to a wife who loved no one but himself. The room erupted into guffaws of laughter. Monsieur de Parabère considerately died afterward, sparing his wife traumatic scenes when he would inevitably discover the truth. Relieved of this burden, Madame de Parabère could flaunt the regent's gifts more freely.

But most married royal mistresses did not have husbands who thoughtfully provided them with the freedoms of an early widowhood. In the 1740s Madame de Pompadour was forced to unharness herself from an adoring husband when she became the mistress of Louis XV. Born Jeanne Poisson, she had married—rather above her station—a wealthy and handsome bourgeois named Le Normant d'Etioles. Monsieur d'Etioles was the nephew of Le Normant de Tournehem, Jeanne's mother's lover,
who was also presumed to be Jeanne's father. Monsieur d'Etioles idolized his bride and gave her a large allowance to beautify herself and their homes, and to secure her social position, which had been dimmed by her mother's shady past.

Since childhood, Madame d'Etioles's sole ambition had been to become the king's mistress. It is likely that her marriage to Monsieur d'Etioles fulfilled a dual purpose—to enjoy the fruits of improved social status, and to use that status as a springboard to meet the king. While the pretty young wife had many admirers, she took no lovers, a rare phenomenon in eighteenth-century Paris. She was known to remark at lively dinner parties that the king alone could make her unfaithful to her husband. The room would always ring with laughter at this remark, her husband laughing loudest of all. Little did he know the cold truth that lurked behind the witticism and the pain it would cause him.

The d'Etioles had been married four years when Jeanne achieved her desire of meeting—and winning—the king. Monsieur de Tournehem occupied the position of farmer-general—a wealthy tax collector—and, showing more loyalty to his presumed daughter Jeanne than to his nephew, quickly packed her husband off on a long tour of the provinces. When Monsieur d'Etioles returned some two months later, his uncle broke the unwelcome news that his pretty wife had become the king's mistress. Monsieur d'Etioles fainted from the shock.

When he came to, he reacted so violently that his uncle feared he would try to kill himself and had all guns removed from the house. Monsieur d'Etioles threatened to go to Versailles to reclaim his wife. His uncle pointed out the folly of such a venture.

Meanwhile, Madame d'Etioles was using her husband's violent reaction to urge the king to commit, to make her the official
maîtresse-en-titre.
Fed up with being smuggled into side doors and up secret stairs at night, she wanted her position recognized; she wanted to taste the power, to enjoy the luxuries of Versailles in all their daylight splendor. Madame d'Etioles told the king that she was in danger of an insanely jealous husband and only he could protect her. She wept copious shimmering tears into a
silken handkerchief. Louis, shaken, was won over by her tears and assented to all her demands. As a sign of accepting her as
maîtresse-en-titre,
he created her the marquise de Pompadour.

Monsieur d'Etioles was sent on a business trip to Provence in the hopes that a change of scene would dispel his grief. In 1747 the king rewarded Monsieur d'Etioles for his grudging acquiescence by giving him his uncle's newly vacated post of farmer-general, a position that brought him the enormous income of four hundred thousand livres a year. He took as mistress a singer from the opera, Mademoiselle Raime, and lived with her in a marriage-type relationship for many years, bringing several children into the world. When offered the post of French ambassador to Constantinople, he turned it down because he would not be allowed to bring his mistress and their children and, as long as Madame de Pompadour was alive, could not remarry.

In 1756 Madame de Pompadour ached for the respectability of becoming a lady-in-waiting to the queen, but her romance with the king, which had opened up such glorious possibilities, now stood in her way. The queen's ladies were required to take Holy Communion daily, but the church forbade Madame de Pompadour the sacraments because of her previous adulterous relationship with the king and her continued estrangement from her husband. Although she had not slept with Louis for years, she was still banned from the altar. Madame de Pompadour, who had no wish to reconcile with her husband but now needed to reconcile herself with the church, followed her confessor's instructions and wrote Monsieur d'Etioles a letter requesting him to take her back. “Already my sin has ceased,” she explained, “and all that is necessary is to end the appearance of it—something which I ardently desire. I am resolved by my future conduct to atone for my past wrongs. Take me back; you will find me anxious to edify the world by the harmony of our life as much as I scandalized it by leaving you.”
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This conscious-stricken missive was accompanied by another message informing Monsieur d'Etioles that the king would be quite irritated if he accepted Madame de Pompadour's offer.

But Monsieur d'Etioles had no inclination whatsoever to take
back the wife who had so publicly shamed him. “I have received, Madame, your letter in which you inform me of your determination to return to me and your desire to surrender yourself to God,” he replied. “I cannot but admire such a resolution. I can well understand that it would be very embarrassing for you to see me, and you must agree that my feelings would be the same. Your presence can only intensify painful memories. Therefore, the best course for us is to live apart. No matter how much dissatisfaction you have caused me, I believe that you are concerned for my honor, and I should regard it as compromised if I received you in my house and lived with you as my wife. You are aware that time cannot alter what honor demands.”
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Breathing a huge sigh of relief, Madame de Pompadour showed her husband's letter to an obliging priest, and was purified of her carnal sins and allowed to take the holy sacraments. Reconciled with the Church, she was now permitted to fulfill her dream of becoming lady-in-waiting to the queen.

Monsieur d'Etioles's story had a happy ending. When Madame de Pompadour died at forty-two, her spurned husband married Mademoiselle Raime, legitimizing their children, and they lived happily for many years. He survived the Revolution and died at the age of eighty-three in 1800.

Some husbands who were initially horrified at the loss of their wives to the king became quickly reconciled. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, had such good fortune with the husbands of several of his mistresses. Tall, handsome, his brute strength only partially tempered by the refinements of the time, Augustus had become elector in 1694 at the age of twenty-four. He dutifully married a princess and sired an heir, but his restless nature compelled him to continue the travels he had enjoyed before he mounted the throne. A crowned king wandering across Europe was a rarity in those days, and the itinerant monarch found throngs of willing noblewomen throwing themselves into his bed when he visited foreign courts.

In Vienna, at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I, Augustus fell in love with Madame d'Esterle, whose resistance was conquered by the gift of a pair of earrings worth 40,000
florins. Thrilled with such valuable proof of royal desire, Madame d'Esterle threw caution to the winds and ended up seducing the king rather than the other way around. Soon after, her husband entered her bedroom one morning to find his wife asleep, with the thick curly head of the king of Saxony resting on her naked breast. The distraught husband cried out, “O thou perfidious wretch!”
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As the shaken king jumped out of bed and grabbed his sword, Monsieur d'Esterle ran away. Dressing hastily, Augustus sent his mistress to the inviolable home of his envoy to Vienna, clutching a case full of her jewels.

Nearly out of his mind, Monsieur d'Esterle raced to the emperor's antechamber, where courtiers dallied, and poured out his shame and rage to his friends. But the courtiers could not agree that Monsieur d'Esterle had a right to be angry. According to Augustus's biographer, “His friends afforded him what comfort they were capable of, in telling him that he had no reason to be so highly afflicted at so trifling a matter. They quoted instances from the fiction of the poets and both ancient and modern history.”
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His friends pointed out that according to ancient myth, Amphitryon was furious at discovering his wife was having an affair. But when he learned that his rival was Jupiter, king of the gods, he calmed down instantly. They reminded him that many noble Romans gave their wives for the emperors' use. When Monsieur d'Esterle replied that his wife had slept with neither a god nor his own sovereign, the Austrian ambassador to Rome advised him, “That you may imitate the examples of those husbands we mentioned to you, enter into the Elector of Saxony's service; and he may lie with your wife without your being obstructed by any person on that account.”
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The cuckolded husband felt so much better at the thought of lending his wife to Jupiter that he immediately wrote the elector seeking employment. Confused at such a turn of events, Augustus asked Madame d'Esterle her opinion. She was horrified at the idea of her husband returning with the elector to his court, always being in close proximity to them and in position to make trouble. She advised the elector instead to grant her husband a
generous pension upon several conditions which would bestow upon her both freedom and respectability. Her husband would renounce all his marital rights, but give his name to any royal bastards his wife might bear. In return for his annual stipend, the cuckold rigorously observed the terms of this contract.

Another husband who did not resist lending his wife to Jupiter was Edward Langtry, whose brilliant wife, Lillie, became the first official mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1877. Edward Langtry trailed in Lillie's shining wake as she sailed to fame and glory, never able to catch up. When Lillie sparkled at a party, Edward sat sullenly in the corner drinking.

Edward never publicly showed any resentment toward the Prince of Wales, but he did sometimes vent his frustrations in sudden violent rages at his wife. One day, Lillie and Edward were guests along with the prince at the home of Lord Malmesbury. She wrote her royal lover a suggestive letter, which her husband deciphered by holding her blotting paper up to a mirror. Edward was so angry he reduced the normally tough Lillie to a puddle of tears. The whole house heard their argument. Lord Malmesbury, too, was furious—at the servants for not changing the blotting paper every day in all the guest rooms as they had been instructed, to prevent just such an inconvenience.

After three years as royal mistress, Lillie lost her position to actress Sarah Bernhardt, who took London, and the Prince of Wales, by storm. Lillie turned her attentions to the German prince Louis Battenburg and soon became pregnant. The Prince of Wales, still fond of Lillie, arranged for her to give birth in France, away from prying eyes. Even Edward Langtry was unaware that his wife had had a child.

Lillie, separated now from her nearly bankrupt husband, found herself cut off from the prince's financial largesse. To support herself and her daughter, she decided to emulate her rival Sarah Bernhardt and earn her living on the stage. Her notoriety as the prince's former mistress ensured good box-office receipts, and the Prince and Princess of Wales pointedly attended her London plays. Traveling coast to coast in her own luxurious ten-room railway car, she performed throughout the
United States for six years and met with huge success in the mining towns of the Wild West.

Edward, grasping at some memory of love, refused to divorce Lillie despite her pleas, and without the consent of both parties the British courts refused to grant the divorce. Because American courts were more flexible, Lillie became an American citizen to rid herself of her humiliating husband. Having lost his wife to a prince and a subsequent dazzling career, Edward sank into an irretrievable pit of alcoholism and depression. Lillie, though thrilled to be freed of him, faithfully sent him money four times a year until the day he died.

While some husbands leaped for joy as their monarchs bedded their wives, and others suffered dutifully, a few had the backbone to stand up to such adulterous intrusions. One of the earliest records of such defiance occurred during the reign of England's King John of Magna Carta fame (1167–1216). One Eustace de Vesci, an aristocrat, was hated by King John “because he had placed a common woman instead of his wife in the royal bed.”
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Thirteenth-century records such as this often offer us more questions than answers. Let us, however, imagine King John rutting joyously in the inutterable darkness of a feudal four-poster with what he presumes is a beautiful virtuous noblewoman. And then, as the first cold fingers of dawn illumine the person in his bed, he finds to his chagrin a scullery maid or washerwoman.

In the 1520s, King François I went to a lady's bedchamber to find her husband waiting next to the bed, guarding his wife's honor with a sword. In a royal rage, the king informed the husband that if he harmed his wife he would lose his head. The king then kicked the unfortunate man out of the room and climbed into bed with his wife.

Henri IV of France suffered resistance from not one, but two of his mistresses' stubborn husbands. When Gabrielle d'Estrées gave him a son, Henri was afraid that her aged husband Nicolas
d'Amerval could claim paternity and remove the boy from his mother. Henri decided to press for a divorce. One of the few reasons the Catholic Church would grant a divorce was in the case of the husband's impotence.