Sex with Kings

by Eleanor Herman

  The former favorite bled to death slowly, each day losing a bit more strength, a bit more color, until a year later Mademoiselle de Fontanges was dead at the age of twenty-two. There is a story in which Louis visited in her final hours and sat crying at her bed. “Having seen tears in the eyes of my King,” she is supposed to have said, “I can die happy.”6 But this story was deemed untrue by many at Versailles because the king had, in fact, already forgotten her.

  In 1743 Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Ventimille gave him a healthy son and a few days later suffered sudden fatal convulsions. The body of the unpopular “king’s whore” was laid out in a house in the town of Versailles watched over by guards. When they left their posts to drink, an enraged mob broke in and insulted the corpse.

  Louis’s next mistress, Madame de Châteauroux, also died young. A few weeks before her sudden demise, the king had nearly died from fever while on campaign and had submitted to his priests’ demands to send Madame de Châteauroux away in disgrace, stripping her of all her titles and privileges. As he recovered, Madame de Châteauroux waited on tenterhooks for her summons to return to court. Finally the summons came. Triumphant, the favorite packed her bags ready to race back to her lavish apartments in the palace and take up where she had left off. She eagerly planned suitable punishments for those who had gloated over her downfall.

  But before she could enter her carriage, she was struck with a blinding headache and took to her bed. Impatient at the delay of her victorious return, she waited for the headache to disappear. Then fever set in. She went into convulsions, sending soul-wrenching shrieks through her house. Her burning ambitions, which had enflamed the entire court, dwindled to a tiny spark, then to a cold ash.

  The king was devastated. The marquis d’Argenson wrote, “Our poor Master has a look which makes one tremble for his life.”7

  Louis had lost two mistresses in two years. He was to lose his next and best-loved mistress to death as well. For nineteen years, Madame de Pompadour had reigned supreme over a king and a nation. But in 1763, her health rapidly deteriorating, she confided her long years of suffering to her old friend Madame de La Ferté-Imbault. “I have never heard a finer sermon on the nemesis of ambition,” the friend wrote. “She seemed so wretched, so proud, so violently shaken and so suffocated by her own enormous power that I came away after an hour’s talk feeling that death was the only refuge left to her.”8

  At the age of forty-one, probably suffering from tuberculosis and congestive heart failure, Madame de Pompadour had such difficulty climbing steps that a mechanical chair was installed on the staircase in Versailles. By early 1764 it was clear to all that the royal mistress was a dying woman. In February of that year she suffered a lung hemorrhage, followed by chills and fever. The king visited her every day. By April, the cold wet spring in the drafty palace had exacerbated her illness. In her last days, she rouged her deathly pale cheeks, put on a brocade dressing gown over white taffeta petticoats, and had her hair combed. When the king visited her, she, knowing he hated sickness, refused to talk about her illness and pretended she was actually quite well. Dying, she listened to his boring stories and injected the witty remark at just the right moment.

  On April 13, the king, having spoken with Madame de Pompadour’s doctors, broke the news to her that she had days, perhaps hours, left. She asked him if he wished her to see a priest, and he nodded. She was not eager to do so, because she knew that once a priest arrived Louis would have to leave, given the sinful nature of their early relationship, and she would never see him again. Catholic mistresses were doomed to die without their lovers by their side.

  As if an ordinary mortal’s death would pollute the ambrosial atmosphere of the gods, it was not permitted for anyone but a member of the royal family to die at Versailles. But Louis insisted that Madame de Pompadour stay there unmolested, in as much comfort as possible.

  Slipping from life, she made her will, leaving many bequests to faithful friends and servants. That last night she slept sitting up in a chair because her rotting lungs could inhale a bit of air only in that position. The following afternoon the dauphin wrote, “She is dying with a courage rare in either sex. Every time she draws a breath, she thinks it is her last. It is one of the saddest and most cruel endings one can imagine…. The King has not seen her since yesterday.”9

  At the very end, Madame de Pompadour soiled her linen. When her maids wanted to shift her to change it she replied, “I know you are very skillful, but I am so feeble that you could not help hurting me, and it is not worth it for the little time I have left.”10

  As her priest rose to go, she gave one last, shining smile and said, “One moment, Monsieur le Curé, and we will go away together.”11 Her lungs—never strong, now utterly defeated—rattled out the last breath of air. And then there was the awful silence.

  When the king was informed that his mistress had died, he shut himself up in his apartments with some of her best friends. Meanwhile, the duchesse de Praslin, looking out her window, saw the corpse of a woman, “covered only with a sheet wrapped so tightly that the shape of the head, the breasts, the stomach and legs were distinctly outlined.”12 Moments after Madame de Pompadour’s death, her body had been whisked away.

  The day of her funeral, a cold wind howled around Versailles. As the solemn procession passed in front of the palace, the king—who was forbidden by etiquette to attend the ceremony—stood on his balcony in the rain without a hat or coat, tears rolling down his face. “They are the only tribute I can offer her,” he said to his servant.13

  When her friend Voltaire heard of her passing, he wrote, “I am greatly afflicted by the death of Madame de Pompadour; I weep when I think of it. It is very absurd that an old scribbler like myself should be still alive, and that a beautiful woman should have been cut off at forty in the midst of the most brilliant career in the world. Perhaps if she had tasted the repose which I enjoy, she would be living now.”14

  A few days after the funeral the queen said, “Finally there is no more talk here of her who is no longer than if she had never existed. Such is the way of the world; it is very hard to love it.”15

  The Business of Life

  Not all royal mistresses suffered tragic endings. Most of them aged, were ousted, and went about the business of daily life, pockets stuffed with the wages of sin.

  Early in the reign of George I of England, three ancient royal mistresses of dead kings ran into each other at the English court. The duchesses of Portsmouth, Dorchester, and Orkney, mistresses of Charles II, James II, and William III, respectively, had beaten the odds and lived into a healthy old age. Like a trio of barnacled old scows bobbing in the harbor, the elderly dames looked at each other. Suddenly the plucky duchess of Orkney crowed, “Who would have thought that we three old whores would meet here?”16

  After the exile of her lover, James II, Catherine Sedley, duchess of Dorchester, was given a pension by William III. She would afterward say that “both the kings were civil to her, but both the queens used her badly.”17 James had granted her a large pension from lands, but after his exile the House of Commons threatened her with the loss of it. Spirited Catherine went before the bar of the house to present her case herself and won it.

  When Catherine was forty, a Scottish baronet, Sir David Colyear, made an honest woman of her. Sir David was an officer in William III’s army and highly respected, so much so that many wondered at his choice of a bride. Despite her age Catherine provided her husband with two healthy sons. Her earthy humor is best revealed in her advice to her sons with Colyear: “If anybody call either of you the son of a whore you must bear it, for you are so,” she counseled, “but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.”18

  Elizabeth Villiers, the duchess of Orkney, never flaunted her position at court as mistress of William III. But in 1694, when Queen Mary died of smallpox at the age of thirty-two, she left William a letter containing a stinging rebuke for his affair with Elizabeth.
Admonishments from the dead are the most tormenting of all. And so William, after endowing Elizabeth with ninety thousand acres in Ireland and an annual income of five thousand pounds, dismissed her.

  When Elizabeth was cast aside, she was nearing forty and had never married. Despite her advanced age and lack of physical attractions—she was described as squinting “like a dragon”—she soon found a respectable husband, George Hamilton, a younger son of the duke of Hamilton.19 King William promptly created him earl of Orkney, and his wife automatically became a countess. Never one to mince words, Elizabeth had told her husband soon after meeting him that she had been “on very good terms with a certain person, but that she did not wish to hear any reproaches or insinuations on that score.”20

  The marriage was not only happy but fruitful. Elizabeth, who had never had any children during her tenure with William, bore her husband three children in her forties. She outlived her royal lover by thirty years. One witness described her at the coronation of George II in 1727: “She exposed behind a mixture of fat and wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of bubbies [breasts] a good deal withered, a great belly that preceded her, add to this the inimitable roll of her eyes and her gray hair which by good fortune stood directly upright, and ’tis impossible to imagine a more delightful spectacle.”21

  Another of James II’s mistresses, Arabella Churchill of the ugly face and lovely limbs, married Colonel Charles Godfrey after her liaison with James ended. Having borne James two girls and two boys, she gave her husband two daughters. They lived happily together for forty years.

  Napoleon’s discarded mistress Maria Walewska also found happiness in marriage, albeit briefly. After Napoleon’s downfall in 1815, she devoted herself to their son Alexander and to regaining the estate left him by the emperor. After the death of her first husband, whom she had divorced, Maria was pursued by the dashing General Philippe Antoine d’Ornano, who had fallen deeply in love with her. She finally relented, marrying him in 1816. Nine months later she gave birth to a boy. But the pregnancy had taken a serious toll on her weak kidneys. She spent her last weeks dictating her memoirs—making herself out to be a Polish patriot rather than a lascivious mistress—and died in December 1817 at the age of thirty-one.

  On his desert exile of St. Helena, no one had the heart to tell Napoleon about her death. He thought she had stopped writing because she was happily married. When he died three years later, he was still wearing the ring she had given him, encasing a strand of her blonde hair, with the inscription, “When you cease to love me, remember, I love you still.”22

  Upon parting from Lady Castlemaine after a liaison of twelve years, Charles II said, “All that I ask of you for your own sake is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.”23 She could not help whom she loved, but she did make a great deal of noise. After countless messy love affairs, at the age of sixty-five she was finally unburdened of her long-suffering husband. Within weeks, the merry widow wed handsome Robert Fielding, a fifty-four-year-old who had married two fortunes and had the good luck to have both brides die.

  Fielding had been on the lookout for a third fortune when he happened to find two wealthy widows: Anne Deleau, worth about sixty thousand pounds a year, and Lady Castlemaine, whose vast income was well known throughout the kingdom. Fielding decided he need not limit himself to one—he would marry both women and take their fortunes.

  But instead of marrying Mistress Deleau, Fielding married an imposter named Mary Wadsworth, a friend of the heiress’s hairdresser, who pretended to be the wealthy relict, whom Fielding had never seen. At the third meeting, the couple was married by a priest and consummated the marriage. The “heiress,” however, said she needed to return home until she had broken the news to her father. She visited Fielding several times, each time having sex and collecting generous gifts from him.

  In the meantime, Fielding also married Lady Castlemaine—though unknown to her, this marriage was bigamous and illegal. Fielding soon discovered that his legal wife was not Mistress Deleau at all, but a penniless adventurer. He beat both her and the hairdresser accomplice black and blue. Meanwhile, he immediately began pocketing Lady Castlemaine’s pensions from Charles II. He began to sell off her valuable furniture and when she protested, he locked her in a room and refused to feed her until she agreed. When Lady Castlemaine told her sons, Fielding broke open her cabinet and took four hundred pounds, then beat her severely until she broke free to the open window and cried, “Murder!” Fielding then shot a blunderbuss into the street. Lady Castlemaine’s sons got a warrant for Fielding, who was taken to Newgate Prison and convicted of bigamy. But Fielding must have worked his magic on Queen Anne as well, for she pardoned him. After two years, Lady Castlemaine’s marriage was declared null.

  The experience with Fielding had finally ended Lady Castlemaine’s lifelong cacophony. Shortly thereafter she left London to live with her grandson. In 1709, at the age of sixty-nine, she developed dropsy, which swelled her once incomparable body into a revolting mass of flesh. Three months later she was dead.

  The Comforts of Religion

  “When women cease to be handsome, they study to be good,” said Benjamin Franklin, and he could have been talking about most royal mistresses. Many experienced religious epiphanies—rarely while still holding the title of maîtresse-en-titre, more often after their disgrace and rustication. Most women sinned at leisure, as long as they were buoyed by youth and vitality, and repented in haste, when the hand of age or illness fell heavy upon them. Many a woman hoped to win points in heaven after a sinful life, as Sir Horace Walpole put it, by “bestowing the dregs of her beauty upon Jesus Christ.”24

  In 1678, when Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle felt herself dying, she “preached to the King, crucifix in hand, to detach him from women.”25 But her piety lasted just as long as her illness. Just a few days after her deathbed supplication to the king, hearing that Charles was attending the theater with her rival Hortense Mancini, Louise painted her face and dragged herself to the king’s box, where, fangs bared, she hastily reclaimed her position. She did not find God again for another forty years.

  We must not assume that royal mistresses neglected church duties while in office, or that religion did not call to them during their adulterous lives. Most attended daily religious services, and many were involved in charitable projects for the poor. In the 1670s Primi Visconti described two of Louis XIV’s mistresses in church, “rosary or prayer book in hand, eyes raised heaven-ward, as ecstatical as a pair of saints!”26

  One of these ecstatical saints, Louise de La Vallière, fled the sparkling court of Versailles for the sanctity of a convent at the age of twenty-nine. Louise, who for years had played lady’s maid dressing her replacement Madame de Montespan, told Louis that “after devoting her youth to him, all the rest of her life was not too long to devote to her salvation.”27

  Before Louise left court, Madame de Maintenon, herself extremely devout, asked Louise if she had considered the bodily discomforts that awaited her among the Carmelites, the strictest convent of the day: clothing that itched and rubbed, long fasts, backbreaking work, extreme heat and cold. Nuns were forbidden to speak and were forced to sleep in hard beds shaped like coffins. “When I shall be suffering at the convent,” she replied, “I shall only have to remember what they made me suffer here, and all the pain will seem light to me.”28 She gestured across the room to Madame de Montespan, giggling and whispering in the king’s ear.

  The day Louise bade farewell to her friends at court, she threw herself at the feet of Queen Marie-Thérèse to beg forgiveness. “My crimes were public,” the penitent explained; “my repentance must be public, too.”29 The queen, who had detested her for many years, must have wished the respectful Louise could regain her former place and oust the nasty Montespan. But Louise, leaving her two surviving children to be raised at Versailles, set off in her ducal carriage to the convent, leaving the world behind her.

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��She has drunk the cup of humiliation to the dregs,” reported Madame de Sévigné.30 During the ceremony to become a novice, Louise had her lovely ash-blonde hair sheared off, though Madame de Sévigné noted gleefully that “she spared the two fine curls on her forehead!”31 Perhaps more embarrassing to Louise’s slender vanity was the loss of her specially made heels, one slightly higher than the other to make up for a short leg. Wearing the flat sandals prescribed in the convent would force Louise to walk with a pronounced limp.

  A year later the convent was packed with courtiers gathered to watch the unique spectacle of a royal mistress taking her final vows to become a nun, accepting her black veil from none other than the queen, who kissed and blessed her afterward. Invitations to the ceremony were hard to come by, and there was a great deal of jostling, pushing, and shoving to watch the show. One witness wrote, “She never looked more beautiful or more content. She should be happy if only because she no longer has to lace up Madame de Montespan’s stays.”32

  The king, who felt flattered by Louise’s years of reproachful glances and silent suffering as he flaunted her successor, had wanted to keep her at court, a reminder of how irresistible he was. He was peeved that she preferred God to her king. For years courtiers, eager to see the novelty of royal mistress turned nun, visited Louise in the convent. After saying a prayer to ward off temptation, she who had given up the world was forced to meet members of it in the convent parlor. But not the king. He never saw her again.