Sex with Kings (5 page)

Madame de Pompadour, who truly loved Louis, wrote to a friend, “Except for the happiness of being loved by the one you love, which is the best of all conditions, a solitary and less brilliant life is much to be preferred.”
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Her lady's maid, Madame du Hausset, who well understood the stresses of Madame de Pompadour's life, said, “I pity you sincerely, Madame, while everybody else envies you.”
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In Madame de Pompadour the king enjoyed a charming companion constantly at his beck and call. Having lost his parents at the age of three, living apart from the rest of humanity as a kind of demigod, Louis was inexorably lonely by nature. In her low apartments under the eaves of Versailles, she offered him the warm and loving home he had never had with parents or siblings, and certainly never with his ill-suited wife. At great cost to herself, she diminished for him the pain of living, the loneliness in a crowd that only a monarch can suffer.

Devastated by Madame de Pompadour's early death—which was no doubt hastened by her nineteen exhausting years as his mistress—Louis waited four years before choosing another
maîtresse-en-titre,
the Parisian prostitute Madame du Barry, in 1768.

Madame du Barry lacked her predecessor's intelligence but boasted greater beauty. One young officer went to petition the new favorite and was so overwhelmed by her loveliness that he nearly forgot what he had come for. “I can still see her carelessly seated or rather reclining in a large easy chair,” he recalled, “wearing a white dress with wreaths of roses. She was one of the prettiest women at a Court which boasted so many, and the very perfection of her loveliness made her the most fascinating. Her hair, which she often left unpowdered, was of a beautiful golden color and she had so much that she scarcely knew what to do with it all. Her wide blue eyes looked at one with an engaging frankness. She had a straight little nose and a complexion of a dazzling purity. In a word, I like everyone else fell immediately under her charm.”
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Madame du Barry's “dazzling” complexion was indeed a rarity in an age when most women's skin was marred by smallpox scars. And while many young women were missing teeth—sometimes
all
their teeth—Madame du Barry had a wide white grin.

Her meticulous grooming habits were highly unusual for the eighteenth century. Most courtiers covered the crusty filth and overpowering stench of their bodies with velvets, laces, and a hearty dose of cologne. Women inserted head scratchers into their elaborate coiffures to ease the itch of flea bites on greasy scalps. But there would be no filth, stench, or head fleas for Madame du Barry, who simmered in rose-scented bathwater several times a week.

Madame du Barry augmented her substantial natural beauty with stunning clothes. Some of her gowns were deceiving in their simplicity—the cost of a diaphanous white robe, tied carelessly with a few exquisite ribbons, would have allowed a Paris family to live in comfort for a year. Other gowns were grander—of gold or silver tissue, embroidered with gold and silver thread and thousands of seed pearls. Her sleeves, skirts, and petticoats were flounced with the finest lace.

At the wedding of the king's grandson in 1773, Madame du
Barry appeared “shining like the sun in a dress of cloth of gold covered in jewels worth over five million
livres,
” according to one eyewitness.
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She owned one bodice encrusted with thousands of fine diamonds sewn in the shape of interlacing bows, costing millions of dollars in today's money. Each of her gowns had a matching pair of slippers with jeweled buckles—diamonds, amethysts, or sapphires.

But Madame du Barry had far more to offer Louis than her radiant beauty. Her sexual talents bound him to her, and her gaiety plucked him out of his frequent depressions. She was all women to him—a delightful child, a talented whore, a comforting mother. And, like Madame de Pompadour, she was always willing to forgive the malicious courtiers who made trouble for her.

Taking the example of her predecessor, Madame du Barry made herself the king's entertainment committee. She decorated her apartments to please Louis and stuffed them with his favorite flowers. Her mother had been a cook in many noble kitchens, and while haughty courtiers ridiculed this, Madame du Barry tempted the jaded royal palate with countless tasty dishes recommended by her mother. In addition, she brought in jugglers and clowns and had operettas and farces performed for the king's amusement.

While it was challenging enough to amuse the king in a palace, in the 1590s beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrées had the task of making Henri IV's surroundings comfortable on the field of battle. For several years at the outset of their relationship, Henri was campaigning with his army against rebel forces throughout France. Golden Gabrielle, even when heavily pregnant, insisted on staying by his side, living in cold, drafty tents. She saw to it that he had a good dinner after a day's battle, and she herself kept his clothes as clean as possible—often pounding them with rocks when she ran out of soap. While Henri was fighting on the field, Gabrielle remained in their tent writing his political and diplomatic dispatches. In the evening, they would discuss the events of the day.

Gabrielle was tall with a delicious figure and graceful walk.
Blessed with exquisite coloring—pale blonde hair and large blue eyes—she had a broad forehead, high cheekbones, and a nose just a bit too long for perfection. Her contemporaries—even enemies who hated Gabrielle for her Catholicism, her involvement in politics, and her warming the king's bed—waxed poetic when describing her beauty.

In addition to providing her royal lover with shining beauty and comfortable surroundings, Gabrielle offered him fierce political loyalty. During a ball in Paris, a messenger arrived informing the king that the Spanish had launched a surprise attack and captured the town of Amiens. Henri decided to march immediately. Gabrielle calmly went to her strong boxes in the Louvre, emptied them of fifty thousand pieces of gold, and gave Henri every penny to pay the initial costs of troops and provisions. While Henri mustered his troops, Gabrielle got in her carriage and visited the homes of the nobility to ask for donations, collecting an additional 250,000 ecus.

Still not satisfied, Gabrielle took her extraordinary jewels to the richest banker in Paris and pawned them. Still in her ball gown and dancing slippers, Gabrielle set out for the front, where she insisted on taking care of her royal lover despite real danger. Henri wrote, “Last evening I found three bullet holes burned into the fabric of my mistress' tent, and begged her to go to her house in Paris, where her life would not be endangered, but she laughed and was deaf to my pleas…. She replied that only in my presence is she pleased. I entertain no fears for myself, but daily tremble for her.”
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One day, during a particularly fierce battle, a column of Austrian soldiers appeared, causing the French troops to flee in disorder. Oblivious of the cannonballs crashing around her, Gabrielle cried at the top of her voice for the French troops to stay and fight. The Austrians came within five hundred paces of the king's mistress as she continued exhorting her countrymen to bravery. Alarmed, Henri rode to her side and ordered her to be slung over a horse and taken to the rear of the camp. Out of fifty-six known mistresses in his lifetime, Henri was faithful only to Gabrielle. So smitten was the king with his brave and beautiful
mistress that he vowed to marry Gabrielle and make her queen of France.

In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the king raised his mistress to his lofty level and ensconced her in apartments at the palace. Most likely she did not complain about the bitter cold that froze the ink in her inkwell and coated the wash water in her basin with a crust of ice. She understood that the distance of outhouses from the palace required bowls overflowing with human waste in almost every room, concealed behind elegant cabinets of inlaid rosewood until they could be removed. She did not expect her food to be warm; the distance of the palace kitchens from the royal suites precluded that. She knew that behind its thin wash of gilding, the court was a “tissue of malice,” as Madame de Pompadour said, a place of vicious backbiting and petulant self-aggrandizement.
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By the nineteenth century, the monarch, instead of raising his mistress to his exalted if uncomfortable level, gratefully descended to hers. He escaped his golden prison by fleeing to her tidy bourgeois home, which offered the warmth, comfort, and privacy his court could not.

Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef (1830–1916), a sad, weary little man bowed down by the weight of a crumbling empire, found joy over coffee and croissants with his mistress Katharina Schratt. A thirty-three-year-old comic actress at the Imperial Theater when their love affair began in 1886, Katharina was the only woman ever reported to make the emperor laugh out loud. Over a period of thirty years, Franz Josef found in her quaint home an oasis of entertainment and relaxation, far from the cold etiquette of the palace. Katharina did not weary him with politics but told him jokes and pleasant chatty gossip.

Katharina was one of those women whose aura of beauty quickly disintegrates when one analyzes her features. She had a face like a potato dumpling, a stubborn chin, thick, quizzical black eyebrows framing laughing eyes, a pointed little nose, and thin lips struggling to suppress a smile. Her curvaceous figure ran to plumpness in middle age. It was the joy she embodied, her warmth and kindness, that made her seem truly beautiful.

In 1895, the German ambassador Count Eulenberg described the forty-two-year-old actress as “ravishingly pretty with extraordinary youthful looks, marvelous coloring, shining golden hair and great blue eyes with the sweetest expression, a really good soul who never says an unkind word and is always pleasant and gay and ready to help whom she can. Apart from which she is delightful company and has a very original way of relating little anecdotes.”
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The emperor loved his beautiful wife, Empress Elizabeth, who was always balancing precariously on the brink of insanity. But the anguished empress was in no position to amuse and comfort her husband, and she spent most of her time trekking across Europe in a fruitless effort to cast out her inner demons. In fact it was she who had chosen Katharina to be her husband's mistress to relieve her own guilt at deserting him. The empress kept throwing the two together—they were a bit slow to understand—until an affair began. It was a wise choice. Franz Josef wrote Katharina that his visits to her cheerful home were “the only rays of light in my otherwise dreary life.”
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With his children married and his wife away, the lonely emperor often roamed the endless corridors of the royal palace alone, with no one to see to his personal comfort. He had dozens of servants to snap to his commands, but not one would have dared to see what he was lacking and make suggestions. Katharina filled this role, giving him a painted screen to protect him from the draft, a thick wool smoking jacket, a cozy little rug. His favorite gift was a hand mirror with the words in French “portrait of him whom I love.”
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While the vast majority of royal mistresses presented an unfailingly cheerful face to the king, there were some notable exceptions. Two of the worst harpies reigned in the 1660s and 1670s. Louis XIV's Athénaïs de Montespan and his cousin Charles II's Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, were both cunning, hotheaded, vengeful, and rapacious.

When she first became Louis XIV's mistress, Athénaïs de Montespan was the most beautiful woman at the French court. She had thick tawny hair, large, heavily lidded blue eyes, a straight nose, good teeth, and the cherubic lips so cherished at court. Her neck was long and shapely, her large bosom and white shoulders well suited to the daring off-the-shoulder gowns of the 1660s. As one courtier reported, “Her greatest charm was a grace, a spirit, a certain manner making a witticism.”
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Unlike her predecessor Louise de La Vallière, whose beauty had lasted just about as long as the violets she had been compared to, Madame de Montespan kept her looks almost until the age of forty, but with the utmost exertion. She marinated herself daily in creams, oils, and flower essences to keep her complexion fresh. She spent lavishly on cosmetics, dabbing on the ivories, roses, and peaches of her complexion as if nature had not fully complied with her exacting requirements.

Daily attending royal dinners with highly fattening food—which the king insisted she eat—and with the limited exercise available to upper-class women at the time, Madame de Montespan often grew plumper than was fashionable. The Italian fortune-teller to the nobility, Primi Visconti, noted gleefully, “While she was descending from her carriage one day, I had a glimpse of one of her legs, and I swear it was almost as broad as my whole body.”
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To counter this tendency toward stoutness, Madame de Montespan had herself rubbed down with pomade two hours at a time, several times a week, as she lay naked on her bed. Periodically she disappeared to a health spa, where she starved herself back into shape.

In 1676 she returned from several weeks at the spa in Bourbon. When Madame de Sévigné visited court, she found the royal mistress “quite flat again in the rear end…her beauty is breathtaking…. While losing weight, she has lost none of her radiance…her skin, her eyes, her lips all aglow…. Her costume was a mass of French lace, her hair dressed in a thousand ringlets, the two at her temples quite long, falling against her cheek, her coiffure topped with black velvet ribbons and jeweled pins, her famous pearl necklace…caught up with superb
diamond clips and buckles. In short, a triumphant beauty to show off, to parade before all the Ambassadors.”
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Athénaïs de Montespan was like a golden lioness, a majestic feline beauty, purring contentedly, who at a moment's notice bares claws and fangs, ready to rip and tear. Her temper tantrums were notorious. When courtiers heard her shrill, angry voice wafting down the hall they avoided her wing of the palace rather than “passing through heavy fire.”
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