In the seventeenth century the Jacobite wars and the Cromwellian invasion meant that many Irish people, poor and rich, found it necessary to emigrate to Europe, and France was a favourite destination. The parents of Marie Louise O’Morphi, better known as Louison, were two such immigrants. Daniel Murphy, or O’Murphy, may have originally gone to France as a soldier in the army of James II. By the 1720s he was a shoemaker in Rouen and his Irish wife, Margaret Hickey, was a second-hand clothes merchant.
The Murphys had five good-looking daughters, and when Daniel died, leaving the family predictably penniless, their mother moved them all to Paris and turned them towards the only lucrative professions within their reach – none of which were on the right side of respectability. The O’Murphy girls started to bring in money variously as actresses, dancers, artists’ models, jewellers of fake jewels and live-in mistresses. The exception was Louison, the youngest. She was made use of by her older sisters as a servant girl – at least, they reasoned, she was out of harm’s way. And so she was, until one day in 1751 a visitor came to see one of her sisters. He spotted the beautiful Louison scrubbing away in the kitchen and followed her to her room. The visitor’s name was Casanova.
Casanova took Louison to see his friend, the artist François Boucher. Boucher was entranced. He had already painted at least one of Louison’s sisters, but he was overwhelmed by Louison’s beauty: she was tall, with curly brown hair, clear skin and a turned-up nose. She was also trim and round and he knew at once that she would be a great model. Before long, Boucher and Louison were lovers and he was painting her obsessively. As his work was commissioned by the French royalty, it was only a matter of time before risqué paintings of her adorned the palace of King Louis XV – even the chapel.
In the royal court, King Louis XV presided over the ancien régime with all the splendour and self-importance of an Egyptian pharaoh. He was in the prime of life and sex-mad, and he inflicted his insatiable appetites on every woman within his greedy reach. His favourite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, admitted frankly that she couldn’t keep up with him – but she also knew that failing to pander to the king’s every whim was risky. Should one of the many cultured ladies of the court succeed her as maitresse en titre, she would lose her powerful and influential position. So the clever courtesan hit on a plan. She drew the king’s attention to the paintings of Louison adorning the walls of the palace, then, one day in 1753, she invited Casanova to introduce Louison to the king in person. Louison was just seventeen years old.
Louis XV was instantly captivated by Louison’s looks, good humour and apparent naïveté. At one point she laughed in his face, something no one ever did. In short order, he found he had paid over a large amount of money to Louison’s delighted mother and set Louison up in the palace. Initially, at least, Mme de Pompadour was happy with the arrangement – the ploy of using an uneducated, unambitious young girl who could satisfy the king’s appetites and yet not pose a threat to her seemed to be working.
In 1754 Louison got pregnant. Mme de Pompadour and the king immediately took over the pregnancy and hustled her away to a secret location. The king really didn’t need another royal bastard hanging around, so when the baby boy was born he instructed the nurse to tell Louison it was stillborn, and then have the baby taken away secretly and adopted. The following summer the same thing happened again. This time the baby was a girl, and she was whisked away to be reared in a convent, never to meet or know her mother and father. Louison accepted the loss of her babies: such was the lot of a royal mistress.
In 1755 Mme de Pompadour and the king married Louison off to an army officer in order to keep up appearances. She was now a lady of rank and lived in a château in Auvergne, in south-central France. She still bedded the king, but her role was changing subtly. As well as being a bedmate herself, she started ‘pandering’ for him, in other words, procuring young virgins for his royal pleasure. This ‘ideal’ situation continued for some time. But it all went wrong when Louison, who had neither the brains nor the inclination to play at politics, became unwittingly involved in an anti-Pompadour court intrigue in 1757.
A courtier persuaded Louison to use her influence with the king at Mme Pompadour’s expense, but she muffed her lines, the plot was uncovered and she was banished from Versailles. Cast out of court life and pregnant with another of the king’s children, she suffered a second blow when her husband was killed in battle. She gave birth to a baby boy, and this time, as a punishment, the child was not acknowledged by the king. The king’s action was to prove a blessing in disguise, for little Louis Charles was allowed to stay with his mother and would be her staunchest friend in the frightening days ahead.
After a few years in the wilderness, Mme de Pompadour and the king relented slightly towards Louison, and by 1759 they were seeking another husband for her. They found someone they deemed suitable and Louison, amenable as always, married without a murmur. Her new husband was given an important job as a steward to the king’s brother. For Louison, this meant a move away from the wilds of Auvergne and back to her beloved Paris. Her continuing discretion and loyalty, and that of her husband, meant she was partially rehabilitated. Eventually, King Louis even summoned little Louis Charles to court as a page, thereby tacitly acknowledging the child’s royal paternity.
The next twenty-five years were lived in comfortable prosperity by the one-time Cinderella. Her rival, Mme de Pompadour, died and was replaced by Mme du Barry; Louis XV died and was replaced by Louis XVI. Now a woman in her fifties, Louison was well-preserved and wealthy and secure in her position as a woman of fashion. But all this was set to change.
In 1789 widespread poverty and the deep unpopularity of Louis XVI led to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Louison’s second husband died the following year, and in 1792 her son, Louis Charles, went to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. Left alone in Paris amid rioting and looting, Louison barricaded herself in her house. Finally, the unthinkable happened: King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were arrested and the mob gained control of the palace.
Louison was one of the lucky ones. When the mob broke into her house they merely looted it, arrested her and packed her off to a convent. From her cell, she watched as the guillotine was set up outside her window and one by one all the members of the court she had known met a gruesome death, to rapturous public applause. In mid-October, Queen Marie Antoinette was guillotined, after which the mob turned on the royal mistresses. Mme du Barry was to be executed first and Louison was to be second. However, she was saved at the eleventh hour by her devoted son, who was going from strength to strength in the new republic and was as trusted and respected as anyone could be in those times. He arranged with the authorities for his mother to be transferred to a different convent prison and granted a reprieve. She kept her head down – and still on her shoulders – by changing her name back to Louise Murphy, talking up her humble Irish roots and dissociating herself from her royalist past.
Between 1793 and 1794 the Terror reached its peak. Even Louis Charles found himself briefly but seriously on the wrong side due to the increasing radicalism of the revolution. But by December 1794 it was all over; Robespierre went to the guillotine and Louison was released from the convent. She returned to Paris and then, with her son, back to the old cháteau in Auvergne. Louison, no longer as naïve as she had been in former days, liberated some jewellery she had hidden in case of emergencies and soon she and her son were able to afford a life of relative affluence. When Napoleon came to power in 1799, Louis Charles received a promotion; he retired as a general in 1803.
Louison lived under Napoleon’s rule much as she had done under the two kings: she enjoyed a comfortable, privileged existence. Apart from an embarrassingly short-lived marriage to a man more than twenty years her junior, she grew old gracefully and discreetly. In 1812 her son died at the age of fifty-one. He had never married and remained devoted to his mother to the last. In spring 1814 the Bourbon monarchy was reinstated with the accession of Louis XVIII. Louison was there to witness the royal procession of the grandson of the man who had given her everything. She died less than a year later, and was buried in Pére Lachaise, Paris.