’Tis not a lip or eye we beauty call, but the joint force and full result of all.
—ALEXANDER POPE
SEXUAL TALENTS ALONE WOULD NOT RAISE A WOMAN TO THE position of maîtresse-en-titre. The king could lift the skirts of almost anyone in his realm as few or as many times as he wanted without giving her the official title and its corresponding emoluments. The king’s servants, knowing their master’s taste, often scrubbed up cheerful prostitutes and dumped them in the royal bed. These women gratefully accepted a piece of gold on their way out the door. Chambermaids cleaning the king’s rooms were sometimes subjected to the sudden and irrepressible lust of their monarch. Smoothing down their rumpled petticoats, they took their brooms and buckets and discreetly went on to clean the next chamber.
With court ladies the king had dalliances—which included private suppers followed by lovemaking and gifts of expensive jewelry. These noblewomen, unlike the prostitutes and chambermaids, were eligible to become the official mistress if the monarch chose to bestow the honor upon her. But in most cases, he did not. What qualities made a woman a serious candidate for royal mistress?
We are tempted to choose beauty as the most important quality. We see the king’s mistress as a Baroque Aphrodite gleaming in silks, dripping with lace, glittering in jewels. Sweeping into a ball, she demolishes the king with a single glance, prompting him, weak-kneed, to utter those fateful words, “Who is she?”
She has translucent skin, shining ringlets, a face and figure of astonishing beauty. Beneath her elegant veneer lurks an animal passion that men can sense across the room. Her voice is low and throaty, her smile devastating. She pins thunderstruck men to the spot with a glance from her luminous eyes. Laughing, she leaves us, her train rustling behind her, and we detect the heady notes of her perfume clinging to the air. Well do we understand why the king has selected her.
But if we chose beauty as the single most important quality of the royal mistress, we would be flat-out wrong. The woman who wore all her assets on her skin, and offered none from within, simply did not last. Good looks without intelligence and kindness resulted in a few frenzied interludes of dropped breeches and rumpled petticoats, rarely in an offer of the position of maîtresse-en-titre. Many monarchs sampled the charms of the most beautiful women in their courts and found them absolutely boring.
Many a plain woman, on the other hand, captivated her king, but not with a grand entrance at a ball. She would require frequent contact with the monarch to reveal her inner beauty, her good nature, keen intellect, and clever wit. He would begin to look forward to their conversations, the comfort he felt in her presence, the laughter she provoked in him. And soon the court would snicker that the king had taken an ugly mistress.
With or without beauty, with or without sexual talents, the successful royal mistress made herself irreplaceable, catering to each of the king’s five senses. She was ready to converse gaily with him when she was tired, make love until all hours when she was ill, cater to his every whim, serve his favorite foods, sympathize when he was cranky, massage his feet, decorate his homes, and raise his illegitimate children—sometimes sired with women other than herself. And all of this must be done cheerfully.
Only a few monarchs enjoyed passionate foot-stomping battles with their mistresses. Typically, the royal mistress did not scold, browbeat, or throw jealous tantrums. Sitting on her perch of dignified serenity, she selected her battles carefully, only rarely flapping down with talons bared.
In the king’s presence his mistress was never to be tired, ill, complaining, or grief-stricken. She wore a mask of beaming delight over any and all discomforts. When Louis XIV bestowed upon his mistresses and their friends the honor of traveling in his carriage from one palace to the other, it was in actuality a great torment. The duc de Saint-Simon reported, “The expedition would not have covered a quarter of a league before the King would be asking the ladies in his carriage whether they did not care to eat something…. Then they were all obliged to say how hungry they were, put on an air of jollity, and set to with good appetite and willingness, otherwise the King became displeased and would show his resentment openly…. The King liked fresh air and insisted on having all the windows lowered; he would have been extremely displeased had any lady had the temerity to draw one of the curtains to keep out the sun, the wind or the cold. There was no alternative but to pretend not to notice that, nor any other kind of discomfort…. To feel sick was an unforgivable crime.”1
Perhaps worst of all, the ladies were not permitted to mention the needs of nature. During one six-hour ride from Versailles to Fontainebleau, the duchesse de Chevreuse was in such dire need of a chamber pot that she almost collapsed. Fixing a smile upon her face, she never mentioned her agony to the king. Upon reaching Fontainebleau, she raced into the nearest room—which happened to be the chapel—and relieved herself there in the first vessel she found—which happened to be a holy chalice.
But the royal mistress’s discomforts did not end there. She was forced to participate in the king’s hobbies whether she liked them or not. Smiling broadly, she rode with him through the cold woods on the hunt and nodded her approval as he cornered and killed screaming animals, then dismembered their bloody carcasses. Laughing gaily, she spent hours in wet fields watching the royal hawks devour little birds. Chuckling merrily, she pretended to relish boring card games until the wee hours of the morning. And then, moaning in feigned ecstasy, she endured unwelcome sex.
We rarely hear of a queen exerting herself to exhaustion to please the king. While the mistress sang, and hunted, and recited poetry, and brought in jugglers, and made love all night, and ate when not hungry, and denied the needs of her bladder and bowels, the queen glided through her marriage with solemn lethargy. Why did the mistress have to work so hard, while the queen did not? Quite simply, because the mistress could be dismissed at any moment, while the queen was a permanent fixture in the palace—like the marble floors or stone columns—until her death. No matter what a queen’s behavior—short of blatant adultery—she would retain her marriage and her position. The mistress, on the other hand, could lose all she possessed with a snap of the royal fingers.
The quintessential royal mistress was Jeanne-Antoinette d’Etioles, marquise de Pompadour, who reigned for nineteen years over Louis XV and France. This twenty-four-year-old from the middle class crashed the forbidding gates of Versailles in 1745, survived countless plots and counterplots by jealous nobles to unseat her, and left court only as a corpse on a stretcher. What silken cords bound the king to her?
Initially she entranced handsome Louis with her beauty and charm. Comte Dufort de Cheverny wrote, “Not a man alive but would have had her for his mistress if he could. Tall, though not too tall; beautiful figure; round face with regular features; wonderful complexion, hands and arms; eyes not so big, but the brightest, wittiest, and most sparkling I ever saw. Everything about her was rounded, including all her gestures. She absolutely extinguished all the other women at Court, although some were very beautiful.”2
But Madame de Pompadour’s beauty was like that of a hothouse flower that soon began to wither in the poisonous atmosphere of Versailles. In her twenties she boasted a fresh, ethereal beauty, with perfect skin, silken chestnut hair, and dark hazel eyes. She set off the purity of her look by simple costumes of rose, pink, or blue silk and satin, trimmed with the requisite lace. But as the rigors of court life sapped her natural beauty, she increased the magnificence of her gowns and jewels to distract the observer from her face—richer lace, larger gems, heavy brocades and velvets embroidered with gold and silver and pearls. One evening she appeared in a dress trimmed with lace worth 22,500 livres, the cost of an estate.
Frigidity is, of course, a great disadvantage to a mistress. To compensate for her poor performance at night, during the day Madame de Pompadour devoted every moment to amusing a monarch who quickly grew bored. Louis escaped the stiff etiquette of Versailles by fleeing to her apartments and barring the door. There he found an entire world created for his personal comfort. His mistress decorated her rooms in colors and fabrics that he found relaxing. She filled them with sweetly scented flowers from the palace greenhouses, even in winter. She ordered dishes and wines that pleased the royal palate.
Madame de Pompadour became an avid student of the king’s moods, his every facial expression, the cadence of his words. She knew when he was hiding boredom, anger, or frustration behind his mask of royal calmness. The twitch of an eyelid, the lilt of a syllable, would tell her the behavior necessary to please him. Did he want a comfortable silence? Should she recount an amusing story, play a somber tune on the harpsichord, stand up and perform a monologue?
Louis must have climbed the secret spiral staircase leading from his apartments to hers with great anticipation. What would she discuss with him that evening? Building, perhaps. Madame de Pompadour had a mania for building palaces and asked the king’s advice on architecture, improvements, and decorations. Perhaps she would have architectural plans laid out for his approval. Or maybe the subject would be botany. His mistress created a botanical garden at the Trianon Palace on the grounds of Versailles where she conducted experiments and grew the first strawberries in France especially for her royal lover. She also had a greenhouse built so that Louis could have fresh oranges and lemons at any time of year.
Perhaps she would report on the progress of the farmyard she had created for him on the palace grounds, complete with a dairy and milk cows. Or maybe she would discuss the art of gem cutting she had taken up, or her plans for a porcelain factory.
One of Louis’s favorite diversions was to listen to Madame de Pompadour read from the private letters of his courtiers. All letters both into and out of court were opened, read for treacherous intent, and carefully resealed. Madame de Pompadour obtained from the palace police copies of the most amusing missives—which contained the most intimate details—to read to the king. After a hard day’s work Louis roared with laughter as she read him these excerpts in a lively and entertaining manner.
To divert the royal boredom, Madame de Pompadour created a tiny theater, holding only a handful of guests, where she performed the lead roles, and the king was invariably the guest of honor. She was a talented actress; after her first performance, Louis came up to her and said with throaty sincerity, “You are the most charming woman in France.”3 Her theater was so successful that she performed comedy on Mondays and sang opera on Wednesdays—in between her other exhausting duties. Courtiers clawed each other out of the way to obtain invitations.
Perhaps her best role was that of royal listener. The king had the unfortunate habit of recounting the same stories innumerable times, of discussing the same themes—hunting, illness, and death. And his mistress, who hated talk of hunting, illness, and death, concealed her yawns behind a smile, nodded her head encouragingly, and hoped that her eyes sparkled with sufficient interest as she heard the same old stories, the boring, macabre old stories, yet again.
Madame de Pompadour’s relentless devotion to amusing the king caused her untold hardship. She rose early for Mass and endured late dinners followed by unwanted lovemaking. Rich food, great quantities of wine, and unending correspondence and court duties exhausted her. Nor could she leave her apartments for exercise or a change of scene lest the king suddenly appear wanting food, conversation, or sex. Despite the daunting challenges of her schedule, she never permitted herself to show fatigue, boredom, or illness, never expressed frustration, anger, or crankiness.
In her early years as royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour was often required to accompany Louis on his frequent hunts, either on horseback or in a carriage, in all kinds of weather. Despite the fact that these excursions often gave her pneumonia, she put on her riding habit and her omnipresent smile and went off to join the king. As she grew older, and sicker, this was the one duty she gave up.
Madame de Pompadour turned to thick white lead powder to hide the dark circles under her eyes and the sallow color of her skin. Blemishes caused by the lead powder were covered by more lead powder or fashionable black patches. And to create the illusion of blooming good health, she rubbed heavy rouge on her cheeks. The layers of rouge, patches, and powder served as a complaisant mask behind which she could hide exhaustion, pain, and anger.
One evening Madame de Pompadour, suffering from one of her horrendous migraines, sent word to the king that she was ill and unable to attend dinner. Louis frowned and asked her messenger if she was feverish. The messenger replied that she was not. “Very well, then, let her come down!”4 commanded the king. And his violently ill mistress was forced to rise from her sickbed, lace herself into her ball gown, hang diamonds from her ears and throat, powder and rouge her face, and most important, paint a smile on her pained mouth.
In 1754 Madame de Pompadour’s only child, ten-year-old Alexandrine, died suddenly in her convent school. Days later Madame de Pompadour’s father, heartbroken over the loss of his only grandchild, also died. Overcome with grief, the royal mistress knew that however much the king liked talking about death and illness, he grew bored in their presence. Having lost a beloved father and darling daughter within a fortnight, she once again dried her tears and put on her diamonds. The prince de Croy, who visited her shortly afterward, reported, “I saw the Marquise for the first time since the loss of her daughter, a dreadful blow that I thought had completely crushed her. But because too much pain might have harmed her appearance and possibly her position, I found her neither changed nor downcast.” Though the prince saw her chatting cheerfully with the king, he thought that she “was in all likelihood just as unhappy inside as she seemed happy on the outside.”5 Indeed, for many years Madame de Pompadour would confess to friends, “For me happiness has died with my daughter.”6 She was just not permitted to show her pain.
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.”7 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.”8
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.”9
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.10 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.”11
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.12
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.”13
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.”14
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.”15
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.”16
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.”17 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.”18
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.”19
One day, while getting into a carriage with his queen and his mistress, Louis got a whiff of Madame de Montespan’s strong perfume and angrily remarked that he had repeatedly requested her to wear less, as the scent made him ill. His mistress replied that she was forced to wear perfume because the king never bathed in his life and, frankly, stank. A shouting match ensued as the king and his mistress entered the carriage, the hapless queen following. Courtiers made bets on how long the mistress would last.
Oddly, Madame de Montespan’s reign lasted thirteen years. The king must have enjoyed sparring with his imperious mistress. And she sometimes showed the good sportsmanship that most royal mistresses possessed. For instance, in the winter of 1678 she insisted on joining Louis on a tour of his frontiers although she was five months pregnant. She suffered repeated fevers but refused to return to Versailles, bumping over muddy roads with the king, sleeping with him in farmhouses, and never complaining. It was this behavior that bound the king to her, in between her temper tantrums.
Louis’s cousin Charles II put up with his beautiful virago, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, for nearly a dozen years. Barbara had dark auburn hair, a shapely figure, porcelain skin, an oval face, and flashing dark almond-shaped eyes under beautifully arched black brows. There was something delicate about her classical nose and ripe pouting lips, ironically evincing a hint of vulnerability.
Lady Castlemaine badgered, threatened, and intimidated Charles into submission with her unending stream of demands for money, titles, and honors for herself and her children and sometimes, in a burst of selflessness, for her friends. Her outrageous behavior knew no bounds. In 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed the medieval St. Paul’s Cathedral and damaged many of the tombs. The mummified corpse of the fourteenth-century bishop of London—“all tough and dry like a spongified leather”—was found intact and exhibited to visitors of the ruins.20 Lady Castlemaine instructed the keeper to leave her alone with the body for a few moments. When he returned he found that the corpse’s penis had been torn off and suspected that the lady had done so with her mouth.
But even the shrewish Lady Castlemaine knew it was her duty to provide the king with a good dinner. Her London house was situated on the banks of the Thames. One evening, when her cook complained that she could not prepare the beef because the river had risen and flooded the kitchen, Lady Castlemaine shrieked, “Zounds, you must set the house on fire but it must be roasted.”21
Nearly two centuries after the twin termagants battled their royal lovers on either side of the English Channel, Lola Montez pounced with outstretched claws on Bavaria, combining the worst qualities of both. As greedy as Lady Castlemaine, as arrogant as Madame de Montespan, raven-haired Lola quickly wrapped the aging Ludwig I of Bavaria around her little finger. It was her passion that inflamed him. His long-suffering wife and former court mistresses seemed as dull as sheep compared to Lola’s flash and fire. Azure eyes glinting, nostrils flaring, Lola would stamp her foot and threaten violence to herself when things didn’t go her way. Lola kept knives and pistols secreted about her person for protection. She got in trouble with the law on several occasions for horsewhipping gentlemen who she felt had insulted her. Poor enslaved Ludwig would likely have kept Lola for years if his own subjects had not thrown her out of Bavaria after only sixteen months as royal mistress.
These three untamed shrews were, however, the exception rather than the rule. Most kings were like Louis XV, demanding cheerful amusement. When his usually complacent Madame du Barry began throwing jealous scenes about his proposed marriage to a foreign princess, the king stopped coming to visit her. Only when she regained her composure did he return.
In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, fell in love at first sight with a certain Mademoiselle Dieskau for her platinum hair, large blue eyes, and “neck of dazzling whiteness.” According to the elector’s biographer, Mademoiselle Dieskau “was, her mind excepted, the most accomplished creature nature ever formed.”22
But, he continues, “how beautiful soever Mademoiselle Dieskau really was, she could be called no better than a lump of snow. No vivacity could be found in her, she made no other answers than yes and no. The King was charmed with the great beauty of her person, he spoke to her…but was in despair when he found so little life in her.”23
But the desires of his body soon overcame the needs of his mind, and Augustus found himself in Mademoiselle Dieskau’s arms, having paid a large sum to her mother for the girl’s virginity. His physical urges assuaged, he left Mademoiselle Dieskau soon after in search of a woman of greater intelligence.
Likewise, in 1680 Louis XIV was captivated by a new face at court, one Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Courtiers raved about her beauty. One ambassador described her as “an extraordinary blonde beauty, the like of which has not been seen at Versailles in many a year. A form, a daring, an air to astonish and charm even that gallant and sophisticated Court.”24
But after the initial wave of enthusiasm over Mademoiselle de Fontanges’s beauty died down, the next tide of gossip revolved around her shocking stupidity. The moment the girl opened her mouth, many tender fantasies inspired by her looks were immediately dispelled.
Madame de Caylus wrote, “The King, in truth, was attracted solely by her face. He was actually embarrassed by her foolish chatter…One grows accustomed to beauty, but not to stupidity.”25 One courtier called the new mistress “beautiful as an angel and stupid as a basket.”26 Louis quickly tired of his stupid basket.
The most bombastic empty-headed beauty was, without a doubt, nineteen-year-old Virginie di Castiglione, who in 1856 was sent by Italian prime minister Camillo Cavour to seduce Emperor Napoleon III of France, a mission she accomplished with lightning speed. Unburdened by modesty, Virginie called herself the most beautiful woman in the world and later expanded that to “the most beautiful woman of the century.”27
Many agreed with Virginie’s assessment of her beauty. Princess Metternich described Virginie’s face as “a delicious oval, her eyes dark green and velvety, surmounted by brows that could have been traced by a miniaturist’s pencil, her small nose…obstinate, yet absolutely regular, her teeth like pearls.”28
The courtier Viel Castel recorded in his diary that Virginie “bore the burden of her beauty with insolence, and displayed it with effrontery.”29 He, like so many at court, was delighted by the “truly admirable” size of her bosom, and confessed that he tried hard to look under the sheer gauze covering to discern its shape. Virginie refused to wear a corset, that most requisite piece of nineteenth-century female attire, which turned the soft curves of the breasts into an impregnable fortress. She allowed her breasts to dangle freely. Viel Castel remarked that those breasts “seemed to throw out a challenge to all women.”30
But what Virginie boasted in the bosom she lacked between the ears. While successful royal mistresses were absorbed in their men, Virginie was absorbed only in herself. Most of her conversation revolved around her own glorious beauty. Napoleon himself confided to his cousin Mathilde that while Virginie was “very beautiful, she bores me to death.”31
Virginie’s looks could not, in the long run, make up for her stone cold selfishness. She lasted only a year. “I have hardly commenced my life and my role is already finished,” she lamented bitterly.32
When George I left Hanover to claim the British throne in 1714, he brought as his mistresses two of the ugliest women his new subjects had ever seen. The tall, skinny one bore a weighty name—Ermengarda Melusina, countess of Schulenberg. She had lost her hair to smallpox and wore unattractive wigs and dumpy dresses. Her plainness was offset by kindness and loyalty but not by scintillating conversation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that while many found King George a dull man, Ermengarda was “duller than himself, and consequently did not find him so.”33
The short, fat mistress was Sophia Charlotte Kielmansegge. Though ridiculed for her girth, she had a sparkling personality and a thorough education, and loved sex. As her mother had been mistress to George I’s father, there was some speculation that George was having sex with his half sister. While the skeletal countess of Schulenberg was nicknamed “the Hop Pole,” the stout Madame Kielmansegge was tagged “Elephant and Castle.” Horace Walpole described her as having “two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by stays.”34
Philip Dormer Stanhope, the future Lord Chesterfield, described both mistresses as “two considerable specimens of the King’s bad taste and strong stomach.”35 Referring to Madame Kielmansegge he added, “The standard of His Majesty’s taste as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favor, and who are near the suitable age, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, others burst.”36
Charles II of England once said that his brother, the future James II, was given his mistresses by his priests as a penance. In a century that worshiped the soft flesh of breasts and hips and rounded arms, James liked extremely slim women. His mistress Arabella Churchill was a “tall creature, pale-faced, and nothing but skin and bone.”37 Courtiers cackled at her appearance until she fell off her horse in front of a crowd, displaying her magnificent legs. One awestruck witness marveled that “limbs of such exquisite beauty could belong to Miss Churchill’s face.”38 Though forced by the fashions of the time to conceal her most comely attributes inside yards of heavy skirts, Arabella often displayed the quick wit and lively intelligence which bound James to her through ten years and four children.
James’s next mistress, sixteen-year-old Catherine Sedley, was equally skinny and pale but nearsighted and squint-eyed to boot. Though feisty and intelligent, she was clearly bewildered at having been chosen by James. “It cannot be my beauty for he must see I have none,” she remarked incredulously. “And it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.”39
Louis, dauphin of France, the heir of Louis XIV, enjoyed a shockingly plain mistress for several years until his death. Ungainly, with a thick neck, heavy lips, and a ski-slope nose, Emilie de Choin was described as having the deportment of a barrel. At a court known for its graceful, witty women, Mademoiselle de Choin looked like a pug and seemed to have the brains of one.
Louis XIV’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte wrote that Mademoiselle de Choin had black rotten teeth that stank so much that one could smell them at the other end of the room. But, she added, “She had the hugest bosom I ever saw; those enormous charms of hers were the Dauphin’s delight.”40 To her horror, Elizabeth Charlotte witnessed the dauphin playing tunes with his fingers on Emilie’s breasts as if they were kettledrums.
But good-natured Emilie made a pleasant home life for her royal lover, who had been unhappily married to two foreign princesses. Shrugging off his notorious tightfistedness, uncomplaining Emilie lived on a pension little better than that of a servant. Sometimes Louis would buy his mistress a small gift and then agonize for days over whether to give it to her or return it and get his money back. Yet rather than face the sacrificial altar a third time, Louis secretly married Emilie, the ugliest girl at court, and enjoyed playing her kettledrums until the day he died.
Perhaps the ruler best known for choosing ugly mistresses was Philippe, duc d’Orléans, who became regent of France in 1715. Philippe was the nephew of Louis XIV and son of the formidable Elizabeth Charlotte, who was scandalized by his taste in women. Casting about a court with the most beautiful women in the world, Philippe would always select the ugliest to pleasure him in bed. His mother huffed, “He is not difficult in this regard; as long as they are good-humored, impertinent and have a hearty appetite for food and drink, he does not worry about their looks.”41
Never one to mince words, she once told her son that he visited his mistresses as he would his chamber pot and loudly reproached him for their ugliness.
“Bah! Maman,” Philippe quipped, “in the night all cats are gray.”42