Yet, in surprising recognition of women’s rights, Islamic law decrees that each wife receive her share of connubial bliss. Obedient to his faith, Ibn-Saud made his rounds without protest. His duties accomplished, he then visited with his concubines and slaves.
His first bride, the beautiful Bint al Fiqri, whom he wed in Kuwait when he was 15, remained the love of his life although she died just six months after their wedding. Only one wife, Munaiyir, survived all the harem shuffles. She gave the king seven sons and also some daughters. He divorced Munaiyir once, but after her marriage to another man he realized that he missed her. Ibn-Saud demanded that she shed her new husband, then gratefully rewed her.
Ibn-Saud’s last children were born when he was 67. His subsequent sterility depressed him, and in a final stab at youth he dyed his graying hair black. A heart attack took his life but it may not have ended his sexual career. He had prayed that God would allow his six favorite wives to join him in paradise. Perhaps God did.
QUIRKS: He considered morning sex unhealthy.
He despised communism, not ideologically, but because he believed Communist men slept with their mothers and sisters.
Shortly before each of his babies was to be born, he left the palace grounds and refused to view the infant until it was several days old. Following Islamic practice, he avoided the new mother sexually for 40 days.
HIS THOUGHTS: “The longest winter night is too short for me.”
“Sleep is but a slice of death inserted into life; why have too much of it?” (True to his credo, he never slept more than five or six hours a day, dividing his sleep into three periods.)
—S.W.
The Sun King
LOUIS XIV (Sept. 5, 1638-Sept. 1, 1715)
HIS FAME: Known as “the Sun King” for the opulence and grand decadence of his reign, Louis XIV at the height of his power ruled every aspect of French life. A patron of artists, writers, and scientists, Louis led his army to victories over the other great nations of Europe. Although he created one of the most grandiose civilizations in history, he left his country impoverished, and his political and religious persecutions led to the French Revolution.
HIS PERSON: Whether or not Louis himself believed that he was a “visible divinity,” he insisted that his subjects so regard him. He taxed the French people mercilessly to support the ostentatious life of his royal court and nearly bankrupted France to build the incomparable pleasure palace at Versailles.
The monarchy Louis inherited from his father was plagued by rebellious nobles, who in 40 years had fought 11 civil wars against the throne. Louis XIV brought the French nobles under royal control by offering them positions at his court, where he seduced them with wine, women, and fortunes. His elaborate system of patronage extended beyond politics to the ladies at court, where it was estimated there were never fewer than 300 of them scheming for the king’s attentions. He was not reluctant to bestow wealth and prestige upon those women who participated in his dalliances.
Although facially scarred by a childhood bout with smallpox, Louis XIV was an athletic and witty charmer and an indefatigable lover. Married twice, he had innumerable affairs with noblewomen and palace servants alike and was generous to them all, ignoring scandal while he rewarded them with jewels, estates, and rank. His women were confidantes as well as lovers, and he decreed legitimate his many children born out of wedlock. However, torn between his licentious nature and the constant urgings of his religious counselors to atone for his many sins, Louis was often as harsh in his punishment of others’ sins as he was lax in controlling his own. In 1674 he ordered the noses and ears cut off all prostitutes found servicing the soldiers stationed within 5 mi. of Versailles.
SEX LIFE: Although he was sexually initiated at 16 by a court seamstress who threw herself naked into his arms, Louis’ first real love was Marie Mancini, a niece of his closest political adviser, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Their affair of the heart lasted two years, until the entreaties of both Mazarin and Louis’ mother convinced him to send her away from court. To bring about peace between France and Spain, Louis married Marie Thérèse of Austria, the daughter of the Spanish king.
Queen Marie Thérèse was a plain if not an ugly woman, devoutly religious but determined to do her “duty”—at least twice a month—by her husband, even if it meant sharing their living quarters with his mistresses. She bore six of Louis’ children, although only one, the Dauphin Louis, survived infancy. The solitary suggestion of scandal to mar her married life occurred when a rival for Louis’ affections, Madame de Montespan, claimed that Marie Thérèse had borne a black child after being given a black dwarf by an African prince. The queen said that during her pregnancy the dwarf once frightened her, and that that incident caused the child to be born black. The queen generally tolerated Louis’ many transgressions, but her temper erupted one night when the king failed to return to their chamber. She had the entire palace searched, and every woman in Versailles was interrogated to find out whether she had the king in her bed. Marie Thérèse died in the convent in which she spent most of her later years.
Louis, of whom Voltaire said, “He liked the ladies, and it was reciprocal,” conducted his court as a never-ending party. Surrounded by fawning attendants from the time he woke in the morning until he retired at night (when he used Versailles’ labyrinth of secret passages to visit one of his current lovers), Louis directed every detail of the continuous round of hunts, dances, and royal dinners that established his court as the center of European culture. A court observer wrote, “One should have some indulgence for this prince if he should fall, surrounded as he is by so many female devils, all seeking to tempt him.” And the women were encouraged in their prestige-seeking flirtations by “their families, fathers, mothers, even husbands.”
While romancing his homosexual brother’s wife, Louis fell in love with one of her attendants, Mme. Louise de La Vallière, who became his secret, then official, mistress. A frail, almost homely woman, La Vallière’s place in the king’s heart and court was usurped by one of her closest friends, Madame de Montespan, wife of the Prince of Monaco. A woman of intelligence and voluptuous beauty, the Marquise de Montespan used her influence as Louis’ mistress to rule the social life of the palace for many years.
Since she had gained the king’s affection and ascended to his bedchamber by treachery, Madame de Montespan was well aware that there would be romantic plottings against her by the other women of the court. Her attempt to keep Louis faithful led to the most famous scandal of their day, the “affair of the poisons.”
In her anxiety, Madame de Montespan first resorted to love potions and charms. Then, despairing of their effectiveness, she submitted to Black Masses conducted by a mad priest. During these secret ceremonies, she would lie naked on an altar (with her face and breasts covered in deference to her rank) while priests chanted and fondled her body. It was alleged that she even participated in the sacrifice of infants, whose hearts and entrails were burned, powdered, and added to love potions which were slipped into the king’s food.
Finally Madame de Montespan was accused of attempting to poison her rivals and of planning, out of frantic jealousy, to poison the king himself, reasoning that if she couldn’t have him, no one else would either. Louis never gave public recognition to these accusations, but he dismissed her from his bed and court after providing her with an ample estate as a token of their affair.
There followed numerous short-lived romances before Louis became enthralled with Madame de Maintenon, widow of satirist Paul Scarron and former governess of the king’s children. A deeply religious woman who had been disgusted by the sexual demands of her crippled husband (in his partially paralyzed state, he was forced to consummate their marriage orally), Madame de Maintenon at first rejected Louis’ attentions and his request that she become his mistress.
Because she burned all of their love letters following Louis’ death, it is only speculation that they slept together before they were secretly married, when she wa
s 48 and he 45. (It has even been suggested that she was technically a virgin when they married.) Their morganatic marriage ceremony, during which the king gave her his left hand instead of his right, entitled this woman of common birth to be the king’s wife without the rights or inheritance claims of a queen.
Considered frigid by nature and morally repulsed by Louis’ extramarital affairs, Madame de Maintenon struggled to reform the king and save his soul, while still satisfying his amorous nature. “Imagine,” she said, “the slavery of having to amuse a man who is incapable of being amused.”
Still, the “peasant queen” did her best, and she shared the king’s bed until he died of gangrene five days before his 77th birthday. A true voluptuary, Louis XIV remained lusty and vigorous until the end, both in and out of bed.
—R.S.F.
The Well-Beloved
LOUIS XV (Feb. 15, 1710-May 10, 1774)
HIS FAME: King of France from the age of five until his death at 64, Louis XV was a relatively passive ruler under whom the monarchy suffered a number of blows, including the loss of its North American colonies to England and an involvement in various debilitating wars. This paved the way for the revolution that toppled his successor, Louis XVI. When young, Louis was affectionately nicknamed “the Well-Beloved” by his people. Toward the end of his reign, however, his scandalous private life made him very unpopular. His fame today derives more from his love affairs than from his political achievements.
HIS PERSON: Because Louis inherited the throne as a child, the first years of his reign saw a regent and ministers in control of France. As a youth Louis dedicated himself to hunting and regular church attendance, pursuits he followed throughout his life. Official occasions required, however, that the boy-king appear before his thronged subjects. Those appearances scarred the child, leaving him forever fearful of crowds, extremely shy, and consistently aloof in his dealings with strangers.
In 1723, under prevailing French law, Louis reached his majority. Two years later, at the bidding of his chief minister, the Duc de Bourbon, Louis wed Maria Leszczyñska, daughter of Stanislas I, the deposed king of Poland. Adult or no, Louis still did not assume the full duties of the throne. In 1743, upon the death of Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, who had replaced the Duc de Bourbon as chief minister, Louis insisted he would take complete control. Nonetheless, Louis still preferred pursuits more pleasurable than ruling—in particular, making love. His mistresses, and there were many, often meddled in the affairs of state. The Marquise de Vintimille is blamed for France’s involvement in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748).
SEX LIFE: Strikingly handsome, Louis had a sensuous face and a well-developed body. At 15 his sexual maturity was apparent. Since he loathed his five-year-old fiancée, the Spanish infanta, his chief minister affianced him instead to the 23-year-old Maria Leszczyñska. While preparations were under way for the scheduled wedding, Louis’ tutors worried about how he could be taught the art of lovemaking. They decided to hang pictures of sex acts on the walls of his study. For firsthand instruction, Louis turned to a certain Madame de Falari and lost his virginity in her bed. Although Louis’ intellect is occasionally belittled, he learned the subject of sex thoroughly. On his wedding night, Louis made love to his wife seven times.
Maria dutifully gave Louis 10 children (seven survived childhood), but her enthusiasm for sex paled beside his hearty appetite. As she pointed out, she was always “in bed, or pregnant, or brought to bed.” She retreated within a small circle of staid intimates to whom she complained that Louis came to her in the night stinking of champagne, and soon she bored the king.
Maria and Louis remained wed until her death in 1768; however, their marriage, for all practical purposes, ceased to be in 1738. Maria, having suffered a miscarriage, was told by her doctor to refrain from sex. As a result she locked Louis out of her bedroom. Shortly thereafter he made public his affair of some duration with Madame de Mailly, one of the five De Nesle sisters. Within months Louis’ fickle affections had turned to Madame de Mailly’s sister, the Marquise de Vintimille. That affair ended when she died giving birth to his child. Louis turned next to a third De Nesle sister, the dazzling Madame de Châteauroux. She, too, soon died, after emerging from a sickbed to heed Louis’ call. The youngest sister amused Louis briefly but found herself rewarded by being married to a duke. Only one sister escaped Louis’ attentions. Her husband objected to sharing her with the king.
In 1745 Louis took as his mistress Jeanne Poisson, who became the Marquise de Pompadour—perhaps the central figure in his life. Pompadour, an accomplished and charming woman (even Maria liked her and said, “If there must be a mistress, better this one than any other”), had long dreamed of becoming part of the royal family. When she was nine, a fortune-teller thrilled her by predicting she would one day be the king’s mistress. After contriving to draw Louis’ attention to her at a ball, she became his “official mistress.” Her husband grudgingly accepted a legal separation from her. Besides sharing the king’s bed, Pompadour shared the secrets of state and the resources of the nation’s treasury. Her love of luxury and her interference in politics caused the people to resent her as well as the king. Described by Louis as “the most delicious woman in France,” Pompadour valiantly tried to keep pace with his unflagging sex drive. She took aphrodisiacs and lived on a diet designed to heighten her passion—a menu of vanilla, truffles, and celery. It was to no avail. As she herself confessed, she was “very cold by nature.” In 1751, her health weakened by a chest infection, she ended her sexual relations with Louis. It was not the king’s body she wanted—“it’s his heart,” she said. She got her wish. Pompadour remained Louis’ closest confidante and, until her death in 1764, lived in apartments connected to his by a staircase.
After the break in physical relations with Pompadour, the virile king turned to a succession of lovers—often young prostitutes. At the Parc aux Cerfs, a four-room hideaway in Versailles, a parade of mistresses satisfied him. Very few knew that their lover was the king. They were told that he was a rich Pole. Girls were nearly always in residence there, but few stayed long; new lovers moved in to replace old ones whose charms had waned. Only Louise O’Morphi, a former model for the painter Boucher, achieved a long tenure at the Parc aux Cerfs. The libertine Casanova claimed in his memoirs that he had procured her for the king, but she may have been brought to Louis by his regular pimp, his valet Lebel. She arrived when she was 15 1/2 years old and instantly captured the king’s affection. Several years and one or two children later, however, she indiscreetly asked the king about Pompadour. “On what terms are you, then, with your precious old girl?” she inquired. Louis sent O’Morphi packing for her boldness, although he did arrange a marriage for her with a minor noble.
In 1768 Louis took his last mistress of importance, the voluptuous Comtesse du Barry. The reputed daughter of a monk and—or so Parisian gossips claimed—a former prostitute, Du Barry’s affair with Louis outraged the French. Louis was not to be shaken, however. When the Duc de Richelieu asked why he kept her, Louis replied: “She makes me forget that soon I will be 60.” Du Barry remained with Louis until his death from smallpox.
HIS THOUGHTS: In inquiring into the attributes of a woman touted to him by a courtier, Louis asked whether she had “a good bust.” The official admitted that he had not looked. “You are a booby!” Louis rebuked the man. “That is the first thing one looks at in a woman.”
—R.M.
Spain’s Doña Juana
QUEEN MARIA LOUISA OF SPAIN (Dec. 9, 1751-Jan. 2, 1819)
HER FAME: Maria Louisa, who was queen of Spain during the turbulent era of the French Revolution, scandalized the courts of Europe by using her royal bodyguards as a recruiting ground for sexual playmates. She elevated her most enduring paramour, Manuel de Godoy, from guardsman to prime minister of Spain. When the Spanish monarchy was overthrown in 1808, the queen went into exile accompanied by not only her husband but her lover as well.
HER PERSON: Mari
a Louisa was a Bourbon by birth and by marriage. Her father was the brother of Charles III, king of Spain; her mother was the eldest daughter of Louis XV of France; and Maria Louisa was married at the age of 14 to her cousin Charles, heir to the Spanish throne. Having been educated by the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the aggressive and articulate Maria Louisa was considered twice the man her amiable but slow-witted husband was. She was also said to be an imperious woman with an unquenchable sexual appetite—the “degenerate offspring of an illustrious race.” As a young woman she was shapely and graceful, with fetching black eyes, but she became old and haggard by her mid- 30s owing to her many pregnancies (she gave birth to 12 children, losing five in infancy and miscarrying several others), dental disease (she lost her teeth by the time she was 37), and, it was widely believed, sexual excesses. According to the Russian ambassador in Madrid, “Her complexion is now greenish, and the loss of almost all her teeth—which have been replaced by artificial ones—has given the coup de grâce to her appearance.” While all Europe seethed around her with revolutionary discontent, the queen of Spain sought solace for her lost beauty with a long succession of lovers.
HER LOVERS: Maria Louisa’s infidelities were the scandal of Spain, a very prim country in matters of morality. Soon after her marriage she created her own court in the Casita del Principe (“Little Prince House”) and began deceiving her husband with grandees such as the Count of Teba, the Duke of Abrantes, and Don Juan Pignatelli, exiling the latter to France because of his partiality to a fairer face. Other lovers were banished by Maria Louisa’s sternly reproving father-in-law, Charles III. Only her husband, who became Charles IV on the death of his father in 1788, remained happily oblivious to his wife’s promiscuity. “If queens felt tempted to sin,” this true naïf who passed his days hunting and tinkering once remarked, “where would they find the kings or emperors to sin with them?”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 46