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.
Boring Beauty
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