Titillating Tidbits
Funny, sad and scandalous stories from the court of Louis XIV.
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Funny And Not So Funny Things That Happened At The Court Of Louis XIV, Part One
Louis le Grand, the great Sun King, reigned for a long 72 years and a lot of things happened during those 72 years at court. Some of those are well-known, some of those not, some of those are small and would not fill a whole post on this blog by themselves, but combined…. you see where I am going with this. There…
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The death of Philippe de France, Duc d’Orléans
On 8 June in 1701, the Château de Marly was the location of a dinner party. It was Louis XIV’s habit to leave Versailles at times and retreat to Marly-le-Roi, where he had built a, compared to Versailles, small château. To be of the ‘Marlys’, meaning to be one of few allowed to follow the King to his ‘summer house’…
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The Chevalier de Rohan and The Latréaumont Conspiracy
Louis de Rohan was born in 1635 to Louis VIII de Rohan, Duc de Montbazon, and Anne de Rohan, Princesse de Guéméné, into the ambitious House of Rohan. A House that claims ancestry from the King’s of Brittany. A Vicomte de Porhoët was the first to take the name of Rohan, after the place he was born, and through the Vicomtes the family was…
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The Royal Fistula
Louis XIV was, as everyone else, plagued by the occasional illness. He had the smallpox as child and nearly died, he had a form of typhoid fever and nearly died, he had measles, fevers, colds, gout, bad toothaches….. The fact that Louis did recover from some of these more dramatic maladies is quite the miracle, considering the medical and…
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The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island
The gardens of Versailles saw their first grand fête in May 1664, the Pleasures of the Enchanted Island. This elaborate garden party marked the beginning of Versailles’ transformation from Louis XIII’s hunting lodge to Louis XIV’s Palace of Glory. Louis XIV invited 600 guests to the spectacle hosted in the freshly enlarged and dolled-up gardens of Versailles from May 7…
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A Party at Chantilly
As Louis XIV announced his intention to pay a visit to le Grand Condé in April 1671, he had no idea that the honour he bestowed upon Condé, the honour of having the King and his whole court as guests for a few days, would end in a suicide. The Prince de Condé had only 15 days to prepare the…
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A very handsome door, or the first meeting of Louis XIV and his bride Marie-Thérèse
Marriage in the 17th century was mostly a matter of politics, either that of a country or family politics to rise in rank or preserve it. Grooms and brides hardly knew each other, or in case of Louis XIV and his Spanish bride, had never seen each other before. Their marriage was part of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, thus…
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The Black Nun of Moret
There are many interesting tales that once circulated at the court of Louis XIV in form of juicy gossip and this one is especially juicy by all means. It is the tale of a dark skinned nun confined in a convent with the name Louise-Marie-Thérèse. Now, that isn’t too unusual by itself, but have a closer look at her name…
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L’Homme au Masque de Fer, The Man in the Iron Mask
We all know the story of the mysterious prisoner in the iron mask Alexandre Dumas tells us in his 1847 roman The Vicomte of Bragelonne and that has been put on the screen in various forms with various alterations ever since. Dumas tells us of a man imprisoned “for the good of France” shortly after his birth, this man is…
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What goes where, or how Louis XIV discovered beds are not only made for sleeping….
What goes where. An essential thing to learn, even more so for a King who has to father an heir and a few spare ones to make sure. In case of Louis XIV, we have some records as to how he learned what goes where and the woman who introduced him to the pleasure of horizontal bed gymnastics. Her name…
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Even a Sun King is not safe from being beaten up… by his brother.
Boys will be boys, brothers will be brothers, and no matter how great the love for each other, they will play pranks on each other and they will quarrel. This was not different as Louis XIV and his brother Philippe were children, yet in their case every little quarrel could lead to the outcry of a Kingdom and could be…
