Louis The Fourteenth is considered one of the most influential and prominent
rulers of not just French but the entire European history. The longest-reigning
European Monarch had a mostly successful rule over France. He was a skilled martial
strategist as well as a great ballet dancer and promoted arts and culture in France.
But he was far from perfect. There are dark histories behind almost all of his shining
achievements and we intend to uncover the most glaring ones. Welcome to Nutty History,
today let's look under the carpet of King Louis XIV and find out his filthy secrets.
The palace of Versailles had been a lot of things, a hunting lodge, a pleasure palace, and a seat of
power and now it is a museum conserving all the history that it has to offer about the French
Imperial era. A dream project of Louis XIII, Versailles began as a small country residence,
but between 1631 and 1634 it was reconstructed to lay the foundation of the grand palace it would
become. The place enjoyed its peak under Louis XIV, however, he decided to extend it beyond
the chateau built by his father and designed the masterpiece himself in 1661 as we know it today.
The residence for King Louis XIV’s leisure was lavish, plated with gold, and full of expensive
art. Even the chamber pots were made of gold but they were still chamber pots and they were full
of…. For maids, they were a hassle to empty with the palace being surrounded by royal gardens and
woods for metaphorical miles. Unwilling to walk all day back and forth, maids would empty them
right out of the window. It was not a pleasant sight for the elitist elites of France to arrive
at the King’s palace and make their way through piles of excrement. Even the finest perfumes of
Paris weren’t enough to make it through that smell. And they weren’t small heaps either.
Versailles was staffed with nearly ten thousand servants and maids and despite the grand size of
the Versailles, it was nowhere close to having enough privy for all of the residents of the
palace. Chamber pots often overflowed and seeped into walls, floors, and ceilings. YIKES! It got
so bad that people just stopped caring to clean at first and then stopped caring to make the effort
to go to the washrooms as the mess was literally everywhere. When it is going to seep out,
why not cut the middleman and just go… wherever you can? All of a sudden hallways and galleries
of one of the most luxurious palaces turned into public restrooms. Women got used to pulling up
their skirts in the open to do their business and some men urinated off the balustrade in the
middle of the royal chapel. Above everything, the construction was an ongoing process for 40
years during the sun king’s rule and that added more dust to the dirty mix of conditions at
Versailles. Everything from statues to the armor of the guards would end up covered in dust every
dusk. Despite its reputation for magnificence, living conditions for servants, nobles, and
royals in Versailles were as worse as the slums of Paris and London. Things remained filthy even
during the sun king’s grandson’s rule whose wife Marie-Antoinette had a terrible accident when she
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up showering with human waste.
There are many mysteries surrounding the Sun King of France but thanks to Alexandre Dumas nothing
is more popular than the shrouded identity of the prisoner in the iron mask. A man was arrested in
1669 and never saw a day in the light again as he spent the next three decades in various prisons in
France including Bastille wearing an iron mask until his eventual death. His crime or identity
was never revealed to the masses and he died in ambiguity, leaving the entire world to wonder
what severe crime deserved such cruel punishment. Whoever he was, his tale became popular once more
after Leonardo DiCaprio played an evil version of King Louis XIV in the movie “The Man in The
Iron Mask” based on the story written by famous author Alexandre Dumas. Thanks to Dumas’s novel,
a conspiracy theory was born. According to this theory, the man in the iron mask
was the twin brother of King Louis XIV who was put away at birth as their father King
Louis XIII thought having twin heirs would put the succession in jeopardy. The second prince,
presumably named Philippe, was raised in secret and was later imprisoned by King Louis XIV so that
nobody could know his identity. Historians have largely discounted this theory and according to
the book written in 2016, Paul Sonnio, a professor of history at the University of California,
claimed that most historians agree that the name of this mystery prisoner was Eustache Dauger. The
consensus is that he only occasionally wore the mask and that when he did wear a mask, it was
velvet, not iron. Sonnino’s research determined that Dauger was a valet for the treasurer of
Cardinal Mazarin, who was the principal minister of France during Louis XIV's early life and the
man who threw a wrench in Louis’s plan to marry his high school crush. Mazarin had accumulated a
large fortune, and Sonnino believes that Mazarin ripped off a lot of money from the previous king
and queen of England. Sonnino theorized that the valet must have learned about Mazarin’s scam and
must have blabbed about it at the wrong place and wrong time, resulting in his arrest. But even if
it’s true, why they went to such lengths to keep his identity hidden is still a mystery and may
never be solved. Louis XIV was indeed one of the most successful military leaders in French history
but his ambition also was the cause of the end of his family’s reign. He was the hero of the Battle
of Rocroi that ended the Thirty Years’ War and he also successfully managed to defeat the Dutch
and defend France against Spain. Under his rule, France became a formidable challenge for the rest
of Europe, including England, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire. So, they formed a coalition
called the Grand Alliance as a response to a spate of French expansionist campaigns.
France managed to survive the war but its coffers and economy weren’t looking so good in 1697.
Later, France suffered more economic losses in the War of the Spanish Succession in which the aging
king defended his grandson Philip V’s inheritance of Spain and its empire. Choosing his nephew over
famine-ridden France created a massive debt in the nation and sparked dissatisfaction against
the crown that would later explode into a revolution that would end the lives of his
grandson and his family, ending their bloodline. Versailles wasn’t the only thing that King Louis
XIV was in love with, in fact, he had so much love to give that one palace or one woman was
never enough for him. He had a real eye for the ladies but his first affair didn’t have a happy
ending. He wanted to marry Marie Mancini who was Mazarin’s niece but the Cardinal and his mother,
Anne of Austria never approved of the match and the poor princess paid for her adoration
for the king by being exiled from the court. He married Spanish Infanta, Marie Theresa of Austria,
for the treaty that secured the end of the Franco-Spanish war but soon he was chasing women
all around Versailles. His first official mistress was Louise de La Valliere, who lived at his court
for 13 years between the 1660s and 1670s. Their surviving kids were legitimized and history
remembers them as Mademoiselle de Blois and Count of Vermandois. But it was Marquise de Montespan
for whom the King went really crazy. They met during the Flanders campaign in 1667
and a year later, Sun King held the Great Royal Entertainment at Versailles in her honor. Soon,
she moved into a prestigious apartment right next to the Sun King’s apartment at Versailles.
Exquisitely decorated by d’Orbay, it was even more spacious than the Queen’s apartment. The King also
gave her the Clagny palace where her six children with the king grew up and were legitimized later.
After her temper cost her the king’s favor, the King turned to the 20-year-old maiden,
Mademoiselle de Fontanges, but that relationship didn’t last long and Paris was rocked by the
scandal “Affair of Poisons” that led to Queen Marie Theresa’s death. Marquise de Montespan
was one of the convicts that were found guilty and that pushed her out of the picture forever.
This time the replacement was Madame de Maintenon, the governess of King’s children with Marquise de
Montespan who was nothing like Sun King’s previous mistresses. She demanded to be married to the king
if he wished to continue a relationship with her and succeeded in tying the knot with him!
In his entire life, Louis XIV fathered nine known illegitimate children and all of them
were legitimized and given titles along with positions in the French Royal Court.
He may not have been a great husband but he was a good father and loved all of his
children so much that he commissioned a series of official portraits of his illegitimate sons,
which hung alongside those of his legitimate heirs. In the end, Louis XIV’s illegitimate sons
played an important role in the French monarchy, both during and after the king’s lifetime.
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