Sex with the Queen Read Online Free PDF

your wife, who is waiting for you.”19
    The king obediently stayed for two hours in bed with his wife, and then stood up, put on his slippers, and shuffled back to his own room. The years passed, and both king and queen remained virgins. To all advice upon the subject, the king replied that there was no reason to be in a hurry, and that he could not take too much care of his health. Yet the royal marriage, which rati-fied a precarious treaty between France and Spain, was not valid until consummation. Both nations and the Vatican—which wanted a strong alliance between the two most powerful Catholic countries in Europe—fretted over the situation. In 1618 Cardi-nal Guido Bentivoglio wrote the pope that he had advised the s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n
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    king to take up masturbation as a means of preparing himself for marital sex, but the king’s confessor prohibited him from com-mitting such a sin.
    Finally, when the king was eighteen, late one night his adviser the duc de Luynes begged him to go to the queen and finally consummate the marriage. When the king began to cry, the duke picked him up and carried the sobbing monarch to the queen’s chamber, with the royal valet solemnly holding a candle to light the way. Once in bed, Louis stayed for three hours and did his royal duty. But still, sex was intermittent over the years and the king did not seem to particularly enjoy the business.
    In December 1637 the king, setting out from the Louvre for his palace of Saint-Maur, was delayed by a terrible storm. As his bed and bed linens had been sent ahead, he found himself in the embarrassing position of returning to the Louvre and unexpect-edly dropping in on his wife, who possessed the only bed fit for a king. Given a choice between the freezing rain and howling wind, or the horrors of the queen’s bed which he had not shared for seven years, Louis resolutely chose the storm, but his bedrag-gled valets finally convinced him to take shelter. It was a fortu-itous rainstorm for France. Nine months later, after twenty-three years of marriage, the future Louis XIV was born. Perhaps it is no surprise that as soon as Louis XIII died in 1643, his merry widow, deprived of sex for the greater part of three decades, took the polished, virile Cardinal Jules Mazarin as her lover for the greater part of the following two decades.
    In 1769 the sixteen-year-old crown prince of France, the fu-ture Louis XVI, married the most beautiful princess in Europe, the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria. Heavy, clumsy, and painfully shy, on his wedding night Louis found himself in bed with a dazzling blue-eyed blonde—all golden curls and golden curves—and froze with fear. But the prince’s impo-tence was not completely psychological in nature. Louis suffered from phimosis, an unnatural elongation of the foreskin which permitted erections but prevented intercourse.
    Three years after the wedding, Louis’s exasperated grandfa-ther King Louis XV—who had rarely gone a day without sex l i f e b e h i n d p a l a c e w a l l s 2 3

    since he was fifteen—ordered the court physician to give the couple sex education lessons. Louis was put on diets to render him more virile, but they only made him fatter. In a desperate attempt to arouse the prince, advisers lined the corridor leading to his wife’s bedroom with pornographic prints and obscene paintings. But all such steps were futile, as were efforts to per-suade the prince to undergo circumcision. In a day and age when anesthesia was a stiff glass of whiskey, and some 25 percent of wounds resulted in infection and death, surely we cannot blame him.
    Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa, who had borne no less than sixteen children, was so alarmed at her daughter’s situation that she sent her son and coruler, Joseph II, to talk to Louis. From Versailles on June 9, 1777, Joseph wrote home, “Her situation with the king is very odd; he is only