The Queen's Lover Read Online Free PDF

that was threatening the very balance of power in Europe. Those Hapsburgs are blunt people, good at man-to-man talk. Joseph appeared at Versailles and, after scolding his little sister for her frivolous behavior and presciently warning her that “there will be a cruel revolution if you don’t take steps to prevent it,” asked Louis some brutally forthright questions. He then wrote the following report to his brother, Leopold, in Vienna: “[The king] has normalerections; he introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating and, still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because he sometimes has nocturnal emissions, but while inside and in the process, never…. Oh, if I could only have been present once, I would have taken care of him; he should be whipped so hard that he would discharge like a donkey…. Together they are total fumblers.”
    Fumblers indeed! The youngsters’ ignorance was such, Joseph was astounded to learn, that they’d thought their little rubbings could induce pregnancy. Having summoned a doctor and listened to his diagnosis, Joseph convinced his brother-in-law that he suffered from a readily curable condition called phimosis: Louis’s foreskin was abnormally tight, causing serious pain whenever he attempted coitus; but this could be perfectly remedied by a brief operation that caused a minimum of pain. So after some weeks of demurring Louis agreed, was given a big shot of brandy, and within some twenty minutes of the surgeon’s ministrations, voilà! He came out of it with an absolutely normal peenie. The young couple set to work again. Within a few months the dauphine reported to her ladies-in-waiting that her period, which she referred to by the Austrian euphemism “General Krottendorf,” was two or three weeks late; and then she felt the first little waves of nausea, and shortly thereafter the doctor came and confirmed it all. “Mama, mama,” she wrote the empress, “I’m pregnant at last!” Provence brooded and withdrew into his billiards game. Artois stopped smirking for a few weeks. The kind young king exulted. Over the years, he had fallen passionately in love with his wife.
    The irony is this: notwithstanding the affection that Marie Antoinette lavished on her, the royal couple’s long-awaited first child, Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Royale, would grow up adoring her father but disliking her mother. When she was six or so, she was playing next to her mother while Marie Antoinette was telling her confessor, AbbéVermond, about a very serious riding accident she’d just had. The abbé asked the child if she realized her mother had almost died. “I wouldn’t care,” said the little girl, who would later be noted for her haughtiness and aloofness. “I wouldn’t see Mother anymore and I’d be very happy because I could do as I pleased.” The queen wept over this incident for a long while.
    W ELL NOW, I’d like to interrupt my reflections on France’s royal family and say a word about their home: I defy you to find anyone in Europe who detested Versailles more fervently than I did. How scathingly did I convey this loathing in my letters home to Sophie! I need not dwell on the presumptions and arrogance, the delusions of grandeur, that led XIV to commission such an elephantine habitation—Versailles Palace could accommodate five thousand persons! But even the site is a monstrosity, a large murky swamp that, however diligently the authorities dredged it, continued to emit a fetid stench and breed an infestation of insects—few were the court beauties whose white throats were not spotted with red pustules from their bites. What was indeed most striking was the discrepancy between the gleaming gilded grandeur of the palace’s outer surface and the filthy, insalubrious conditions that prevailed inside it. Many courtiers as well as visitors (the French populace had full right of entry to the palace as long