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Louis XIV and the measles
The measles are a very serious contagious infectious disease caused by a virus. It takes 10 to 12 days after exposure for the symptoms to show and then 7 to 10 days for the whole thing to vanish…. if one survives it. La rougeole, as the French call it, was a killer in the 17th century and it still is…
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The War of the Reunions, 1683-1684
The War of the Reunions was a short conflict in a larger conflict between France, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Some historians claim it was Louis XIV’s most successful war. The whole thing already started in the 1670s. In several peace treaties, that of Westphalia, Aix-la-Chapelle and Nijmegen, France gained several…
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Was Louis XIV illegitimate?
Versailles season 3 plays with the idea that Louis XIV, the great Sun King, was not legitimate. This idea is not new at all and pretty much as old as Louis XIV. If a child is legitimate, it means it is born to two people bound in marriage and those two people are the natural parents of the child. If…
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Dining with the Sun King….
Louis XIV enjoyed to eat. A lot. Although, as he said himself, he never really felt such a thing as hunger and could go the whole day without eating anything, once the first drop of broth made contact with his royal tongue, he developed an appetite that was hard to satisfy. The King was one of very few people…
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In bed with the Sun King….
Looking at what is searched for on my blog, this one topic seems to be the one with the most appeal. Not a week passes without countless searches involving the words sex and Louis XIV. The Sun King is famous for having an army of long and short-time mistresses, but this shan’t be our focus here. All of them will,…
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Five Things You Probably Did Not Know About Louis XIV
-Louis XIV liked his windows open. He did not care much if the weather was good or bad, as soon as he entered a room, Louis opened all windows. His mistresses did not like this habit much. Madame de Maintenon complained of it regularly, saying the King does not care whether she felt cold due to the windows being open. It was…
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The Miracle Birth Of Louis XIV
Anne d’Autriche and Louis XIII had been married for a long twenty-three years before their first son, Louis XIV, was born. This birth of a healthy heir to the throne of France was regarded a miracle and what led to it was reportedly a happy coincidence. As Anne d’Autriche and Louis XIII were married on the 24th November in 1615, both…
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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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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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A day in the life of Louis XIV…
From Levee to Couchee, Louis XIV followed a strict schedule, as did all the members of the Court, all regulated like clockwork, allowing the officers in the service of the King to plan their work as accurately as possible. “With an almanac and a watch, you could be three hundred leagues from here and say what he was doing”. – Saint…
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The Grand Lever of the King
If you are Louis XIV, you can’t simply get up in the same way like the peasant down the road or the Vicomte in the chambers above you. Non, your awakening needs to have style and be of grand proportions, just like everything else. It needs to be of a dimension big enough to remind everyone of the fact that…
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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…
