In 1742, a Parisian noblewoman arranged for her younger sister to be introduced to King Louis XV at a lavish Mardi Gras ball. The introduction was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated plot, and it worked perfectly. Within weeks, the younger sister had captured the king’s attention, displacing her own elder sibling as his royal mistress and forcing her out of her apartments at Versailles in a calculated humiliation. This was not the first time the king had taken a mistress from the same family, and it would not be the last.
Over the course of a single decade, four sisters from the aristocratic de Nesle family would become the official mistresses of the same king, an extraordinary scandal that overshadowed nearly everything else in the French court. The de Nesle sisters came from one of the most distinguished noble lineages in France. Their father, Louis de Mailly, Marquis de Nesle, was a nobleman and writer, and in 1713 he acquired the title of Prince of Orange in Provence. Their mother, Armande Félice de La Porte Mazarin, came from Italian stock that had risen to prominence through the influence of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the powerful first minister of Louis XIV.
Mazarin had launched his nieces, the Mancini sisters, into the heart of the French court, where they became famous for their beauty and influence, and it was through this maternal line that the de Nesle sisters inherited their ambition and their connection to power. The five de Nesle sisters were born between 1710 and 1717, around the same time as the king himself. Louis XV had inherited the throne at the age of five in 1715 and grew into a man known less for his wars and politics than for the spectacular scandals of his private life. In 1725, he married Marie Leszczynska, a Polish aristocrat, and the couple had ten children, but by the early 1730s the king’s eye had begun to wander.
The first of the de Nesle sisters to catch it was Louise Julie, the eldest, born in March 1710. She married her cousin at sixteen in an unhappy union, and after her mother died in 1729, she took over her position as a lady-in-waiting to the queen, placing her at the very heart of the court just as the king was beginning to look around. By 1732, Louise Julie had become the king’s mistress. The relationship was encouraged by Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, the king’s most powerful minister, who saw a discreet and loyal mistress as a useful counterweight to rival factions gathering around the queen.
The affair remained hidden for years, but in 1738 the queen suffered a miscarriage and her doctors warned that another pregnancy could kill her. From that point, the royal marriage became effectively celibate, and the court openly embraced the institution of the official royal mistress. Louise Julie, shy and retiring by nature, genuinely loved the king, but her greatest rival was not another ambitious woman at court, it was her own family. Believing she was securing the futures of her sisters, she used her influence to obtain prestigious positions for them at Versailles.
Instead, she opened the door to the woman who would replace her. Pauline Félicité, the second sister, born in 1712, was taller, louder, and far more ambitious. She wrote to Louise Julie asking for an invitation to court, and once installed, she quickly won the king’s affection. By 1739, two sisters were simultaneously sharing the king’s bed.
Pauline was showered with gifts, wealth, and a marriage to the Marquis de Vintimille, who retired to the countryside while his new wife continued her relationship with the king. Her rise was brief and tragic. In September 1741, only two years into her time as mistress, she died in childbirth at the age of twenty-nine, the child almost certainly the king’s. While her body lay in state, guards abandoned their posts to drink, and an angry mob broke in and mutilated her corpse in punishment for her adultery.
Her death cleared the way for the most ruthless of the sisters. Marie Anne, the youngest, born in October 1717, was the direct opposite of her elder sister Louise Julie. While Louise was gentle and uninterested in politics, Marie Anne deliberately used her beauty and charm to build her own faction at court. After her marriage to the Marquis de La Tournelle in 1734, she too received an invitation to court through her sister.
By 1741, with Pauline dead and Louise Julie’s position weakening, a fierce struggle for influence was underway around the king. The powerful Duke de Richelieu, a bitter rival of Cardinal Fleury, saw his opportunity and decided to back Marie Anne as the next royal mistress. His plan succeeded, and within weeks she became the king’s new lover. According to contemporary accounts, she was so cruel that she insisted Louis dismiss his other mistresses before she would fully accept the role, and she wasted no time in disposing of her own sister, having the furniture removed from Louise Julie’s apartments at Versailles to make clear that the previous favourite’s time had ended.
Marie Anne now stood at the center of political intrigue. Europe was engulfed in the War of the Austrian Succession, and Richelieu used his close relationship with her to influence the king’s decisions, hoping to secure command of French military campaigns. Her extraordinary rise did not last long. In the early winter of 1744, she fell severely ill, convinced she had been poisoned, and died on December 8, 1744, at just twenty-seven.
Rumors of murder spread through Versailles, though no concrete evidence was ever found. The king was said to be utterly devastated. After Marie Anne’s death, Louis found consolation in the arms of a fourth sister. Diane Adélaïde, the middle sister, born in 1713, had sided firmly with Marie Anne during the bitter rivalry of 1742 and had stayed at court.
She married the Duke de Lauraguais in January 1742, a marriage marked by infidelity on both sides, though they had one daughter. Her relationship with the king was less dramatic and more a matter of circumstance, beginning in the final weeks of 1744 and ending just three months later. At thirty-one, she was displaced as the king’s mistress by Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, a twenty-three-year-old commoner who would become famous as Madame de Pompadour. Diane retired quietly from court and lived peacefully until her death in 1769 at fifty-six.
There was one sister who never became the king’s mistress. Hortense, born in February 1715, married at the relatively late age of twenty-four to the Marquis de Flavacourt, a violent and arrogant man. She served as a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and when the king seemed to be moving from sister to sister, court gossip assumed she would be next. She was not.
She resisted the king’s advances, caught between royal pressure and her husband’s threats to kill her if she became his mistress. She remained the only sister never to share the king’s bed. She outlived all her siblings by decades, living to witness the French Revolution. During the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794, she was arrested and interrogated as a member of the aristocracy, but her wit and intelligence saved her.
Even Maximilien Robespierre could not justify dragging a woman in her late seventies to the guillotine. She died peacefully in Paris in December 1799, just a month after Napoleon Bonaparte had seized power as First Consul. The world she and her sisters had known had vanished forever. Louise Julie, broken-hearted and stripped of the king’s affection and her place at court, had withdrawn to a convent, where she died in March 1751 at the age of forty-one.
The scandal of the de Nesle sisters, four women who became the official mistresses of the same king while a fifth narrowly escaped the same fate, outlived the monarchy itself. In 1765, the painter Charles André van Loo depicted three nude sisters in a painting of a scene from Greek mythology, and everyone at court understood that the three women were Louise Julie, Pauline, and Marie Anne. The de Nesle sisters remain one of the most extraordinary and scandalous families in the history of European royalty.