For centuries, kings kept mistresses, and it was an accepted, often overlooked part of court life. But no monarch pushed that tolerance further than King Louis XV of France, whose love life spiraled into one of the 18th century’s greatest scandals—a saga defined by one family above all others. It was not one or two women from the same household, but four official mistresses who were sisters. Five sisters, one king.
This is the story of the notorious de Nesle sisters, an aristocratic family whose rise and fall became a defining chapter in French royal history. The sisters, also known as the de Mailly sisters, came from an ancient and distinguished noble lineage. Their father, Louis de Mailly, was a French nobleman and a well-regarded writer at the royal court in the early 18th century. In 1713, he was granted the title of Prince of Orange, a prestigious honor tied to a principality in Provence, formerly associated with the powerful Dutch House of Orange.
Their mother, Armande Félice de La Porte Mazarin, came from the influential Mazarin family, which had risen to prominence through Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the chief minister of King Louis XIV. Through this connection, the sisters inherited a strong Italian heritage and a place among France’s foremost noble families. Like many daughters of the high nobility, the de Nesle sisters were educated in music, dance, etiquette, and conversation, preparing them for a debut at the glittering and politically dangerous court of Versailles. Their family history had already included notable figures, as the Mazarin women had become mistresses to powerful kings in the 17th century.
But the de Nesle sisters would achieve something virtually unprecedented: four sisters who each became the official mistress of the same king. The sisters’ lives revolved around King Louis XV, born in February 1710, just a month before the eldest sister. He ascended to the French throne in September 1715 at the age of five, succeeding his great-grandfather, Louis XIV. Over the following decades, Louis XV became one of France’s most scandalous kings, not for his wars or politics, but for his extraordinary personal life.
In 1725, Louis married Marie Leszczynska, a Polish aristocrat, when he was just 15 and she was 22. The couple had ten children, though three died in childhood. While the marriage remained stable for years, by the early 1730s, Louis began to look elsewhere. Over the next decades, he became notorious for his many royal mistresses, a reputation sealed by the de Nesle scandal that preceded his most famous relationship, with Madame de Pompadour.
The eldest of the five sisters was Louise Julie de Mailly, born in Paris on March 16, 1710. She was the first to become the king’s mistress. At just 16, she was married to her cousin, Louis Alexandre de Mailly, a match arranged to secure family lands and titles rather than for love. It was not a happy marriage.
In 1729, the sisters lost their mother, who died at around age 38, and Louise Julie inherited her mother’s prestigious position as the queen’s chief lady-in-waiting. This placed her at the center of court life just as the king began to take notice of her. By 1732, a romance had developed between Louise Julie and the king. Her husband had little say in the matter; in the early modern royal court, few aristocratic families could refuse the king’s wishes without risking their standing.
In fact, families of royal mistresses often welcomed the arrangement, using their newfound influence to secure pensions, titles, military posts, and other royal favors. The relationship was also actively encouraged by Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, the king’s most powerful minister, who believed Louise Julie could be used as a means of influence over the king. It was a political calculation far more than a simple romance. Louise Julie herself seemed little interested in political power.
She instead enjoyed the immense wealth, luxury, and improved social standing that came with being the king’s favorite. For years, the affair remained discreet, with Louis XV maintaining the image of a devoted husband. But in 1738, a turning point arrived when the queen suffered a miscarriage, and her doctors warned that another pregnancy could be fatal. From that moment, the royal marriage became more a friendship than a physical union.
This shift transformed Versailles, as the court formally accepted the position of a royal mistress. Louise Julie became the first woman to publicly hold that role. Despite the riches and prestige, she remained shy and introverted, never fully comfortable in her position. She seems to have genuinely loved the king.
But her greatest rival was not a court beauty—it was her own sister. Louise Julie, in a move to secure her sisters’ futures, used her influence to place them in prestigious positions at Versailles. Unknowingly, she was preparing the way for the woman who would eventually take her place. By the late 1730s, the king had already begun relationships with Louise Julie’s younger sisters.
In the spring of 1742, Louise Julie was replaced by one of them. Heartbroken, she retreated to a convent, where she lived out her remaining years. She died there in March 1751 at the age of 41. The second eldest sister, Pauline Félicité, was born in 1712.
Unlike Louise Julie, she was tall, outspoken, and far more calculating. She was consumed by a desire for wealth, influence, and attention, traits that would make her one of the most feared and hated women at court. In her mid-twenties and unmarried, Pauline wrote to her sister, asking to be invited to court. Louise Julie happily agreed, never considering the consequences.
Pauline quickly turned the king’s attention to herself. By 1739, she had become a mistress to Louis XV alongside her sister, creating an unbelievable scandal where two sisters shared the same king. Pauline was showered with gifts, money, and property, and a marriage was arranged to the Marquis de Vintimille. Her new husband conveniently retreated to the countryside while his wife continued her relationship with the king.
But Pauline’s rise was tragically short-lived. In September 1741, just two years into her position, she died giving birth at the age of 29. The child’s father was almost certainly the king, though legally the boy was recognized as the Marquis’s son. While the child received financial support, the king showed little interest in him.
During Pauline’s funeral, guards abandoned their posts to drink, and an enraged mob broke in, mutilating her corpse on accusations of debauchery. Both Louis XV and Louise Julie were reportedly devastated by her death, with Louise Julie terrified that her own decision to bring her sister to court had led to such a horrifying end. Yet Pauline’s tragic fate was soon overshadowed by the ambitions of the youngest and most ruthless of the sisters, Marie Anne. Born on October 5, 1717, she was the complete opposite of Louise Julie.
Where her elder sister was humble and shy, Marie Anne used her beauty, charm, and ambition to seize the king’s heart and build a faction of her own at court. In June 1734, at age 16, she married Jean-Baptiste Louis, Marquis de La Tournelle, who was nine years her senior. Like her sisters, she was soon invited to court through Louise Julie, but Marie Anne had no intention of living in anyone’s shadow. By 1741, Pauline had died, and Louise Julie’s position was weakening.
Seizing the opportunity, the Duke of Richelieu, a bitter rival of Cardinal Fleury, decided to support Marie Anne as the king’s next mistress. In 1742, at a grand royal ball, Richelieu carefully introduced the young noblewoman to the king. The plan worked perfectly. Within weeks, Marie Anne had displaced Louise Julie and become the king’s new lover.
Contemporary accounts describe her as ruthless, even demanding that Louis XV dismiss his other mistresses so that she could have the role all to herself. In a calculated humiliation, she ordered Louise Julie’s furniture removed from her Versailles apartment, making it clear that the former mistress’s power was at an end. Marie Anne now stood at the center of court intrigue. Europe was embroiled in the War of the Austrian Succession, and Richelieu used his connection to Marie Anne to influence the king’s military decisions.
Her extraordinary rise, however, was also brief. In the early winter of 1744, she fell gravely ill. Believing she had been poisoned, Marie Anne died on December 8, 1744, at just 27 years old. Rumors of murder swept through Versailles, though no definitive evidence ever surfaced.
Louis XV was mentally shattered by her death, which abruptly ended her powerful political faction. Despite Marie Anne’s own scandalous career, her death was not the final mark the de Nesle sisters left on the king. Another sister was waiting. Diane Adélaïde, the fourth of the five sisters, was born in 1713.
During the fierce rivalry between Louise Julie and Marie Anne, Diane had firmly sided with Marie Anne. After Marie Anne’s victory, Diane remained at court. In January 1742, she married Louis de Brancas, Duke of Villars, a marriage marked by infidelity on both sides, though they did have a daughter named Louise. Compared to the devotion of Louise Julie or the ruthless ambition of Marie Anne, Diane’s relationship with Louis XV was far less dramatic—a matter of circumstance rather than grand passion.
It began in the final weeks of 1744 and ended just three months later. The 31-year-old Diane was displaced by a 23-year-old commoner named Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, whom the king met at a masked ball celebrating the marriage of the Dauphin. She would become the legendary Madame de Pompadour, opening a new chapter in the king’s life. Diane then retired from court and lived quietly in Paris until her death in 1769 at the age of 56.
That left one sister who never became the king’s mistress. Hortense, the second youngest, was born in Paris on February 11, 1715. She was the only one of the five de Nesle sisters who never shared the king’s bed. At the relatively late age of 24, she married François Marie de Foix, Marquis de Flavacourt, in 1739.
The marriage was deeply unhappy due to her husband’s harsh and sometimes violent behavior. Despite this, they had two children, a son named Auguste and a daughter named Adélaïde. Like her sisters, Hortense spent much of her time at the French court after Louise Julie became the king’s mistress. In 1742, as the king was moving between sisters, Hortense was appointed lady-in-waiting to the queen.
To many, this seemed like the next step in the familiar pattern, and court gossips assumed it was only a matter of time. They were wrong. Hortense refused the king’s advances. Court whispers suggested she was caught between the king’s wishes and her husband’s threats, who warned he would kill her if she became Louis’s mistress.
Whatever the truth, Hortense was the only de Nesle sister who never submitted. By 1745, the king’s attention had turned to Madame de Pompadour, who became his official mistress. In the years that followed, Hortense remained at court as a lady-in-waiting but gradually distanced herself from the grandeur of Versailles. She lived a remarkably long life, outlasting her sisters by decades.
This meant she lived to witness the French Revolution. As a member of the nobility and the last of the de Nesle sisters associated with Louis XV, she was arrested and interrogated during the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794. It is said that her acerbic wit during questioning saved her life, with Maximilien Robespierre finding no compelling reason to drag a woman in her seventies to the guillotine at the Place de la Révolution. Hortense died peacefully in Paris on December 28, 1799, at the age of 84.
Just one month earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had come to power as First Consul. The world she and her sisters had known was gone forever. After Madame de Pompadour’s arrival in 1745, the de Nesle sisters lost their hold on the king. Pompadour nevertheless maintained her influence and remained close to the king for many years.
In the 1750s, 1760s, and early 1770s, Louis XV enjoyed the company of more than a dozen other influential mistresses, many of whom were housed in a building on the grounds of Versailles known as the Parc aux Cerfs, meaning the Park of the Stags. Yet despite all the women who followed, the extraordinary story of the de Nesle sisters was never forgotten. In 1765, French painter Charles André van Loo created “The Three Graces,” a painting depicting a Greek mythological scene, but the three nude women were widely understood to represent Louise Julie, Pauline, and Marie Anne. Nearly three centuries later, the de Nesle sisters remain one of the most infamous families in European royal history.
Four sisters in succession had become the mistresses of the same king, with a fifth on the brink of joining them—a scandal that outlived the monarchy itself.