Portrait of Pauline Nesle
In the endless host of lovers entered the graces and royal bed of Louis XV three sisters, can also be counted which all became his favorites, in certain situations even at the same time.
I'm talking about the "infamous" Nesle sisters , who for many years, thanks to certain hidden but abundantly lavished virtues, managed to keep the French sovereign tied to himself, who has always been too sensitive to charm and to the female arts.
One of the young women, however, died suddenly, giving rise to legitimate doubts about the causes of her untimely death.
Pauline Félicité de Mailly-Nesle she was the second of the four sisters, perhaps the least beautiful and graceful due to her excessive stature (it seems, moreover, that she did not take care of personal hygiene at all, with imaginable results), but she was nice, intelligent and lively, as well as determined to conquer the king.
It mattered little that Louis XV, at the time he was introduced to her, had been her sister's lover for some time Louise and that the latter, in 1738, had convinced her to move to court; she soon became a ménage à trois which scandalized even the most libertine and frivolous palace in Europe, because one thing was a womanizer monarch, another that he shamelessly understood two sisters (who would later become three!)!
At a certain point, silencing gossip and malice became indispensable and so it was decided to find a complacent husband for Pauline, a consort of pure facade in short, just to be formally in order.
Except that the girl became pregnant and in 1741 she gave birth to one of the many illegitimate children of the fickle Louis XV.
Unfortunately, the young woman did not have time to enjoy the joys of her motherhood:within a few days, in the throes of excruciating and inexplicable pain, she died.
The causes of Pauline's disappearance were never established; it was probably an infection, not at all rare at the time, but many foreshadowed, not so subtly, the possibility that the woman had been poisoned.
The contemporaries tell of a king who was sincerely distraught and in tears immediately after the disappearance of his lover, but also of a Louise immediately ready to console him:she could never, a sister, come to kill the other in order not to be forced to share with you man (powerful) and privileges?
We will almost certainly never know.