The Scandalous Lives of the Infamous Nesle Sisters

Throughout history kings have kept mistresses. It was expected, accepted and often ignored. But no monarch took it quite as far as Louis XV of France. His love life became one of the greatest scandals of the 18th century, with a seemingly endless stream of women passing through his court. Yet among all of them, one story stood above the rest. Not one, not two, but four of his official mistresses came from the same family five sisters one king this is the extraordinary story of the infamous Denel sisters but before we get into their story i want to give a huge thanks to today's sponsor Freecash click the link in the description or scan the qr code to download Get your $10 bonus now. Before you jump to any conclusions, this isn't a get rich quick app and it definitely isn't a scam. Brands already spend billions on ads hoping you'll try their games and apps. With free cash, they simply pay you to try them instead. So if you'd like to earn while you play, here's how it works. Pick a game that looks interesting like this one. Then complete the tasks, like reach a certain level, and once you do, you get coins that you can accumulate and later cash out. Just make sure you enable app tracking, otherwise your progress might not track properly and you won't get rewarded. If you're on your phone a lot anyway or have a lot of free time, this way you can earn some extra cash just by playing some games. I usually play while relaxing in my free time, and here you can see me playing Harvestland. And it's not some sketchy site either. Freecash has a 4.6 star rating on Trustpilot, with over 300,000 reviews. By the way, to cash out you must have a minimum of $25. Click the link in the description or scan my QR code to download. Get your $10 bonus now. That's almost half what you need, so give it a try. The Denel or the Desmaisi sisters, as they were also known, came from an esteemed aristocratic line. Their father was Louis Desmaisi, Marquis Desmaisi and Denel. He was a French noble and a well-known writer at the French court in the early 18th century. His family traced its heritage back hundreds of years within the French nobility. Furthermore, in 1713 Louis was given the title of Prince of Orange. This was a principality in Provence in southern France, which had previously been ruled by the House of Orange, the most powerful aristocratic lineage in the Dutch Republic. It was an immensely prestigious title and meant that the sisters were born into one of France's premier noble households. The girl's mother was Armand Felice de la Porte Mazarin, the Marquise de Denel. The de Denel title came from her side of the family, and her husband only acquired that part of his titles after they married in 1709. Through their mother, the sisters were partly of Italian heritage. Armand's father was Paul Jules de la Porte, the son of Hortense Mancini. The Mancini family hailed from Rome, but their fortunes were transformed by their uncle, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the powerful chief minister of King Louis XIV. Under his patronage, the family rose to the very heart of the French court, where the women of the Mancini family would become almost as famous for their beauty and influence as for their noble connections. Like many daughters of France's highest nobility, the Deneuil sisters received an education intended to prepare them for life at Versailles. They were taught music, dancing, etiquette, conversation and other accomplishments expected of aristocratic ladies before making their debut into one of Europe's most glamorous and politically dangerous royal courts. The Mancini sisters, before their Deneuil descendants, had already written a remarkable chapter in European history. Several became the mistresses of some of the most powerful monarchs of the 17th century, including Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England. Yet even their exploits would be eclipsed by what came next. The Deneuil sisters would achieve something virtually unprecedented, four sisters becoming the official mistresses of the very same king. The lives of the Deneuil sisters would revolve around the monarch of the day in France, King Louis XV. Louis was born in February 1710, just a month before the eldest of the five Deneuil sisters. As such, he was of a fairly similar age to the sisters. He succeeded his great-grandfather, King Louis XIV, to the throne of France in September 1715, when he was only five years old. Over the next 59 years, Louis XV would become one of France's most infamous monarchs, not for war or politics, but for the extraordinary scandals of his private life. In 1725, Louis married Marie Leszczynska, a member of a prominent Polish aristocratic family. She was 22 years old, while Louis was just 15. They would have ten children together, though three died in infancy. The marriage remained stable for many years. But in the early 1730s, Louis XV began to wander. Over the following decades, he would earn a reputation as one of France's most notorious womanizers, surrounding himself with a succession of royal mistresses. Madame de Pompadour would become the most famous among them, but before her came the scandal that would eclipse them all, the extraordinary rise of the Deneuil sisters. The eldest of the five Deneuil sisters was Louise-Julie de Mayenne. She was born on the 16th of March 1710 in Paris and would be the first of the sisters to become a lover of King Louis. However, like many noble women of her era, The future was decided for her long before she had any say in it. At just 16 years old, she was married to her cousin, Louis Alexandre de May, in a union intended to strengthen the family's hold over its lands and titles. Sadly, it was not a happy marriage. Fate intervened in 1729, when Louise and her sisters lost their mother, Armand Felice, who died at around 38 years of age. Since 1725, Armand had served as Dame du Palais, the queen's senior lady-in-waiting. Upon her death, Louise succeeded her in a prestigious position, placing her at the very heart of the royal court, just as King Louis XV was beginning to wonder. By 1732. The two had begun an affair that would forever alter both Louisa's own life and the history of her family. Her husband Louis-Alexandre would have had little real say in whether his wife became the king's mistress. At the courts of early modern Europe, A monarch's wishes carried enormous weight, and few noble families were in a position to refuse his advances without risking their standing at court. Indeed, the families and often the husbands of royal mistresses frequently embraced the arrangement, using their wives' newfound influence to secure pensions, titles, military appointments, government offices, and other royal favours. Louise's relationship with the king was not entirely a matter of chance. It was actively encouraged by Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury, Louis XV's most powerful minister, who believed Louise could be used to influence the king. A discreet royal mistress loyal to his interests was far preferable to allowing rival factions clustered around the queen to gain greater sway over the monarch. In that sense, The Daunel sisters' extraordinary role at court began as much with political calculation as with romance. Louise herself appears to have had little interest in wielding political power. Instead, she enjoyed the immense wealth, lavish gifts, and elevated status that accompanied her position as the king's favourite. At first, the affair remained hidden from public view. Between 1732 and 1738, Louis XV was determined to keep his infidelities as discreet as possible. To the outside world, he still appeared to be a devoted husband, and he continued to share the queen's bed. Pregnancy followed pregnancy until, in 1738, tragedy struck. After suffering a miscarriage, Queen Marie Leszczynska's physicians warned that another pregnancy could prove fatal. From that point on, the royal marriage effectively became one of companionship rather than intimacy. The change transformed life at Versailles, with the queen no longer able to fill the role expected of a royal wife. The court openly embraced the role of an official mistress. Louise Julie, whose striking beauty had first captivated Louis, became the first woman to occupy the position publicly. Yet despite the wealth, prestige and influence it brought her, she was naturally shy and reserved and never seemed entirely comfortable. She appears to have genuinely loved the king and seems to have regarded him as far more than a passing lover. In the end, however, Louise Julie's greatest rival was not another ambitious beauty at court, it was her own family. Believing she was securing her sisters' futures, she used her influence with the king to obtain prestigious positions for them at Versailles. Instead, she unknowingly opened the door to the very women who would replace her. By the late 1730s, while Louise was still the king's official mistress, Louis had begun bedding her younger sisters as well. For a woman who had devoted herself so completely to him, the betrayal was crushing. In the spring of 1742, she was cast aside in favour of one of her own sisters. Worse still, as you will soon see, her youngest sister would force her from her apartments at Versailles, completing her humiliation. Heartbroken and stripped of both the king's affection and her place at court, Louise withdrew to a convent, where she spent the remainder of her life. She died there in March 1751, at 41 years of age. Her story ended in quiet seclusion, but the scandal surrounding the Daunel sisters was only just beginning. Pauline Félicité, the second eldest of the five Daunel sisters, was born in 1712. Unlike the shy and reserved Louise, Pauline was remembered as taller, louder, and far wittier. She possessed an immense appetite for wealth, influence, and attention, qualities that would soon make her one of the most feared and hated women at Versailles. Still unmarried in her mid-twenties, Pauline wrote to Louise asking to be invited to court. Her elder sister gladly obliged, never imagining the consequences. Pauline repaid her debt to her older sister by immediately inveigling her way into the king's affections. By 1739, she had become Louis XV's mistress at the same time as Louise. The extraordinary scandal of two sisters simultaneously sharing the same king had become a reality. Like Louise before her, Pauline was showered with lavish gifts, money and estates. A marriage was then arranged to the Marquis de Vintimille, one of France's leading aristocrats. The union gave Pauline an esteemed title, and her new husband conveniently went to live in the countryside, while his new bride carried on her affair with the king. Yet Pauline's rise proved tragically short. In September 1741, after only two years as Louis' mistress, she died giving birth at just 29 years of age. The child was almost certainly the king's, although he was legally recognized as the Marquis de Vintimille's son. He would receive financial support from Louis throughout his life, but the king showed little interest in him. If Pauline's life had ended in tragedy, then what followed was even more horrifying. As her body lay in state in Versailles, the guards abandoned their posts during the night to drink. A furious mob then forced its way inside and mutilated her body for adultery. Both Louis XV and Louise Julie were reportedly devastated by Pauline's death, while Louise was haunted by the belief that she'd brought her sister to court. Only to lead her to such a gruesome end. Yet, even Pauline's shocking fate would soon be overshadowed. Waiting in the wings was the youngest and by far the most ambitious of the Daunel sisters, Marie-Anne. Marie-Anne was the youngest of the sisters and was born on the 5th of October 1717. She was also the most ruthless of the five. and was the direct opposite of her eldest sister. While Louise Julie had been gentle, reserved and largely uninterested in politics, Marie deliberately used her beauty, charm and ambition to replace her sister in the King's affections and built her own faction at court. In June 1734, when she was 16 years old, Marie Anne married the Marquis de la Tournelle, Jean-Baptiste Louis. He was nine years older than her and in his mid-twenties. Like her sisters before her, she soon gained an invitation to court through her sister Louise-Julie, though Marie-Anne had no intention of remaining in her sister's shadow. By 1741, Pauline was dead, Louise-Julie's position was weakening, and a fierce struggle for influence surrounded the king. Sensing an opportunity, the powerful Duke of Richelieu, a bitter rival of Cardinal Fleury, decided to back Marie-Anne as Louis XV's next mistress. At a lavish Mardi Gras Tuesday ball at Versailles in 1742, Richelieu carefully orchestrated an introduction between the young noblewoman and the king. The plan worked perfectly. Within weeks, Marie-Anne had captured Louis' attention and became his newest lover. According to contemporary accounts, she was ruthless, and even insisted that Louis dismiss his other lovers before she would fully accept the role. Determined to reign alone, she wasted no time in eliminating her own sister. As noted earlier, she ordered the furniture to be removed from Louise-Julie's apartments at Versailles, a calculated humiliation that left no doubt the former favorite's reign had come to an end. Marie-Anne now became the king's chief mistress, and was at the centre of political intrigue at court. Europe was engulfed in the War of the Austrian Succession and Richelieu used his close relationship with Marie-Anne to influence Louis' decisions, hoping to secure command of France's military campaigns against Austria, Britain and the Dutch Republic. Her extraordinary rise, however, would also be short-lived. In the early winter of 1744, Marie-Anne fell terribly ill. Convinced she had been poisoned, She died on the 8th of December 1744 at just 27 years of age. Rumours of murder swept through Versailles, though no concrete evidence was ever found. Louis XV was reportedly devastated by her death. bringing to an abrupt end the brief but immensely powerful political faction that had formed around her. Yet even Marie-Anne's infamous career would not mark the end of the Daunel sisters' astonishing hold over the king. One final sister was still waiting. Marie-Anne's passing saw King Louis taking solace in the arms of a fourth Daunel sister, Diane Adélaïde was the middle of the five sisters and was born in 1713. During the bitter rivalry between Louise-Julie and Marie-Anne in 1742, Diane had sided firmly with Marie-Anne. Therefore, she remained at court after Marie-Anne won the struggle. Around the same time in January 1742, she married Louis de Brancas, Duke of Lorraine. As with nearly all of her sisters, the marriage was characterised by infidelity on both sides, although they did have a child together, a daughter named Louise. Unlike Louise Julie's heartfelt devotion or Marie-Anne's ruthless political ambition, Diane's relationship with Louis XV was much less dramatic and was mainly one of circumstance. It began in the final weeks of 1744 and ended three months later. Diane, who was 31 at the time, was displaced from her brief stint as a royal mistress by by Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, a 23-year-old commoner. After meeting Louis at a masquerade ball celebrating the marriage of the Dauphin to the Spanish princess Maria Teresa Rafaela, she would rise to become the legendary Madame de Pompadour, inaugurating an entirely new chapter in the king's life. Diana retired from court thereafter and lived out a quiet life down to her death in 1769 in Paris, at 56 years of age. Yet there is one sister we still haven't covered, so why wasn't she also involved with the king? The second youngest of the five Daunel sisters, Hortense, was born in Paris on the 11th of February 1715. Hortense was the odd one out of the five sisters. She was the only one who never became King Louis XV's mistress. Her marriage came at the comparatively late age of 24, when she married François-Marie de Foix, the Marquis de Flavacourt, in 1739. Their marriage was immensely unhappy owing to François-Marie's overbearing and occasionally violent attitude towards his wife. This aside, they did have two children, a son named Auguste and a daughter named Adélaïde. Like all of her sisters, Hortense spent much of her time at the French court from the mid-1730s onwards, after Louise Julie's rise as the king's mistress. In 1742, as Louis moved from one Daunel sister to another, Hortense was appointed a lady-in-waiting to the queen. To many at Versailles, it seemed like the next step in a now familiar pattern. Surely Hortense would be next. They were wrong. Hortense resisted the king's advances. If the court gossip is to be believed, she found herself trapped between obeying the wishes of the king and the threats of her husband, who warned that he would kill her if she became Louis' lover. Whatever the truth, Hortense remained the only Daunel sister never to share the king's bed. Before long, Louis' attention was captured instead by the famous Madame de Pompadour, who became his official mistress from 1745 onwards. Hortense spent years afterwards at the French court as a lady-in-waiting. She started to absent herself from the pomp and formality of Versailles more in the 1760s. In the end, she lived a very long life. Outliving most of her sisters by half a century and Diane by 30 years. This meant she lived to see the French Revolution in 1789. As a member of the aristocracy, and the final one of the Danelle sisters who had been so intensely associated with King Louis XV, she was arrested and questioned during the Terror in 1793 and 1794. Apparently her sarcastic wit under questioning saved her, but even Maximilien Robespierre, the tyrant who led the revolutionary Terror, couldn't really have justified dragging a woman in her late 70s down to the Place de la Révolution to have her head cut off with a guillotine. In the end, Hortense died peacefully in Paris on the 28th of December 1799 at 84 years of age. Just one month earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had come to power as first consul. The world she and her sisters had once known had disappeared forever. The Danelle sisters lost their influence as the king's mistresses after the arrival of Madame de Pompadour in 1745. She only retained her position until the early 1750s when ill health meant, like the queen before her, that continued sexual relations could be hazardous. Still, Pompadour retained her influence at court and had a close relationship with the king for years thereafter, unlike the surviving Danelle sisters. Louis went through well over a dozen more prominent mistresses in the 1750s, 1760s and early 1770s. Somewhat borderly, from around 1750 to onwards, Pompadour managed a building on the grounds of Versailles where these mistresses lived. It was called the Parc aux Cerfs, which translates as Park of Stags. Yet despite the many women who followed, the extraordinary saga of the Danelle sisters was never forgotten. In 1765, the French painter Charles-André Vanloo painted the Three Graces. Though it features a scene from Greek mythology, the three naked sisters in the painting were understood to be Louise Julie, Pauline and Marie-Anne. Nearly three centuries later, The Danelle sisters remain among the most notorious families in European royal history. Four sisters became the mistresses of the same king, one after another, while a fifth stood on the brink of joining them. It was a scandal so astonishing that it has outlived the monarchy itself. Thank you so much everyone for watching this video on the Danelle sisters. I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you thought of the live down below in the comments and if you want more videos on sisters Or royal mistresses also, let me know down below in the comments Also, I hope you guys are subscribed and have notifications turned on to get all my videos as soon as I upload them Anyway, that's all from me. So i'll see all of you in the next. Don't forget to like. Thanks