MFDJ 12/15/24: A Debauched Frenchman

Today’s Filthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Louis XIV’s nephew, Philip, Duke d’Orléans, was Regent to the boy-king Louis XV for nine years and ruled the country in all but name. The myopic little Regent was generally considered to be the most debauched man in French history. Although he had demonstrated himself to be an intelligent and very gifted politician, his chief interests were women and wine. At the age of fourteen he became the father of a baby girl when he raped the head porter’s daughter at the Palais Royal. He made an actress and his wife pregnant at about the same time, mistress and wife simultaneously giving birth to an illegitimate son and a legitimate daughter.


Debauched?  Moi???

His mistresses were legion; it was reckoned that he kept over a hundred at a time. His choice of women drew comment too, as all of them were very plain. When he was chided by his mother for his lack of taste, he famously replied, “Bah, Mother, all cats are gray in the dark!” His personal harem and his “daily filthiness” were the talk of France, but he was similarly famous for his drinking binges. The Regent was a desperate alcoholic, particularly partial to the new fizzy champagne recently invented by Dom Pérignon. To the very end he continued to consume seven bottles of champagne almost every evening.

The Regent’s regular orgies in the Palais Royal scandalized Paris. Every evening he would shut himself away with a few male and female companions, then get himself wildly drunk and sleep with whoever took his fancy, while naked prostitutes were served upon silver dishes for his guests. Even more controversially, he was an atheist and proud of it: the held orgies on Good Friday and it was alleged that he dabbled in the occult. The single most shocking allegation against the filthy old Regent, however, concerned his incestuous relationship with his eldest daughter, the Duchess de Berri. The abominable Elizabeth, short, obese, and badly marked from smallpox, was almost as debauched as her father. Married at the age of fourteen to her cousin the Due de Berri, the youngest grandson of Louis XIV, within four years she became wealthy teenage widow interested only in drinking herself senseless and running up huge gambling debts. Daily she drank herself into a stupor and could often be found rolling in her own vomit on the carpet. Eventually she became so fat that she found it impossible to mount a horse.

It was widely rumored that she was sleeping with her father, gossip which the Regent encouraged by inviting her to his all-night orgies and painting her in the nude. She died aged twenty-four, most probably from cirrhosis of the liver and weakened by a difficult and illegitimate childbirth, although her death certificate stated that she ate herself to death. It was commented at the funeral that the Regent’s unusually intense display of emotion at his daughter’s early demise was motivated by something other than parental grief.

In his forties, the Regent took on the appearance of a senile and purple-faced old man. When he first showed himself in England, London’s bookmakers offered odds that he would be dead within three months. In 1723, against the advice of his physicians, he took a new mistress thirty years his junior. The effect on his heart was predictably disastrous. They were sitting by the fireplace of his drawing room at Versailles one December evening when he had a massive stroke and slumped unconscious. When a doctor tried to bleed him, a lady courtier warned, “No! You’ll kill him… he has just lain with a whore.” Two hours later he was dead, aged forty-nine. Most people thought it was a miracle that he had lived that long. Although it was quite obvious to everyone what had killed him, court etiquette demanded that there should be an official postmortem. Unfortunately, while the physicians were carving him up, the Regent’s favorite dog snatched his master’s heart and ate it.

Culled from: Royal Babylon 

 

Vintage Asylum Inmate Du Jour!

In The Library Eclectica, I have a book entitled The Faces of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography (edited by Sander L. Gilman), 1977.  It contains a wonderful collection of photographs of asylum inmates taken in the 1850’s by pioneering medical photographer and psychiatrist Dr. Hugh W. Diamond, along with engravings that were made of them and used in teaching. There are also several case studies by Dr. John Conolly (the leading British psychiatrist of the mid-nineteenth century) for some of the patients.  The portraits are beautiful and sad and the text reveals the psychiatric thought processes of the mid-19th century.

Here’s today’s lovely soul.

 

Garretdom

A FIENDISH WOMAN.

The Horrible Manner in Which She Treated a Little Foundling.

CHICAGO, Sept. 22.—A case of terrible cruelty to a child is now on hearing before Judge Garnett. Mary Gray, a resident of Englewood, about a year ago took from the Foundlings’ Home a boy about four years old to rear. She is said to be a woman of ungovernable temper, and she first administered correction to the child with a severity that was cruel. Shortly the neighbors began to observe the little one’s distress, and sundry acts of Mrs. Gray’s brutality were witnessed by residents in the vicinity.

The Humane Society was informed, and an examination of the boy revealed that his entire body was covered with cuts, scars of cuts, sores, welts and bruises. Mrs. Gray was promptly committed to the Criminal Court. Witnesses for the State assert that the woman has been seen cuffing and kicking the child over the floor, striking him upon the face and scalp with a knife, and what is incredibly fiendish, with drawing the boy’s finger-nails by force. A large number of the reputable citizens of Englewood are present in the court, an deeply desirous of securing for the woman the severest penalty of the law.

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

Incidentally, the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty.  Here’s the follow-up article from the September 25, 1886 issue of the Chicago Tribune:

ABUSING A CHILD

The Evidence Shows Mrs. Gray of Englewood Was Not Guilty.

It seems that injustice was done Mrs. Mary Gray, the Englewood lady who has been on trial this week in the Criminal Court on the charge of cruelty to a child, by the report of the trial published in THE TRIBUNE of Thursday. There was no evidence whatever that his toe-nails dropped off or were not in a perfectly healthy condition; nor was the word hatchet used in any manner during the trial of the case. There were no scars upon the child, except the cut on the lip, which had been produced by any external violence, and it was amply explained that the cut on the lip was occasioned by a fall of the child down a flight of eight or ten steps while playing with his dog. The child was covered with scars, but it was the testimony of Dr. Henrotin that these scars were the result of sores from skin or blood disease in the child. The child was stripped at the trial and shown to the jury, and several running sores of like character were found upon his person. Another serious one was found on his head. The only witness who testified to any act of cruelty beyond moderate chastisement was impeached by the defense, and acts sworn to by this witness were denied by Mrs. Gray almost in toto. A dozen or more of Mrs. Gray’s nearest and most intimate neighbors of the most respectable character testified to her uniform kind treatment of the child: that she had dressed it well, fed it well, kept it cleanly, supplied it abundantly with toys, and was very particular in regard to its manner and habits. The child at the trial showed this by its frequent replies of “no, ma’am,” and “yes, ma’am,” and “thank you,” and the like. Her neighbors also testified as to her quiet, well-disposed, and even-tempered character. The jury which tried her case was more than an ordinary one for intelligence and standing in the community, and  on the evidence promptly acquitted her. Her attorney, while making some technical points in her defense, argued the case mainly on its merits, and there is no doubt that the verdict was a just one. Witnesses who testified against her were shown to have been actuated by motives of spite and enmity, and at least some principal ones bore a very unsavory character.

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