Matrimonio a la mierda
WARNING: The following contains language and imagery. Please proceed with caution.
The flesh goes on creating seed just as God created it to do. The blood vessels function according to their nature, and thus the fluids rise. To put it bluntly for the sake of those who suffer miserably: if it does not flow into flesh it will flow into the shirt.— Martin Luther, 1521
Writing to Stendhal in 1829, Prosper Mérimée describes how Fernando VII’s third queen and second cousin, Maria Josepha of Saxony, was so overcome on her wedding night by her husband’s monstrous appearance and appendage that she soiled the sheets of their marriage bed.
The poor girl, a sixteen-year-old Saxon princess who spoke only German, was untutored in the more unpleasant realities of the animal kingdom. Her only love, pastoral poetry, furnished her with but the most fanciful notions of natural truth and the elemental character of man. Vowed since her first flowers to chaste devotions, she was, according to Mérimée, “so Christianly elevated as to be unaware of even the simplest things of this world, the sort of things that every little girl in Spain learns before they are eight years old.”
As was the custom, on the night of the royal nuptials, the First Lady of the Bedchamber was assigned the task of instructing the newly queened on what was expected from a hymeneal bride on her day of days. And what to expect from the groom.
However, according to Mérimée, “the old whore protested that she had never paid much attention to what her husband was doing to her, so she could hardly be expected to explain it to others, and as a result, the queen was put into her marriage bed without the slightest preparation.”
Enter the king, her now husband, a swarthy and bloated satyr smoking a cigar clenched between black teeth in a slack mouth above a jutting lower lip and a prognathous jaw whose absurd prominence, on a face as long and gray as a donkey’s, was barely counterpoised by the enormity of its nose and the tininess of its squinting piss-hole eyes.
Generations of interbreeding had endowed craniofacial dysostosis, which deformed the royal skull, and macrogenitosomia, which, according to a sister-in-law, produced “a royal manhood as thin as an asparagus spear at the base, as fat as Pedro Romero’s fist at the end, and as articulated and long betwixt as the front leg of a bull.”
He was, moreover, the rudest and most shameless scoundrel in his kingdom.
Faced with this horrible sight, the girl thought herself fainted and clutched in the most horrifying dream of her life; or perhaps she had died a sinner and gone to hell; and unable to understand the bleats of the beast attacking her, and incapable of ascertaining the aspirations of his fondling exertions or what in god’s name the wielded club attempting to impale her even was, the best she could do was do her best to drive it off, which only incensed it more. So she ran, the priapus in heated and heavy-stepped pursuit.
Goya told what is described thus far in three etched and aquatinted prints, long since lost, but renowned for their brilliant hue and warm saturation. In the fourth print, which, like the rest of the series, borrows heavily from Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode and the libertine scenes of Fragonard, the king pursues his queen; but, as she is young and agile and he obese, heavy with gout, he trips over a settee.
In the next, the enraged and engorged king puffs angrily on his cigar, which is almost as long and thick as his ashamedness, while in the next chamber, two women—his sister-in-law has joined the old crone—explain to the horrified queen her conjugal duties.
In the sixth, the donkey-faced is almost upon his paled prey, who shows no signs of resistance, except her mouth is gaped, her eyes rolled back, and she holds her belly as if in pain.
The seventh and final print showed the king in flight, his face contorted in fury, horror, or both. Beneath it read the caption: “At his first effort to open a door, the next door opened quite naturally and stained the sheets a very different color from what is expected after a wedding night. This created a terrible odour. Queens, it seems, do not enjoy the same properties as civet cats.”
Though Saxon princesses were renowned for their fertility—Maria Josepha of Austria, for example, who bore both Maria’s grandmother and Fernando’s grandfather, along with at least fourteen other children—the queen could not be persuaded to open any of her doors for her king ever again. Not even a personal letter from Pope Pius VII, whom, as a child of eight she had seen levitate in ecstasy while conducting mass for her family during his and their imprisonment by Napoleon at Fontainebleau, could enjoin her ever again to share her bed with the king. She withdrew from public life to the palace in Aranjuez and died ten years later in 1829. Six months after her death, she was expeditiously replaced by the king’s niece.
Thanks for reading. Next week: audio.
Truly, who ever would want to be à Queen.
What strange beasts we are. Thank you for this remarkable tale of woe, and whoah!