The kings of France were never exactly known for their hygiene. Louis XIV bathed only a handful of times in his entire life, while Henri IV (r. 1589-1610) won plenty of romantic conquests even though, according to one historian of his time, he reeked of feet and garlic. The exception was Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792), who actually bathed regularly, brushed his teeth and washed his hands (behavior his own courtiers saw as a mild form of madness). Some of the queens of France did not always smell of perfume either, but one queen, without a doubt, broke every record for bad smell.
Marie Joséphine de Savoie (1753-1806), daughter of Victor Amadeus III, king of Sardinia (r. 1773-1796), arrived at the French court in 1771 to marry the king’s brother, Louis Stanislas, Count of Provence. According to accounts from the time, Marie was short, dark-haired, unattractive (her portrait is quite generous with her) and a total stranger to anything resembling hygiene.
Louis XV (r. 1715-1774), the groom’s grandfather, had to beg her father to make her brush her teeth and wash her face every now and then. The requests didn’t impress the princess much, and the powerful odor she spread wherever she went shocked more than a few nobles at the French court, even though they were supposedly used to bad smells by then.
But beyond her total lack of hygiene, Marie Joséphine also had a few especially disturbing habits that certainly didn’t help her social standing. The most notorious one was catching small birds with a net and boiling them alive in soup.
It’s no surprise that her husband kept his distance from her for his entire life and preferred the company of good food and men. In 1795, when the French Revolution and tuberculosis turned her husband into King Louis XVIII (r. 1814-1824) and her into queen (at least in title), the couple, who were forced to share a house in England, already lived on two separate floors. Marie Joséphine died in 1806 and never actually became queen of France in practice, but I doubt anyone mourned that.
Louis XVIII’s brother, the Count of Artois, later Charles X (r. 1824-1830), had no better luck with his own marriage. He was forced to marry Marie-Thérèse de Savoie (1756-1805), the sister of Marie Joséphine, his brother’s wife. His wife, too, was short, with personal hygiene much like her sister’s, and to top off all that “beauty,” she also had an unusually long nose.
Unlike the son of Louis XIV, one of his ancestors, who actually liked long noses, Charles couldn’t stand his wife. Still, he worked up the courage to sleep with her four times, which brought two sons and two daughters into the world. Like her sister, Marie-Thérèse died long before her husband became king of France, but unlike her sister, who at least got the title of queen of France, she had to settle for the title of Countess of Artois her whole life.
So let’s end on this note: two royal marriages, two queens who could have used a bar of soap, and a 250-year-old family story smelly enough to make you wonder how French history might have turned out if someone had just handed them a bath.