The Palace of Versaille has 700 rooms, the most famous of which belonged to the infamous French Queen, Marie Antoinette.

After three years of restoration, the queen’s room, which includes her private chambers, is open to the public again.

The fascination with her living quarters extends past the ornate rococo design and over-the-top finishes to the mystery and scandal that surrounded the queen herself, reports The Daily Beast.

Turns out she may have been a wild one behind closed doors:

These apartments were where Marie Antoinette, with the help of myriad staff, got dressed each day in stockings, garters, a tight corset, and layers of silk, topped off with clouds of powder and perfume. And, says the Revolutionary-era gossip mill, got undressed. Often.

Love letters were written in these rooms (although not to the king), and there are also rumors of same-sex trysts with ladies in waiting, passionate romps with a young duchess, as well as numerous orgies. Not-so-affectionately known as “Madame Deficit,” the queen’s excesses, legend has it, went beyond her flamboyant fashion sense and extended to the bedroom.

It was rumoured that the queen had an affair with her husband’s younger, better-looking brother – the Comte d’Artois, also known as Charles X – but this has never been proven.

The king’s kid brother wasn’t the only one believed to have indulged in lusty interludes with the queen. Two of her closest female friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, and the Duchesse de Polignac, were rumored to have been more than friends.

The queen met Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, who would become the Princesse de Lamballe, shortly after her arrival in France. Widowed young after her husband’s death from venereal disease (you can’t make this stuff up), Lamballe became close with Marie Antoinette, who appointed her as superintendent of her household—a move that provoked jealousy among older, more experienced courtiers.

Marie Antoinette referred to Lamballe as “mon cher cœur,” my dear heart, and the Austrian ambassador to the court of Versailles wrote in a letter, that “Her Majesty continually sees the Princesse de Lamballe in her rooms,” adding that he had “taken the precaution to point out to the Queen that her favor and goodness to the Princesse de Lamballe are somewhat excessive in order to prevent abuse of them from that quarter.”

The rumours surrounding the queen were often depicted in books, plays, and tawdry pamphlets that can best be described as political porn.

That illustration above – ‘The Empress Has No Clothes” – was one of the many distributed showing the queen with Lamballe.

Such libelles were common during pre-Revolutionary France as public anger towards the monarchy was reaching a boiling point. Stanford University keeps an online archive that includes the smutty cartoons depicting the queen in the arms of the Princesse de Lamballe, as well as in other compromising positions. Many contemporary historians agree that the pamphlets helped shape the image of the queen as a morally bankrupt sex fiend.

You can read more about her rumoured exploits here.

Following her demise, no other queen has occupied Marie Antoinette’s chambers, so they remain much as they were when she lived at Versaille.

The chambers have been described by many a historian, as a “gilded cage”.

[source:dailybeast]