Lara Marlowe on the colourful life of Marie-Louise O’Morphy

Two hundred years ago on December 11th, Marie-Louise O’Morphy died in the Paris home of her daughter, Marguerite Victoire, Baronne de Tournhem. In 77 years, the Irish grand-daughter of a Jacobite soldier had been the mistress of King Louis XV, whom she bore one, possibly two, daughters. She married three times, collecting chateaux, diamonds and lovers, was imprisoned during the revolution and later met Napoleon Bonaparte.

O'Morphy's was an extraordinary life, but as her French biographer Camille Pascal writes, "History has remembered neither her name nor her face but her arse. A backside which Casanova, (the painter Francois) Boucher and Louis XV, three fine connoisseurs, one by one and each in his fashion, marvelled at".

O'Morphy's father Daniel was imprisoned in the Bastille, for espionage and blackmail. "He was spying for the French, the Orange connection and the Jacobites, " says Norman Mongan, who has made a documentary titled La Petite Morphise; Marie-Louise O'Morphy and Louis XV.

Daniel O’Morphy was banished to Rouen, where Marie-Louise was born in 1737, the last of 12 children. Her mother, Marguerite Hickey, was also imprisoned, for prostitution and theft. When Daniel died, Marguerite took her five daughters to the teeming Paris neighbourhood of Montorgeuil. “The O’Morphy women were not prostitutes in a bordello,” says Mongan. “I’d call them high-class call girls. They had rich lovers who bought their favours.”

Little Louison, as the family called Marie-Louise, worked as a maid in the home of her sister Victoire. The great seducer Giacomo Casanova called one evening and was stunned by the “perfect beauty . . . white as a lily . . . the loveliness of her features” of 14 year-old Marie-Louise. He commissioned François Boucher, a court painter, to record her posterior for posterity.

Boucher's Female nude reclining on a chaise-longue was shown to King Louis XV, then age 42. The king's entourage – led by his chief mistress the Marquise de Pompadour – were always on the lookout for virgins for him. "She cannot exist, and if she does, bring her to me so that she may extinguish the fire she has lit in me," Louis said.

Louis XV showered clothes and jewels on his young mistress. For easy access, he ensconced her in a house near his palace in Versailles. Their first daughter, Agathe Louise de Saint-Antoine de Saint-André, was spirited away to a convent where aristocrats left illegitimate offspring.

O’Morphy’s story still inspires unease. Was she, as Duncan Sprott, the author of a fairytale version of her life, asks in Mongan’s film “a victim, a girl of 14 taken by the king to be his plaything“? Or was she incredibly lucky, as Sprott equivocates, “the 18th century equivalent of a lottery winner?”

In the middle of the night in November 1755, O’Morphy was expelled from her house. A political ingenue, she had made the mistake of telling the King that he should “get rid of [his old/] lady.” Madame de Pompadour was not pleased.

O’Morphy was nonetheless given a large sum of money and married off to a young nobleman who would be killed in battle two years later. Their son, Louis Charles Antoine de Beaufranchet, would become a general in the revolutionary army. When the revolution came, O’Morphy tried to pass for “citoyenne Morfi,” but was nonetheless imprisoned as an aristocrat. Her son got her out, in part by claiming to have accompanied Louis XVI to the scaffold.

O’Morphy married a second nobleman, Francois Nicolas Le Normant de Flaghac, but when la Pompadour died, she was allowed to return to Versailles, where she is believed to have resumed her affair with the king. Her daughter Marguerite Victoire may also have been Louis’s offspring.

The late Irish artist Michael Farrell painted a pastiche of Boucher's painting in 1977, which he titled Madonna Irlanda. "For Farrell, Marie-Louise O'Morphy was, like Cathleen Ní Houlihan, a symbol of Ireland," says Norman Mongan. "Farrell believed Ireland had been raped by colonisers, and he was also hitting out at the power of the Catholic Church."

O’Morphy’s story inspired the traditional singer Liam Healy to write the ballad which closes Mongan’s film. It’s worth watching just to hear Healy sing: “King Louis found her so sublime/Built a palace to be near her all the time/Loving and kissing all night and all day/’Till Louis got tired and sent her away/Surprise, soumise, la petite O’Morphise.”