Madame Montespan, who after their “divorce, when having a public set-to with her sun-god in the glittering salles of Versailles, discomfited that little, red-heeled, bewigged, and pompous mannikin with the following broadside :
“With all my imperfections, at least I do not smell as badly as you do !”
His ancestor, “Lewis the Eleventh,” says Burton in “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” “had a conceit everything did stink about him, All the odoriferous perfumes they could get would not ease him, but still he smelled a filthy stink.”
A modern rhinologist would suspect this monarch of having been afflicted with maxillary antrum suppuration. It will be noted, however, that there is no record that the odour he himself perceived was perceptible to others. The fœtor, as we say, was subjective, not objective, in which respect it differed from that of another historical personage, Benjamin Disraeli to wit, who was the subject probably of the disease known as ozæna. (See later.)
