favourites (see Comines's annals) was Cressol, Governor of Dauphiné (1473). A woman-despiser, turning to sexuality furtively when cynical passion moved him, Louis XI is a dark shape in the gallery of vaguer royal homosexuals.
Philippe d'Orléans, the Regent of France, a prince of fine natural qualities but corrupt to the marrow early in his manhood, casts a particular shadow across the line of kingly homosexuals. His orgies, in the Palais-Royal and elsewhere, have been given sufficiently in detail for many generations of readers of French backstairs scandal. One such "affair" between Philippe and a certain much petted companion, the Abbé de Choisy, is distinguished. The same Abbé de Choisy furnishes possibly the most brilliantly demoralizing, cynical type of an uranian courtier to be met in French print. The caustic private correspondence of the Regent's German mother, Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, by her marriage, Duchess of Orléans (1652-1721), throws fugitive light on aristocratic uranianism in Paris under the Regency—anything but to its respectability. Numerous other records, even more graphic and at first-hand as depictions, are at the service of the curious.
The period of the Regency, as also that of Louis XY, developed aristocratic French uranianism so much that really scandalized remark on it was not over-common. The Bachaumont Memoirs, the secret "Journal" of the Police Inspectors under Sartine, the Cheverney, d'Argenson, Barbier and similar records, offer interesting witness to this. About 1760, for instance, we are told quite casually that the Italian ambassador Erizzo,—"has just given to young Fleury, an actor in the Montensier troupe a cabriolet and horse, so that Fleury can come offener to Paris … The Ambassador keeps Fleury, just as he would a pretty woman … Some days ago, coming from a supper with the Duc d'Aiguillon, the Ambassador went to bed with Fleury;
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