Queen Marie-Thérèse, born the Spanish Infanta, resembled the King as a sister does a brother; hardly surprising, as her father was the brother of the King’s mother. Not much taller than Nabo, she would have been attractive, had her fondness for garlic and chocolate not made her teeth look like mushy peas and her forehead not bulged like a plumped-up cushion. Nabo’s days were spent waiting on this capricious, voluptuous and indeed fatuous reine while she titivated herself in her bedchamber in preparation for the pomp of Court, where she was but an ornament to the royal pageant.

He carried her train with a studied formality. Fanned her assiduously in the summer. Held her smelling salts when her daily routine of inertia made her feel faint. Poured her tea. Fed her garrulous, beloved parrots. But alas, alors, the Queen became pregnant with child and, fearful of its negritude, was given to hysterical railings. When the child was born into the royal chamber, everyone gasped Métisse! The child was a métisse!

No amount of pleading on the part of the Queen made the King, who would one day inspire terror across the whole of Europe, stop spitting bile. When one of the doctors suggested that ‘the colour of the child might have been caused by the black man’s looking at the Queen’, the King retorted, ‘It must have been a very penetrating look!’

The little man vanished. He was extinguished from l’histoire.

… the royal infant that had just been born resembled a Negro dwarf that Mme. de Beaufort had brought with her from foreign lands – a little Negro that the Queen always had with her … When the Queen was better, I went every day to the Louvre to see her. She told me that everyone laughed at seeing the child, and the great pain their laughter caused her.

Mademoiselle de Montpensier, cousin of the King

There was no singing and dancing in the streets of France. No salvo of guns. No chanting of Te Deums. No bonfires. No fireworks. No church bells. No overflowing free wine.

Louise-Marie, the child was named, and she was hastily dispatched to the Convent of Moret, where she would be inducted into the closed sisterhood by the Mother Superior and her nuns, and remain for the term of her natural life.

A Caravan in a Country Lane

Neanderthal instincts and all that.

Stanley the Stud’s bursting with lust,

his brain’s gone on holiday and without it to hold the fort

his libido’s completely unbridled.

Raw – we are both sauvage.

I pull my trackies off, then hers.

What happened to jeans and man’s best friend – flies?

I try to rip her knickers off but they’re nylon.

I stuff myself into her like banging a cork

into a wine bottle with a hammer.

Got Stanley the Manly in my leg vice and I’ll crack

his hips if I feel like it.