The crowd broke through the guards sometime after midnight. The doors of the chapel at Versailles had been left unguarded, the men at their posts having slipped away to drink, and now a mass of people pushed inside to see the body of the woman who had lain in the king’s bed. What they did to that body, laid out for its final viewing, was so brutal that the palace would speak of it in hushed tones for years. She was only twenty-nine years old.

Her name was Pauline Félicité de Mailly-Nesle, and she had died after giving birth to a child who was almost certainly the king’s. The horror of that night was not an accident of mob fury. It was the measure of how much the people of Paris hated the women of that court. And it was only one scene in a larger story that began a century earlier, with another set of sisters pulled out of Rome like pieces on a chessboard.

History remembers them as the Mancini sisters. Their father, Baron Lorenzo Mancini, came from one of the oldest noble houses in Rome, a family that claimed roots stretching back to the days of the Roman Republic. Their mother, Geronima Mazzarini, came from humbler stock, but she held one powerful card. Her brother was Giulio Mazzarini, the man the world would call Cardinal Mazarin.

He had risen from a clever servant of the Pope to become chief minister of France, and by the 1650s, serving the young King Louis XIV, he held almost total power over the kingdom. One detail explains everything that followed. Mazarin was a cardinal, so he could never have a lawful family of his own. A man with no heirs and enormous power looks at his sister’s children and sees something else.

He sees the beginning of a dynasty. Lorenzo and Geronima had ten children: three sons and seven daughters. Two of the boys died as teenagers. Five of the girls grew up.

Their names were Laura, Olympe, Marie, Hortense, and the youngest, Marie Anne. All five were born within thirteen years of each other, between 1636 and 1649. Together, they would scandalize a continent. The eldest, Laura, was born in Rome in May 1636, into a world of old noble families and a plague that kept returning to Italy.

At just fifteen, she was married to Louis de Bourbon, the Duke of Mercœur. He was thirty-eight, a grandson of King Henry IV, which made him a cousin of the young king. Her uncle arranged the whole thing from far away in Paris. Then her father died, and the family packed up and moved to France.

They did not get a warm welcome. Cruel pamphlets mocked the sisters as “dirt princesses” and “stinking snakes. ” Two cousins arrived as well, so there were seven young women in the group, and the French gave them a nickname: the Mazarinettes. When they were first presented at court, one marshal said these girls had no money today, but soon they would have castles, jewels, and great rank.

He was right about almost everyone but Laura. In February 1657, she died after giving birth to her third son. She was twenty years old. Her sisters raised her boys, and two of them grew up to be dukes.

One even became a marshal of France. The sister who came next did something that nobody in Paris would ever forget. Olympe was born in the summer of 1638, and she became the main piece in her uncle’s game. Mazarin married her in 1657 to Prince Eugène Maurice of Savoy, from a ruling family on the border between France and Italy.

They had eight children, and six lived to adulthood. Olympe was a born schemer at court. She was said to have been the king’s mistress for a time, and she grew close to the king’s sister-in-law. After her husband died in 1673, her intrigues only grew, and in 1679, her name landed in the middle of one of the darkest scandals in French history.

It was called the Affair of the Poisons. The charge was that Olympe had asked a fortune teller named Catherine Monvoisin to poison Louise de La Vallière, who was then the king’s mistress. Hundreds of people were pulled into that scandal. Dozens were executed.

Olympe was not one of them. She escaped with her life, but she was thrown out of France, a princess of Europe sent away like a piece of unwanted luggage. She went to Spain, where a new rumor of poison followed her. Whether any of it was true is still unclear.

She spent her last years in Brussels and died in 1708, aged seventy. Here is the twist. Her son was Prince Eugene of Savoy, who grew up to become one of the greatest generals in Europe. He fought the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and later won famous victories alongside the Duke of Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The mother driven out of France for whispers of poison raised a man whose name echoes through military history. Step back and look at the board for a second. This was a girl born in Rome, moved across Europe and married to a prince she barely knew. Her uncle could build a family empire with her.

She did not choose any of it. Keep that in mind, because the next sister was the first one to try to take her life back. Marie was born in August 1639, and she was a true beauty. King Louis XIV fell in love with her—not a quick fling, real love.

He even thought about marrying her, but his advisers told him a king must marry a princess from a great royal house, and in the end, he gave in. He chose his kingdom over his heart. The story goes that he wept so hard that the people around him were stunned. To keep Marie far from the king, she was quickly married off to Prince Lorenzo Colonna in Italy.

She was twenty-two. The Colonna family was one of the most powerful in Rome, but she was never happy. She and Lorenzo had three sons, and after that she refused to have more children. By the early 1670s, the marriage was falling apart.

She was sent to a religious house, which was a bit like being locked away, and soon after that she did something bold: she left Italy and joined her sister Hortense. Marie spent years traveling and writing, and she became known for her memoirs. She only returned to Italy after her husband died in 1689, and by then her sons were fully grown. She died in 1715, aged seventy-five.

That brings us to Hortense, the sister whose life had the strangest ending of all. She was born in 1646, so she was just a baby when the family moved to Paris. When she was still young, people talked about marrying her to the future King Charles II of England, whose father had been executed in 1649. That plan never happened.

When Mazarin died in 1661, the family’s power dropped, but in that same year, fourteen-year-old Hortense was married to Armand Charles de La Porte, the Duke of Mazarin, one of the richest men in France. He was fourteen years older and deeply unstable. He believed his young wife was being unfaithful, so he sent servants to search her rooms in the middle of the night to find imaginary lovers. He damaged his own family’s art collection because he thought naked figures were immoral.

He was even rumored to have pulled out the teeth of some female servants so that men would not look at them. They had four children, and in 1668, Hortense ran. King Louis protected her. The Duke of Savoy gave her a large pension so she could live on her own.

In the mid-1670s, she moved to England and met again the man who might have married her years before: King Charles II. He had over a dozen known children from other women, and he took Hortense as his mistress. It was not easy. England was in the middle of a wave of fear about France and Catholics, so many people at court hated her.

She was also said to have had an affair with the king’s own daughter. She fell out of favor, but she and Charles later became friends again. She stayed in England, wrote her memoirs, and died in 1699. Then came the part that sounds made up.

Her husband, the Duke, came back. He took her body and carried it around France on a tour in a cart before burying it in the family tomb. Even in death, she could not get away from him. That is four sisters.

One left to find a story of her own. Now to the youngest, the one the family called the wittiest and most lively. Marie Anne was born in 1649, the baby of the group. When she was still a child herself, she helped care for Laura’s boys.

In 1661, a day before Mazarin died, her marriage to Godefroy Maurice de La Tour d’Auvergne, the Duke of Bouillon, was agreed. They were married the next spring, and for once it was a happy marriage. He loved her so much that he looked away from her affairs. They had seven children, and almost all of them lived long lives.

That alone was rare in a time when about three in ten children died in infancy. But even Marie Anne could not escape the poison scandal. She was put on trial in early 1680, and she defended herself so well that the French people cheered for her. She was asked to leave court, but she was soon invited back to Versailles.

When things turned sour again in the mid-1680s, she left for good and lived quietly on her husband’s country estates. Five sisters. Between them: mistresses of kings, an accused poisoner, a runaway wife, and the mother of a famous general. But this was not the end of that family story.

The blood of one of these sisters ran straight into the next family. And that family would do something that has almost never happened in history. Her great-granddaughters were five sisters of their own. They were called the Nesle sisters, and they ended up in the bed of a king.

Their father was the Marquis, a noble and a writer at the French court, and in 1713 he was given the title of Prince of Orange. Their mother, Armande Félice, was the granddaughter of Hortense Mancini. So the same blood of the Mancini sisters ran through these girls. They were taught music, dancing, and manners—everything a young lady needed for Versailles.

And the king they would grow up beside was Louis XV, born in 1710, who became king at just five years old. He married a Polish princess when he was fifteen, and they had ten children. But in the early 1730s, the king began to wander. Over the next forty years, he would become one of the most famous womanizers in French history.

And it all started with one quiet girl. Louise Julie was the eldest, born in March 1710. At sixteen, she was married to her own cousin. In 1729, her mother died, and Louise took over her mother’s place as the queen’s senior lady-in-waiting.

That put her at the very center of the palace, right when the king was starting to look around. By 1732, they were lovers. Here is the part that most people miss. Her husband had almost no say.

When a king wants something, a family does not say no. In fact, many husbands and relatives of royal mistresses were happy to use that favor for pensions, titles, and jobs. And the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, actually encouraged the affair. He wanted a quiet mistress who was loyal to him instead of letting the queen’s rivals win the king’s ear.

Louise Julie did not care about power. She loved the king, and she seemed to love him as more than a passing fancy. For years, it was a secret. Then in 1738, the queen had a miscarriage, and her doctors warned that another pregnancy could kill her.

From then on, the royal marriage was only a friendship. The court did not hide it anymore. Louise Julie became the first official mistress of the king. But she was shy and uneasy, and she made a mistake that would cost her everything.

She wanted to help her sisters, so she asked the king for jobs and places for them at Versailles. She thought she was lifting up her family. Instead, she was opening the door for the women who would replace her. The second sister, Pauline Félicité, was born in 1712, and she was nothing like Louise.

She was taller, louder, and sharper, with a huge appetite for money and attention. When she was still unmarried in her twenties, she wrote to Louise and asked for an invitation to court. Louise said yes. By 1739, Pauline was in the king’s bed, too.

Two sisters, one king, at the same time. Pauline was married to the Marquis de Vintimille, who happily went to live in the countryside while she carried on at court. But her time was short. In September 1741, she died after giving birth.

She was twenty-nine. The child was almost certainly the king’s. And then came the horror at the chapel, the guards who left their posts, the crowd that broke in and destroyed her body. The story shows how much the people of Paris hated the women of that court.

The king and Louise Julie were said to be crushed. Louise believed that she had brought her sister to the palace only to lead her to such an end. Step away from the palace for a moment and think about what you are seeing. Every one of these sisters had been placed in the king’s path by someone else: a minister, a rival, a duke with a plan.

You may think these women were the schemers, but look closer. They were the pieces, and the men who moved them were playing for war and power. The proof of that comes with the youngest sister, the one everyone thought was the biggest winner of them all. Marie Anne was born in October 1717, and she was the exact opposite of Louise Julie: ruthless, sharp, and hungry.

She married the Marquis de La Tournelle in 1734, and she used her sister to get invited to court. By 1741, Pauline was dead and Louise was losing ground. A bitter enemy of Cardinal Fleury, the Duke of Richelieu, saw his chance. He arranged for Marie Anne to meet the king at a masked ball in 1742.

It worked. In a few weeks, she even demanded that the king drop his other lovers before she would accept. And she did not stop there. She had the furniture taken out of her own sister’s rooms at Versailles.

It was a brutal way to say that Louise Julie’s time was over. Louise left court, went to a convent, and spent the rest of her life there. She died in March 1751, aged forty-one. Meanwhile, Marie Anne became the king’s chief mistress, and Europe was now at war over who would rule Austria.

Richelieu used her close bond with the king to push for command of France’s armies. She was no longer a young woman at a party. She was the center of a war machine. But in the winter of 1744, she fell terribly ill.

She was convinced she had been poisoned. She died on the eighth of December, aged just twenty-seven. People whispered about murder, but nothing was ever proved. The little faction around her fell apart overnight.

The sister who seemed to win everything was dead within three years, and the king moved on. But he was not finished with that family. A fourth sister was waiting. Diane Adélaïde, born in 1713, had sided with Marie Anne during the fight with Louise.

So when Marie Anne won, Diane stayed at court. She was married, and the marriage was full of cheating on both sides. In the last weeks of 1744, the king turned to her for comfort. It lasted only three months.

Then a twenty-three-year-old commoner whom he met at a masked ball took her place. Her name was Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, and the world would soon know her as Madame de Pompadour. Diane left court, lived quietly, and died in 1769, aged fifty-six. Four sisters, one king, and a trail of broken lives.

But there was one sister who said no. Her name was Hortense Félicité, born in 1715, and she was the one sister who never became his mistress. She was married at twenty-four to a man who was violent and controlling. In 1742, she became a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and everyone thought she was next.

She was not. Court gossip says she was trapped between a king who wanted her and a husband who said he would kill her if she gave in. Whatever the full truth, she refused. And the price of that no?

Nothing. That is the stunning part. Her no did not cost her the way a yes cost her sisters. Pauline died at twenty-nine and Marie Anne at twenty-seven.

Hortense Félicité lived to eighty-four. And her story had one more scene. She lived long enough to see the French Revolution. In 1793 and 1794, during the Terror, she was arrested as a noblewoman who had once been close to the king’s circle.

Her sharp, sarcastic answers under questioning are said to have saved her. Even Robespierre could not have easily justified sending a woman in her late seventies to the guillotine. She died peacefully in Paris on the twenty-eighth of December 1799, just one month after Napoleon took power. The world she and her sisters had known was gone forever.

The king kept going. Madame de Pompadour was his official mistress from 1745, and after her came more than a dozen others. But the story of the Nesle sisters never faded. A famous painting of The Three Graces by the French painter Carl Van Loo is said to show three of them.

The Nesle sisters were pushed into a king’s life by men with plans. But the next family was different, because these sisters pushed themselves, and they did it in the twentieth century, in a country that ended up at war with its own daughters. They were the Mitford sisters, six daughters of a British lord. People later labeled them the Duchess, the Fascist, the Communist, the Nazi, the Novelist, and the Other One.

Their family could be traced in England back before the Norman conquest, and their father was a famously eccentric baron. The girls were taught at home in a chaotic way by parents who were distant and nervous in equal measure, and that lonely house produced one of the strangest sets of siblings in history. Their mother flirted with fascism for years, and their parents finally separated in 1943, in the middle of the war. The politics did not stay outside the house.

It sat at the dinner table every night. Nancy, the eldest, was born in 1904. She turned to her family library and became a writer. She wrote eight novels, along with well-loved books about figures like Louis XIV and Madame de Pompadour—yes, the same Pompadour who replaced the Nesle sisters.

She died in France in 1973. Pamela, the quiet one, married a rich physicist in 1936 and then lived a simple country life. She died in 1994 at eighty-six. Deborah, the youngest, married into the family of the Duke of Devonshire and spent decades turning Chatsworth House into one of the finest stately homes in England.

She leaned to the political left, like Jessica, and she died in 2014, aged ninety-four. But it was the sisters in the middle who made the world stare. Diana was married at nineteen to a rich heir. Then she met Oswald Mosley, a politician who had once held a post in the British government and who founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932.

Diana left her husband for him. In 1936, they were married at the home of Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, and Adolf Hitler was a guest. When war began, Britain locked them both up in 1940. They were free again by 1943, but the country never welcomed them back, and they moved to France.

Diana never took back her views, right until she died in 2003, aged ninety-three. Now picture the bedroom where two of these sisters grew up. Down the middle, they drew a chalk line. On one side, Unity hung a Nazi flag and a picture of Hitler.

On the other, Jessica hung a hammer and sickle and a picture of Lenin. Two sisters, one room, and a line that neither would cross. Unity went to the Nazi rally at Nuremberg in 1933, when she was nineteen. The next year she moved to Munich, and her real goal was to meet Hitler.

She did. He was twenty-five years older. She spent years trying to win his attention, and she became part of his inner circle. By 1936, Britain’s security service was watching her.

When war broke out in September 1939, Hitler told her to go home. Unity was crushed. She tried to end her own life and survived with serious brain damage. She came home in early 1940 and never fully recovered.

A rumor spread that she secretly had a child, and that the child was Hitler’s. There is no real proof for it. If she did have a baby, the likely father was an RAF pilot she had been seeing. Unity died in 1948, aged thirty-three, from an infection linked to her old injury.

And Jessica, on the other side of the chalk line, hated her parents’ politics. At nineteen, she married her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. He joined the Canadian Air Force and was killed in 1941. Jessica moved to the United States, joined the American Communist Party with her second husband, and was called before a congressional committee at the height of the Red Scare.

Then, in the 1960s, she became one of America’s best-known investigative writers, exposing the funeral business and the prison system. She died in 1996, aged seventy-eight. Here is what makes this family unforgettable. The same house gave the world a woman who stood next to Hitler’s circle and a woman who stood against it.

Their only brother, Tom, was in love with the idea of Germany. Yet he refused to fight against the Germans, so he was sent to the Pacific and was killed in 1945. The family could not agree on anything, and the split ran through every dinner table. The last family had a different kind of scandal.

No politics, just a number that sounds impossible: three sisters, twenty marriages. The Gábor sisters—Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva—were born in Budapest, in a Jewish family that sold jewelry and porcelain. They grew up rich and beautiful. Zsa Zsa was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936, at nineteen.

Eva married a Swedish doctor and moved to the United States in 1937. That one move would save the whole family, because in 1944, Germany took over Hungary and began a mass murder that would kill over half a million of its Jews. The Gábor family fled first to Portugal and Brazil and then to America, to join Eva. And in Hollywood, they became stars.

Zsa Zsa was the most famous. She appeared in Moulin Rouge in 1952 and in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958. Eva starred in her own television show in 1953 and 1954. Magda was less famous on screen, but she was just as famous for her husbands.

As the years passed, Hollywood moved on because it loves youth. By the 1960s, the sisters were in their forties and fifties, and the offers dried up. Zsa Zsa still popped up in the Naked Gun comedies in the early 1990s. Magda was married six times.

One husband, a building contractor from New Jersey, stayed with her for over ten years, and he only left her when he died in 1967. Another husband was the British actor George Sanders, and that marriage lasted four weeks. Here is the funny part: Sanders had already been married to Zsa Zsa. Zsa Zsa herself married nine times.

Her second husband was Conrad Hilton, the hotel heir. She also had one marriage declared invalid because she was still legally married to someone else. Her last husband, a German-American prince named Frédéric von Anhalt, was nearly thirty years younger. They stayed together until the end of her life.

Eva was married five times, too. That is twenty marriages between three sisters, and one question: how many children did they have? Just one. Zsa Zsa gave birth to a daughter, Francesca, in 1947.

Francesca died in 2015, aged sixty-seven, from a stroke. And here is the saddest line in the whole story: her mother was living with dementia at the time, and she was never told. Zsa Zsa died in December 2016, aged ninety-nine, the last of the three, and the end of that famously glamorous family. Eva had died in 1995, and Magda in 1997.

Here is the final twist, and it is the one thing all these families share. The Mancini sisters were pushed by their uncle. The Nesle sisters were pushed by ministers and a king. The Mitford sisters pushed against each other.

And the Gábor sisters pushed themselves through marriage after marriage. Every one of them was searching for something that fame, money, and crowns could not give them. And that brings us back to the bedroom with the chalk line. When Unity and Jessica drew it, they were only girls.

They had no idea it would divide a family for the rest of their lives. And it is hard not to wonder how many of the other sisters in this story would have chosen a different life, if anyone had ever asked them.