By the late summer of 1715, the most powerful man in Europe was rotting from the feet up. For twenty-two days, Louis XIV of France, the Sun King who had ruled for seventy-two years, watched his legs turn black, liquefy, and fall apart. He could smell his own decay. His surgeons would later report that the gangrene had reached the bone, and that he remained lucid until very near the end.

He was not a battlefield casualty or a plague victim. He was the absolute monarch who had built Versailles, commanded armies that reshaped the continent, and believed he ruled by the will of God. Then a black spot appeared on his leg after a hunting trip, and none of that mattered. On the morning of August 10th, 1715, none of this was yet imaginable.

Louis XIV was seventy-six years old, but he maintained the rigid routine he had followed for decades. At eight thirty sharp, he rose for the Grand Lever, the theatrical ceremony in which chosen nobles watched him dress, each button and buckle a sacred ritual. Then chapel, then meetings with ministers, then dinner eaten in public view, like a caged lion at feeding time. Everything was choreographed down to the second.

He had spent that morning hunting at Marly, his favorite escape from the suffocating etiquette of Versailles. He had ridden for hours through the same forests where he had hunted since he was a boy of five. At seventy-six, he could still spend six hours in the saddle without complaint. The courtiers who rode with him that day later remembered nothing unusual.

The king seemed in good spirits, even jovial. It was on the ride back that he felt it. A sharp, stabbing pain in his left leg, just above the knee. Nothing dramatic, just enough to make him shift in his saddle.

By the time his carriage rolled through the gates of Versailles that evening, he was limping. His chief physician, Guy-Crescent Fagon, took one look and declared it sciatica. A bit of rest, some poultices, and his majesty would be dancing again within the week. Fagon is a name worth remembering, because his incompetence would literally cost the king his life.

Except Louis XIV did not rest. He could not, or rather, he would not. The Sun King had an image to maintain. For seventy-two years, he had been the fixed point around which all of France, all of Europe, revolved.

To show weakness was unthinkable. So the next morning, August 11th, he rose for the Lever as usual. He stood through mass despite the pain shooting through his leg. He presided over the Council of State, his face a marble mask hiding his agony.

But those closest to him noticed things. The way he gripped the arm of his chair until his knuckles went white. The beads of sweat on his forehead during dinner, even though the August evening was cool. His secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, saw how he barely touched his food.

This was a man who usually devoured twelve courses without blinking. By August 13th, the pain had become a burning sensation, as if someone were holding a torch to his flesh from the inside. Fagon prescribed laudanum, essentially opium mixed with wine, but it barely took the edge off. That morning, the king’s valet noticed something else.

A small black spot on his leg, about the size of a coin. When they pointed it out to Fagon, he waved them away. Just bruising from the pressure, he said. Apply more poultices.

What Fagon did not know, or chose to ignore, was that the black spot was necrosis. Tissue death. The beginning of senile gangrene, where the blood supply to the extremities fails and the flesh starts to die while you are still using it. It is more common in elderly diabetics, and Louis, after a lifetime of consuming massive quantities of meat and sweets at his legendary banquets, almost certainly had diabetes.

But eighteenth-century medicine did not know what diabetes was. They did not understand circulation. They thought the body was governed by four humors that needed to be balanced. By August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, Louis XIV gave his last public performance.

He had to be practically carried to the chapel, but once there, he stood through the entire mass. Witnesses described his face as gray, his lips blue-tinged. The smell had already started, that sweet, cloying stench of rotting flesh that anyone who has worked in a hospital knows. It clung to his clothes, filled the chapel.

Some courtiers discreetly held perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. That night, his leg swelled to twice its normal size. The black spot had spread, creating what looked like an ink stain creeping up from his foot toward his knee. The skin was tight, shiny, starting to crack and weep foul-smelling fluid.

Fagon finally called in other physicians. Not because he admitted he was wrong, but to spread the blame for what was clearly becoming a disaster. They arrived on August 17th, four of the most celebrated doctors in France. They examined the leg, now mottled purple and black, swollen like a grotesque sausage.

They conferred in hushed Latin, throwing around terms like mortification and putrefaction. Then they prescribed their remedy. Donkey milk baths and camphorated spirit dressings. They also decided to bleed him, because clearly a seventy-six-year-old man whose leg was rotting needed less blood, not more.

Louis, weakened from pain and lack of food, fainted three times during the procedure. When he came to, he asked them plainly, “Am I dying? ”

They lied to his face. “Your majesty’s constitution is remarkably strong,” they said.

“With rest and treatment, recovery is assured. ”

Meanwhile, in the corridors of Versailles, the death watch had begun. Not the noble vigil one might imagine, but something far uglier. Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s nephew, had already sent riders to Paris to alert his supporters.

The Duke of Maine, Louis’s illegitimate son whom he had legitimized and named in his will, was gathering his own faction. They were like vultures circling a dying animal. Except the animal was still conscious, still giving orders, still trying to rule France from his bed of agony. August 25th was the day Louis XIV finally broke.

It was St. Louis’s Day, the feast day of his ancestor and namesake, Louis IX, the crusader king who had been canonized as a saint. Louis had always marked this day with special ceremony. He was determined to at least show himself to the court, to prove he was still alive, still king.

His valet tried to dress him, but when they attempted to pull stockings over his legs, he screamed. Actually screamed, for the first time in his life, in public. The silk stocking came away bloody, with pieces of blackened skin stuck to it. The smell that filled the room was indescribable.

One courtier later wrote that it was as if all the graves of Saint-Denis had been opened at once. They carried him to his bedchamber. Louis XIV never stood again. What happened over the next seven days defies belief.

The gangrene had now consumed his entire left leg from foot to thigh. The flesh was black, green in places, literally liquefying. Surgeons who examined him reported that you could push your finger through his leg like it was soft cheese. The smell was so overwhelming that servants had to burn perfume constantly, creating a bizarre mixture of incense and decay that made people retch.

Yet Louis’s mind remained clear. Horrifyingly, agonizingly clear. He conducted state business from his bed, signing documents with a shaking hand. On August 26th, he summoned his five-year-old great-grandson, little Louis, Duke of Anjou, the future Louis XV.

A dying king, his leg rotting off his body, the room thick with the stench of death, and in walks a tiny boy in his silk court dress, probably terrified out of his mind. Louis XIV pulled the child close, close enough that the boy must have been overwhelmed by the smell, and spoke words that echoed through history. “My child, you are about to become a great king. Do not imitate me in my love of warfare.

Try to relieve your people’s burdens, which I have failed to do. I have loved war too much. Do not imitate me in that, nor in my excessive spending. ”

This farewell advice is attested in court memoirs.

The Sun King, who had waged war for fifty-four of his seventy-two years of rule, who had built Versailles at a cost that would be billions in today’s money, who had styled himself a god-king, was confessing his failures to a five-year-old. He knew what he had done to France. He knew the treasury was empty, the people exhausted, the nation bled dry by his ambitions. He was begging a child not to repeat his mistakes.

The boy was led away in tears. He would never see his great-grandfather again. On August 27th, the surgeons made a horrifying discovery. They judged that the gangrene had reached the bone.

Louis looked at it and said, with that dark humor that emerges in the face of death, “Gentlemen, I appear to be falling apart ahead of schedule. ”

One surgeon, a man named Maréchal, finally had the courage to tell the truth. He took the king’s hand and said, “Sire, we could amputate the leg, but it would only buy you days, perhaps hours. The corruption has spread too far.

Your majesty should make preparations. ”

Louis refused amputation. “If I must die anyway, I prefer to keep all my limbs. ”

He had known, of course.

How could he not? He could see his own leg rotting away. He could smell his own decay. But hearing it confirmed seemed to bring him a strange peace.

He turned to his confessor and said, “I have lived as a king. At least let me die as a Christian. ”

August 28th and 29th were days of farewell. Louis called in his courtiers in small groups, thanking them for their service, asking their forgiveness for any wrongs.

Many wept openly, not just for the dying king, but for the end of an era. These people had known no other monarch. Some had been born at Versailles, lived their entire lives in Louis’s shadow. What would happen when the sun finally set?

To his illegitimate children, he gave his blessing and wept, knowing that his brother and nephew would strip them of their rank the moment he died. To Madame de Maintenon, his secret wife, he said, “I thought dying would be harder. ” She held his hand as the fever consumed him, as his body temperature spiked so high that his physicians could not understand how he was still conscious. The political vultures, meanwhile, were getting bolder.

Philippe d’Orléans was already acting as if he were regent, giving orders to ministers, promising positions to supporters. The Duke of Maine was frantically trying to secure military backing. Letters flew between Versailles and Paris, Versailles and Madrid, Versailles and Rome. Everyone wanted to know how much longer.

On August 30th, something bizarre happened. A man named Brun, who claimed to be a healer from Marly, talked his way into the royal bedchamber. He said he had an elixir that could cure gangrene. The regular physicians protested, but Louis, perhaps desperate for any hope, or maybe just curious, allowed it.

Brun gave him several drops of a red liquid. Within an hour, Louis felt better. The fever dropped. He asked for food, the first time in days.

The courtiers in the antechamber began to celebrate. A miracle. The king would live. Plans for the succession were hastily shelved.

Philippe d’Orléans allegedly went pale when he heard the news. But it was a false dawn. By that evening, the fever had returned, worse than ever. The pain in his leg, which had been numbed by the advancing necrosis, came roaring back as if his nerves were on fire.

Louis spent the night of August 30th to 31st in absolute agony, crying out despite himself, begging God to take him. His last coherent day was August 31st. The gangrene continued to advance in the affected limb. He confessed to his Jesuit confessor, Père Le Tellier.

The last rites were administered by Cardinal de Rohan. Then he did something extraordinary. He ordered his courtiers to open the curtains of his bed fully, so everyone could see him. See what the Sun King had become.

This rotting, dying thing that had once been the most powerful man in Europe. “Look well,” he said. “This is what becomes of the glory of kings. ”

As midnight approached, Louis began to drift.

His breathing became shallow, rattling. He muttered prayers in Latin, fragments of psalms he had learned as a child. At one point, he clearly said, “I thought dying would be harder… but now I know it is.

”

September 1st, 1715. Eight fifteen in the morning. The dawn light was just beginning to filter through the tall windows of the royal bedchamber. Madame de Maintenon held his hand.

His confessor whispered prayers. The physicians stood uselessly by, their remedies exhausted, their patient beyond all help. Louis XIV’s breathing slowed. Stopped.

Started again. Stopped. A courtier approached the bed, held a mirror to the king’s lips. No breath fogged the glass.

He turned to the crowd of nobles pressed into the room and spoke the words that would end an era. “The king is dead. Long live the king. ”

The silence lasted perhaps three seconds.

Then chaos. Philippe d’Orléans immediately left the room to secure his regency. The Duke of Maine tried to follow but found his path blocked by Orléans’s guards. The coup was already in motion.

Courtiers scattered like roaches when a light comes on, some racing to align themselves with the new regime, others fleeing to their estates to wait and see which way the wind would blow. Louis XIV’s body lay abandoned in the Mercury Room, where it was displayed, attended only by servants and the physicians who had failed him. The smell was so overwhelming that they had to evacuate the room within an hour. When the embalmers arrived, they nearly refused the job.

The king’s legs had putrefied so completely that they fell apart when moved. They had to essentially pour what remained of Louis XIV into his coffin. Royal tradition demanded that the king’s body be divided into three parts. The corpse would go to Saint-Denis, the heart to the Jesuits’ Church of Saint-Louis, and the entrails to Notre-Dame.

The coffin was displayed in the Mercury Room from September 2nd to 10th. Transport to Saint-Denis occurred on September 9th. The funeral procession was a shadow of what it should have been. There were torches and prayers and all the pomp, but contemporary accounts note that some along the route jeered.

After seventy-two years, France was sick of the Sun King. The most telling moment came during the funeral oration. Bishop Massillon stood before the assembled nobility in Saint-Denis, looked at Louis XIV’s coffin, and began his sermon with these words: “God alone is great. ”

Not “Louis the Great is dead.

” Not “We mourn the Sun King. ” Just “God alone is great. ” It was a repudiation of everything Louis XIV had stood for. All his glory, all his power, all his pretensions to divinity, reduced to a rotting corpse that fell apart so badly they could barely get it into the ground.

On September 2nd, Philippe d’Orléans had the king’s will annulled by the Parlement de Paris and made himself sole regent. Within a week, the court abandoned Versailles, moving back to Paris. The regent governed from the capital. It was as if the Sun King had never existed.

The great palace Louis had built as a monument to his glory stood empty, a seven-hundred-room tomb for a dead dream. The physicians who had attended Louis, especially Fagon, who had misdiagnosed the gangrene until it was far too late, fled court in disgrace. Fagon died in 1718. In his final delirium, witnesses said he kept crying out, “The black spot.

I should have seen the black spot. ”

But perhaps the most poignant aftermath came from little Louis XV, that five-year-old boy who had inherited an empty treasury and an exhausted nation. Years later, as an adult, he would tell people about his last meeting with his great-grandfather. How the smell had made him sick.

How the rotting king had pulled him close and whispered about not repeating his mistakes. He did not listen. Louis XV ruled for fifty-nine years and left France even more bankrupt, even more broken. The Bourbon monarchy limped on for two more generations before the French Revolution finally put it out of its misery.

In 1793, when the revolutionaries broke into the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, they found Louis XIV’s lead coffin. The lead was melted down for bullets. The remains were thrown into common pits and covered with quicklime. The Sun King, who had long been falsely credited with proclaiming “L’État, c’est moi”—I am the state—ended up as a few handfuls of bone fragments dissolved in lime.

The man who thought he was a god died rotting from the feet up, conscious and in agony until almost the very end, abandoned by his courtiers before his body was even cold. In those last days of August 1715, as gangrene ate through his body, Louis XIV experienced something that all his power, all his wealth, all his glory could not prevent. The basic, brutal biology of death. No amount of gold could stop the bacteria multiplying in his flesh.

No divine right could halt the necrosis creeping up his legs. No army could fight the infection destroying him from within. His surgeon Maréchal left one final chilling observation in his notes. “His majesty died as any peasant might die of the same affliction.

Slowly, painfully, and with full knowledge of what was happening to his body. ”

In death, the king discovered he was merely a man. The horror of Louis XIV’s death was not just the physical agony, though that was terrible enough. It was the complete destruction of an illusion that had held France in thrall for seven decades.

The Sun King could not die like ordinary men. Except he did, and worse than most. He died over twenty-two days of increasing putrefaction, each day stripping away another layer of the mystique that had made him seem immortal. Today, when visitors see Versailles, they are shown the grandeur.

The Hall of Mirrors. The vast gardens. The gold, the marble, the crystal. They are not shown the Mercury Room where his coffin lay in state.

They are not told about the servants who had to burn pounds of incense to cover the smell of royal decomposition. They are not told that the Sun King’s last words were not some profound statement about glory or France, but a simple, exhausted confession: now he knew it was hard to die. Because that is the truth about absolute power, about men who think they are gods. In the end, they discover what Louis XIV discovered in those horrible August days of 1715.

Flesh rots the same whether it is wrapped in silk or sackcloth. Death does not care about divine right. And when the gangrene comes, whether in your leg or in your kingdom, all the glory in the world cannot stop the rot.