Marie Louise de Bourbon

Shivering on my bed experiencing the last queesy vestiges of a violent stomach flu, I was reminded of Maria Luisa, originally Marie Louise de Bourbon, niece of Louis XIV, as described by Kathryn Harrison in her gruesome, martyred, spectral, work of historical fiction, Poison. Maria Luisa became so after her arranged marriage to the impotent, pasty skinned king of Spain, Carlos II. She failed to produce an heir, and eventually died a vomitous death brought on by poison. Harrison imagines the poison as an overdose of Spanish Fly, slipped into her addictive opiate friend laudanum, which she took daily to surive her depression in dismal inquisition era Spain. Once the vomiting began, the court's doctor saved all of it for inspection, hoping to detect the source of her illness. Gold and ceramic steaming bowls of royal puke were whisked away by handmaids to be poked and prodded. Gross. After a week or so of her vomitting, they slaughtered a goat at her feet, and covered her with the warm, bloody skin, hoping that the animal's sacrificed life would revive the other wasting spirit. But she died, and in so doing escaped the prison her royalty had offered her. Me, I survived.