A governess hid a toddler in a closet and saved the French crown
In 1712 measles killed Louis XV's mother, father and elder brother within weeks, the brother partly from the bloodletting meant to cure him. The governess Madame de Ventadour refused to let doctors bleed the two-year-old and nursed him alone in a palace closet. Three years later he was king.
Born at Versailles in 1710, Louis started life fourth in line behind his grandfather, father and brother. Smallpox took the Grand Dauphin in April 1711. The following February his mother died of measles, and his father, who had refused to leave her bedside, followed six days later. His five-year-old brother died next. When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, a frightened, weeping five-year-old inherited the throne.
Custom required a regent until the king turned 13. The old king had distrusted his nephew Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and tried to hand real power to his favourite illegitimate son. Philippe got the will overturned by the Parlement of Paris by giving back its right to challenge royal decisions, a concession that fed decades of conflict with the crown. During the regency, John Law's paper-money bank and his Mississippi Company rose and then crashed in 1720, leaving wealthy Parisians distrustful of any currency but gold.
The boy king's schooling included geography, astronomy and mapmaking, and in 1717 he charmed the visiting Peter the Great by naming Russia's major rivers and cities; the towering tsar broke protocol by lifting him up and kissing him. Painfully shy, Louis was made to dance in two public ballets and never did so again. He kept a lifelong love of science, later founding physics and mechanics departments at the Collège de France and backing the Cassini survey, the first complete, accurate map of France. A three-year-old Spanish infanta was betrothed to him in 1721 but sent home once it was clear she could not bear heirs soon enough.
Cardinal Fleury, his former tutor, ran the government from 1726 until 1743, when Louis took sole control. His reign of almost 59 years brought Lorraine and Corsica into France but lost New France after the Seven Years' War. Most historians judge him extravagant and incompetent, and his grandson Louis XVI inherited a kingdom near financial ruin.
Source: Louis XV
