Comte de Tissault

Pierre Claude Justin Cleines was a French aristocrat, womaniser and bon vivant in the court of the Louis XIV. Over the course of fifteen years during which he was in favour at the court of the Sun King, he is said to have engaged in approximately eight thousand romantic liaisons - amounting to an average of about one every day and a half. He is credited with both the invention and the naming of the paper tissue, a word which is a corruption of his title, Comte de Tissault. It has also been suggested that his surname, Cleines, is the source of the brand name Kleenex.

As a young man, he would arrange his trysts by sending a silk handkerchief embroidered with a ‘T’ for ‘Tissault’. As he rose to prominence, and his conjugations rose in frequency, so too did the extravagance of these tokens. He exchanged silk for cloth of gold, picked out with silver-thread monograms. These lavish gifts were colloquially known as ‘Tissaults’. Such largesse did not come cheap, however, and by 1690, the Cleines estates at Tissault and elsewhere were heavily mortgaged.

Though Cleines maintained the outward appearance of wealth, the liaisons that he delighted in were becoming increasingly squalid. A list of inamorata that had once included a teenage courtesan who would go on to become the Marquise de Montespan now consisted of an impoverished procession of social climbers keen to enter the court circles by any means possible. Matching this decline was a decline in the tokens that Cleines distributed. Unable to afford gold or silk Tissaults, Cleines resorted first to linen and finally to paper, with a ‘T’ scrawled in ink. It is a testimony to the volume of these squalid love-notes that more than fifty survive in the museum collection at Versailles to this day.

Cleines’ end was predictable. Challenged to a duel by a jealous lover, the middle-aged and gouty Cleines’ swordsmanship was easily bested. He received a wound to the inner thigh, and died some days later, of infection or blood loss. His star had fallen so far that his burial place is not even known.