Character in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-9). A deceptively attractive but vicious seducer and rapist, Lovelace became a byword for a licentious and predatory aristocrat.

Louvet authored the licentious novel Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas (1786-91).

Born the Count of Provence, Louis XVIII, sometimes known as "the Desired," was the King of France from 1814-1824. Before his reign, he spent twenty-three years in exile during the French revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic empire, and was exiled again during the "Hundred Days" reign of Napoleon after his escape from prison on the island of Elba. While Louis XVIII's 1814 Charter established France as a constitutional monarchy and instituted progressive reform, he subsequently retracted or violated several key measures.

King of France beginning 1774, Louis XVI was guillotined by the French Revolutionary National Convention in 1793. His failed efforts to reform the French aristocracy undermined his popularity, and a debt crisis consequent on his support for the North American colonists in their war for independence from Britain as well as an extravagant court left him vulnerable to the hostility of the French middle and lower classes, and his palace was stormed by a revolutionary mob in 1789.

Sometimes known "Louis the Beloved," Louis XV was the King of France for fifty-nine years, the second longest in French history. Notwithstanding this, his reign is sometimes criticized for failing to address those issues that led to the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.

Often called "The Sun King," Louis XIV presided over a period of great military success and artistic and architectural achievement. He was responsible for the construction of the Palace of Versailles, an architectural marvel.

King from 1498, Louis XII had immense domestic popularity despite his disastrous mishandling of the Italian wars.

Character in Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent (1703), whose name became a byword for a cavalier seducer.

Daphnis and Chloe by Longus dates from the mid-third century CE. The English language edition by George Thornley and J.M. Edmonds (1935) opens its introduction explaining, "Nothing is known of the author of the Pastoralia. He describes Mytilene as if he knew it well, and he mentions the peculiarities of the Lesbian vine. He may have been a Lesbian, but such local colouring need not have been gathered on the spot, nor if so, by a native.

Unidentified Greek author of On the Sublime, which was for a time thought to be the work of rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus, c. 213-273. After his text was translated into French by Boileau in 1674, it become one of the central works in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.