Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon

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Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse du Maine
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Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon
Duchess of Maine
Portrait by François de Troy as Cleopatra,
c. 1690
Born(1676-11-08)8 November 1676
Hôtel de Condé, Paris, France
Died23 January 1753(1753-01-23) (aged 76)
Hôtel du Maine, Paris, France
Burial26 January 1753
Church of Saint Jean Baptiste
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1692; died 1736)​
Issue
Among others...
FatherHenri Jules de Bourbon-Condé
MotherAnne Henriette of Bavaria
SignatureLouise Bénédicte de Bourbon's signature

Anne Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon (8 November 1676 – 23 January 1753) was the daughter of

Madame de Montespan, she revelled in politics and the arts, and held a popular salon at the Hôtel du Maine as well as at the Château de Sceaux
.

Biography

Birth

Portrait of a young girl presumed to depict Louise Bénédicte, unknown artist

Louise Bénédicte was born on 8 November 1676 at the

Hôtel de Condé[a] in Paris. She was the eighth child born to the then Duke and Duchess of Enghien.[1] The name Bénédicte was added in honour of the child's maternal aunt, the Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg
.

She was brought up at the Hôtel de Condé with her many sisters and had to endure slave-like conditions under the madness of her father[

Count of Charolais, and as a result Louise Bénédicte became known as court as Mademoiselle de Charolais. This appellation would later pass to her niece Louise Anne
.

She was very outspoken and witty, and had a terrible temper. As she was very small and paid much attention to her appearance, she was nicknamed poupée du Sang at the French court, literally, "Doll of the Blood", a play on the honorific princesse du sang, princess of the Blood. This nickname is sometimes said to have been made up by her sister-in-law the

Anne Marie, Mademoiselle de Condé. Louise Bénédicte and her oldest sister Marie Thérèse de Bourbon, known as Mademoiselle de Bourbon until her marriage to le Grand Conti in 1688, were considered the most attractive of the daughters born to the Condés.[citation needed
]

Mademoiselle d'Enghien received the typical education given to girls of the nobility in France and was taught reading, writing, dancing, singing and other matters which were considered necessary for a young aristocrat. She spent most of her time in the company of her mother and two older sisters.[citation needed]

Marriage

At first, it was proposed that she marry

Mademoiselle de Nantes, eldest legitimised daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan.[citation needed
]

In 1692,[5] the 15-year-old Louise Bénédicte married the 22-year-old Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Légitimé de France, Duke of Maine.[6]

Louise Bénédicte in the year of her marriage

The wedding ceremony took place on 19 May 1692 in the chapel of the Palace of Versailles, Madame de Montespan was not invited but all of Maine's siblings attended as well as the princes and princesses of the blood. As both the groom and his wife were physically handicapped, members of the court joked that "look at the union of a one-armed woman and a lame man! What a beautiful couple!".[b] The marriage was not happy. The couple did not like each other, Louise Bénédicte found her husband weak and abhorred his lack of ambition. He could not stand her terrible temper and deliberate attempts to embarrass him at court. Louise Bénédicte's is said to have had several affairs which were known to Maine.[citation needed] To her husband, she was recorded as saying, "Just look at yourself – a lame bastard! – and you'd like to boss me? I am a pure bred royal princess, Monsieur, with no stain on my cradle! What would you be without the sticks at which everyone laughs? One to support your body, and the other, me, to maintain your rank! And this Leggy wants to rule my steps!" (Since Maine limped, his wife called him 'Gambillard', which meant leggy).[c]

In order to escape the dull court of

livres
. Louise Bénédicte spent a further 80,000 livres on its furnishings and decorations.

After extensive renovations, she took up residence in December 1700. There, she began to be called La Reine des Abeilles, or Queen of the Bees. In 1703, to amuse herself, Louise Bénédicte created her own personal

chivalric order, the Order of the Honey Bee. She gave the order to thirty-nine people. Each member had a robe embroidered with silver thread, a wig in the shape of a beehive and a medal embossed with a profile of Louise Bénédicte and engraved with the letters L. BAR. D. SC. D.P.D.L.O.D.L.M.A.M, meaning Louise, baronne de Sceaux, dictatrice perpétuelle de l'ordre de la Mouche à miel ("Louise, baroness of Sceaux, dictator of Order of the Honey Bee").[8]

To her small court, Louise Bénédicte attracted a host of literary figures of the day, including the young

comte de Caylus, Charles-Jean-François Hénault and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
.

The Château de Sceaux at the time of Louise Bénédicte

In 1710, she helped to plot the marriage of her sister, Marie Anne, Mademoiselle de Monmorency, to the famous general

homosexual, thirty years older than his prospective bride.[citation needed] As it happened, though, Louise Bénédicte got nothing. On the duke's death, Marie Anne was created Duchess of Étampes in her own right and inherited the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris, where she died in 1718 from alcoholism.[citation needed
]

Both the Maines doted on their children. Their daughter, who would remain close to her mother until her death, was baptised at Versailles on 9 April 1714. Mademoiselle du Maine was given the name of her paternal aunt

Madame de Maintenon.[citation needed
]

The guest of honour at the baptism of Mademoiselle du Maine was the small dauphin, the future

Louis XV.[citation needed
]

Regency of Philippe d'Orléans

Cellamare Conspiracy
in 1719.

At the death of the king in 1715, however, the

Cellamare Conspiracy in the hope of transferring the regency to King Philip V of Spain, the uncle of Louis XV.[7] The plot was named after Antonio del Giudice
, Duke of Giovinazzo, Prince of Cellamare, who was the Spanish ambassador to France.

In order to gain more support for a new regent, Louise Bénédicte started a correspondence with

Duke of Richelieu and Melchior de Polignac. The plot, however, was discovered, and both the Maines were arrested and forced to abandon their residence at Sceaux.[7] In 1719, the duke was imprisoned in the Doullens fortress and the duchess in Dijon. Their two sons were put in the care of their governor in Gien, and their daughter was taken from a convent at Maubuisson to another convent at Chaillot in Paris, in the area of the present Trocadéro
. She stayed at Chaillot until 1720 when her parents were released from their separate imprisonments.

After her release, Louise Bénédicte led a more peaceful life at Sceaux, still surrounded though by her little court of wits and poets.[7] On 27 December 1718, before their exile, she and her husband had purchased an unfinished house in Paris on the rue de Bourbon (now rue de Lille) from her sister Marie Thérèse de Bourbon. It was originally designed by the architect Robert de Cotte, but they had hired a new architect, Armand-Claude Mollet, to enlarge and redesign it. It was completed before their return from exile and became known as the Hôtel du Maine (destroyed 1838).[9]

At the time of her imprisonment, she was trying to arrange the marriage of her eldest son,

Madame la Duchesse, Maine's sister.[citation needed
]

Widowhood

After their release from imprisonment in 1720, the Maines seemed to have reconciled and led a more compatible life rather than being hostile to each other. In May 1736, the duke died at the age of sixty-six.[10] Louis XV allowed Louise Bénédicte to keep her apartments at Versailles next to those of her daughter. These apartments overlooked the Orangérie. Both her sons also had apartments at court, but both preferred to stay in the country hunting. Madame du Maine tried on more than one occasion to arrange an advantageous marriage for her daughter. The first was to one Monsieur de Guise, but that marriage never materialised. Later, she tried to convince the widower Jacques I, Prince of Monaco, who was often at Versailles, to wed again. Despite the lure of a large dowry, both men considered Mademoiselle du Maine to be very unattractive. Unwed, she died in 1743. She was buried at the Église at Sceaux. At the time of her death, her library was numbered at having some 3000 books.

The Hôtel du Maine, present day Hôtel Biron where Louise Bénédicte lived as a widow

In 1736 Louise Bénédicte received the medieval

Hôtel Peyrenc-de-Moras (today the Musée Rodin) in Paris from the widow of Abraham Peyrenc de Moras. During the remainder of her life, this was also referred to as the Hôtel du Maine, and she died there in January 1753.[12] Dying at the age of seventy-six, Louise Bénédicte had outlived all of her siblings. She was buried at the Saint Jean-Baptiste church in Sceaux. Her oldest son, Louis Auguste, died less than two years after her, having been injured in a duel at Fontainebleau. Her youngest surviving son, Louis Charles, never married and died childless in 1775. He left his fortune to his first cousin, the already wealthy Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre
.

Issue

Arms of Louise Bénédicte as Duchess of Maine

Ancestry

Notes

  1. Charles de Wailly and Marie Joseph Peyre on the grounds of the garden of the hôtel of the prince de Condé, who expected to be rid of the property in expectations of setting up more grandly in the Palais Bourbon
    .
  2. ^ Voici l'union d'un boiteux et d'une manchote. Ah, le beau couple!. Prince of Condé site.
  3. ^ "Regardez-vous un peu! Un bâtard boiteux! Qui me prétend gouverner! Je suis née princesse du sang, Monsieur, sans tache sur mon berceau! Vous, que seriez-vous sans les bâtons (les cannes) dont le monde rit bien haut? Un pour soutenir votre corps, plus moi pour soutenir votre rang! Et ce Gambillard-là réglerait mon pas!" – Prince of Condé site

References

  1. ^ "Henri-Jules de Bourbon, 5e prince de Condé". Encyclopædia Britannica.
  2. ^ "Anne-Louise-Bénédicte". Archived from the original on 12 May 2008. Retrieved 12 May 2008. Doll of the Blood
  3. ^ Fraser, Antonia (Lady), Love and Louis XIV
  4. ^ The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete, by Élisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orléans
  5. ^ Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate & Stevenson 1924, p. 81.
  6. ISBN 2013512597
    .
  7. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911, p. 432.
  8. ^ Les Aventures des Condé & Conti
  9. ISBN 9782840962137
    , pp. 313. The site of the former Hôtel du Maine is at 84–86 rue de Lille.
  10. ^ Général de Piépape, La duchesse du Maine (1910).
  11. ^ "Château de Montrond de Saint-Amand-Montrond", montjoye.net.
  12. ISBN 9782840962137
    , p. 208.

Bibliography

External links

Media related to Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé at Wikimedia Commons

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