Marie Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans
Marie Louise Élisabeth | |||||
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Basilica of St Denis | |||||
Spouse |
Charles, Duke of Berry (m. 1710; died 1714) | ||||
Issue Detail | Charles, Duke of Alençon Marie Louise Élisabeth | ||||
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Father | Philippe II, Duke of Orléans | ||||
Mother | Françoise Marie de Bourbon | ||||
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Coat of arms |
Louise Élisabeth, Duchess of Berry (born Marie Louise Élisabeth, Mademoiselle d'Orléans; 20 August 1695 – 21 July 1719) was Duchess of Berry by marriage to the French prince
Life
Marie Louise Élisabeth was born at the Palace of Versailles as the eldest surviving child to Philippe II, Duke of Orléans and his wife Françoise Marie de Bourbon, a legitimised daughter of King Louis XIV of France. She was given the honorary title of Mademoiselle d'Orléans at birth, and was baptised at Saint-Cloud on 29 July 1696.[1]
Known as Louise Élisabeth, she grew up at the
... had entirely her own way, so that it is not surprising she should be like a headstrong horse.
At the age of ten, Louise Élisabeth caught smallpox at Saint-Cloud and her grandmother wrote in her memoirs that Mademoiselle d'Orléans was presumed dead for over six hours.[3]
Marriage
It was decided, with the help of
The position of
I shall pass lightly over an event which, engrafted upon some others, made some noise, notwithstanding the care taken to hush it up. The
Madame de Maintenon.
In July 1711, Louise Élisabeth gave birth to her first child, a stillborn girl, at the Palace of Fontainebleau. The child's death was blamed on the King, who had made her travel with the royal court to Fontainebleau despite the doctors advising her to stay at Versailles or at the Palais Royal due to her advanced pregnancy. The King did not give in and made Louise Élisabeth travel by barge instead of carriage. During this journey, the barge hit a pier of a bridge at Melun and nearly sank. Louise Élisabeth almost lost her life.[4] According to the doctors, the death of the baby was caused by stress of the journey and the accident. The Princess, however, made a quick recovery.
On 26 March 1713, the Duchess of Berry gave birth to a son, who was given the title
In November 1713 it became public that the Duke of Berry had taken as a mistress one of her chambermaids.[citation needed] In return, Louise Élisabeth took a lover, a certain "Monsieur La Haye", who had been preceded by Monsieur de Salvert. When her affair with La Haye became known, her husband threatened to have her sent to a convent. Saint-Simon even records on one occasion that the Duke of Berry kicked her in public because of her indiscretions. During her romance with La Haye, she conceived a plan for the two of them to flee to the Netherlands.[citation needed]
Dowager Duchess
On 5 May 1714, her husband died from internal injuries sustained in a hunting accident, whereupon Louise Élisabeth became the Dowager Duchess of Berry. On 16 June 1714, seven weeks after the death of her husband, she gave birth to a daughter who died the following day.
In September 1715, Louise Élisabeth was given the Luxembourg Palace as her Parisian residence, where she hosted lavish banquets. The closing of the Luxembourg Garden to the public made her unpopular with the Parisian population.
King Louis XIV had died on 1 September and Louise Élisabeth, officially in mourning, promised she would not attend any shows for six months, but she soon openly turned into a "merry widow". On 23 September 1715, she established her residence in the Luxembourg Palace and obtained from her father a whole company of guards. Despite the mourning, the Duchess of Berry allowed gambling in her new palace, in particular the Lansquenet game. She even entertained herself in public. Dangeau noted in his diary dated Saturday, 4 January 1716: "There was ball in the evening in the hall of the Opera, the Duchess of Berry and many other princesses were there masked." Radiantly beautiful, the Duchess paraded in a splendid dress at this carnival ball that her father had just installed at the Opera.
Three weeks later, Louise Élisabeth shut herself up in the Luxembourg Palace, officially "bothered with a bad cold". The Duchess had been hiding her pregnancy until she reached her term in which she would be suffering the pains of labour. This clandestine confinement is reported in the Gazette de la Régence on 6 February 1716:[5] "They say the Duchess of Berry gave birth to a daughter who lived only three days. This conduct reminds of Messalina and of Queen Margot". This secret childbirth soon became public knowledge and excited the verve of satirists. A song dated 1716 ("Les couches de la Duchesse de Berry") and later satirical verses from the Collection Clairambault-Maurepas[6] lampoon the unbridled lust of the young widow, poking fun at her "countless" lovers and her pregnancies.
During the Regency, Louise Élisabeth was given an annual income of 600,000 livres. In addition to the Orléans residences, she was also given the use of the
According to the Gazette de la Régence, when the Duchess of Berry received the Russian emperor at the Luxembourg, she appeared at the reception "stout as a tower" ("puisssante comme une tour"),[7] a rare idiom implying she was big with a child. It is then during May 1717 that Voltaire got arrested after saying to a police informer that the daughter of the Regent was a whore, adding that she had retired for six months at La Muette to give birth.[8] Dangeau's diary confirms that the Duchess spent most of spring and summer in 1717 at her Château de la Muette. The Gazette de la Régence mentions that her prolonged stay there and also the fact she had given up hunting and horse-riding had given rise to salacious gossip.[9] The Gazette de la Régence states that in early July, the Duchess, who by then kept secluded in La Muette, was being "inconvenienced", "having grown so big" ("puissante") that it was feared for her life![10] The "Gazette" reports by the end of July[11] that Madame de Berry was rumored to be in critical condition as she was finally delivered of this new fruit of her amours.[12] As in 1716, this clandestine birth was an open secret and satirical songwriters mocked the loose morality of the princess who always armed with a large c..k, gets f....d from both front and behind. In a Christmas satirical song of 1717, the whole court of France, renders homage to the Holy Child in Bethlehem, led by the Regent and his very pregnant daughter :
- Very big with child
- The fruitful Berry
- Said in a humble posture
- Very sorry at heart :
- Lord, I will no longer have such lusty ways
- I only want Rions,
- Sometimes my dad,
- Here and there, my guards.[13]
In the spring of 1718, it seems likely that the "fecund Berry" was again with a child. The anonymous author of the letters sent from Paris to Holland, and was also collected in the Gazette de la Régence, mentions on 9 May 1718 that the Duchess of Berry will remain in La Muette until All Saints Day, and has been bled over the past days because of "a certain condition" she was in.[14] The Princess was presumably 3–4 months pregnant. At the time, bloodletting was commonly performed at various stages of pregnancy and also at childbirth. Soon later, the Duchess of Berry miscarried. She conceived again in July. This new pregnancy, which soon became public gossip, would prove fatal to her.
Nearing her term, the Duchess of Berry still played a lead role in the "little suppers" of the Regent. On 2 April 1719, upon four days of gruesome labor, she delivered a baby girl. According to Saint-Simon the father was her lieutenant of the guards, Sicaire Antonin Armand Auguste Nicolas d'Aydie, the Chevalier de Rion.
The Duchess then took up residence at the Château de la Muette, where she died on 21 July 1719, at the age of twenty-three. According to Saint-Simon, the autopsy revealed that "the poor princess" had in her womb a new fetus with several weeks of gestation. On Saturday 22 July 1719, her heart was taken to the Val-de-Grâce church in Paris, and on 24 July 1719, she was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.[21] Her funeral arrangements were made by Saint-Simon himself.[22]
Final moments and legacy
Concerning her last visit to her granddaughter, Madame wrote:
28th May, 1719. I went to see her last Sunday, the 23rd May, and found her in a sad state, suffering from pains in her toes and the soles of her feet until the tears came into her eyes. I went away because I saw that she refrained from crying out on my account. I thought she was in a bad way. A consultation was held by her three physicians, the result of which was that they determined to bleed her in the feet. They had some difficulty in persuading her to submit to it, because the pain in her feet was so great that she uttered the most piercing screams if the bedclothes only rubbed against them. The bleeding, however, succeeded, and she was in some degree relieved. It was the gout in both feet
During her lifetime, Louise Élisabeth gained a reputation for scandal. In an irony of history, the next Duchesse de Berry,
Issue
The Duke and the Duchess of Berry had three children who never reached one month of age:
- Daughter* (21 July 1711 – 23 July 1711); Mademoiselle de Berry.
- Charles, Duke of Alençon (26 March 1713 – 16 April 1713).[23]
- Marie Louise Élisabeth (16 June 1714 – 17 June 1714).
It is known that the young Duchess had several lovers while her husband was alive, so the real fatherhood of her first three unhappy maternities is open to debate. Having become a widow, the Duchess secretly brought forth three children of uncertain parentage:
- Daughter* (27/28 January 1716); this child of an unknown father only lived 3 days.
- Daughter* (July 1717); the Duchess had retired at the Château de la Muette to hide the term of her pregnancy. The putative father Sicaire Antonin Armand Auguste Nicolas d'Aydie, Chevalier de Rion, became the Duchess's lover sometime in 1716 or 1717. In his additions to the diary of Dangeau on 21 July 1719, Saint-Simon[24] mentions that the Duchess had managed to hide a first pregnancy by Rion, bringing forth a girl. She was not so fortunate the second time when she almost died in labour at the Luxembourg and provoked a public scandal. This was underscored by Saint-Simon, who then wrote a short description of the Duchess's 1719 childbirth which has become the most-well known episode of her scandalous biography. According to Duclos, this child subsequently became a nun at the Abbey of Pontoise.[25]
- Stillborn daughter* (2 April 1719); her father was probably the Chevalier de Rion, also.
Ancestors
Ancestors of Marie Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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References
- ^ Boudet. Antoine: Dictionnaire de la noblesse, seconde édition, [French], Paris, 1776, p.107.
- ^ Dufresne, Claude: les d'Orléans, CRITERION, Paris, 1991, p. 94 [French].
- ^ The Orléans Daughter. Accessed 20 May 2009.
- ^ Lady Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV.[page needed]
- ^ E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.68.
- ^ Émile Raunié (ed.), Chansonnier historique du XVIIIème siècle: recueil Clairambault-Maurepas, Paris, 1880, pp.36-38.
- ^ E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.180.
- ^ Jean-Michel Raynaud,Voltaire soi-disant, Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983, vol.1, p.289.
- ^ E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Regence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.175-176.
- ^ E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.192
- ^ E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.196. The entry dated 30 July mentions that the Duchess has borne a child several days earlier in an undisclosed place and is returning to La Muette since she is feeling better
- ^ In his biography of the Duchess, Noel Williams (Unruly Daughters, 1913) quotes the Gazette de la Régence and makes the following comment about the corpulence of Madame de Berry : By the spring of 1717, the princess's generous proportions had begun to cause her serious inconvenience. The active life she had always led was no longer possible, and she decided to sell her saddle-horses[...] Williams attributes the embonpoint of the Duchess to her intemperance at table. This suggests his very biased reading of the Gazette de la Régence which clearly reports the secret confinement of the Duchess in July 1717, two months after the reception of the Czar at the Luxembourg palace. A disregarded fact which means that when she received Peter the Great the princess was already in a state of advanced pregnancy and thus of course "stout as a tower". Writing for a Victorian public Williams certainly found it less shameful to attribute the "distressing embonpoint" of the Duchess to her overindulgence in food and liquors
- Antoine François Prévost, better known as L'Abbé Prévost (1697-1763). The verses translated here appear on p.4.
- ^ Françoise Weil (ed.), Lettres de Paris à un diplomate hollandais, Champion-Slatkine, Paris & Geneva, 2004, p. 384. According to this revised edition of the Gazette de la Régence, the fact that Berry was "in a certain condition" and needed bloodletting means that she was then pregnant.
- ^ Jean-Michel Raynaud, Voltaire soi-disant, Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983, vol.1, p.289.
- ^ Jay Caplan, In the King's Wake: Post-Absolutist Culture in France. University of Chicago Press, 1994, p.50-51.
- ^ Philippe Erlanger, Le Régent, 1985, p.241.
- ^ Édouard de Barthélémy, Les filles du Régent, Paris : Firmin Didot frères, 1874, vol. 1 p.227.
- ^ As the famous French historian Michelet put it, Berry's repeated pregnancies finally killed her. Michelet claims that the child borne by the Duchess at the Luxembourg was fathered by the Regent. Driven to incest by her boundless ambition and pride, the princess would have become pregnant during a "private orgy" at the feasts of Saint-Cloud in July 1718: cf. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, vol.XIV, La Régence, Paris, 1895, pp. 98-99.
- ^ On the last few months of the life of the Duchess of Berry, and her secret marriage to the Chevalier de Rion in April 1719: The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the reign of Louis XIV and the Regency, chapter XXIII, pp. 206-220.
- ^ The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon p. 219.
- ^ The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon.[page needed]
- ^ Journal du marquis de Dangeau (on 26 March 1711): Le roi, avant la messe, alla voir M. le duc d'Alençon; c'est le nom du prince dont madame la duchesse de Berry est accouchée cette nuit à quatre heures.
- ^ Soulié, Dussieux et Feuillet de Conches (éds.) Journal du Marquis de Dangeau avec les additions du duc de Saint-Simon: Paris, Firmin Didot 1860, vol 18, 1719-1720, p.87.
- ^ Charles-Pinot Duclos: Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, Paris, Colnet, 1806, p. 401 : "La fille de la duchesse de Berri et du comte de Riom, que j'ai vue dans ma jeunesse, est actuellement religieuse à Pontoise, avec trois cents livres de pension".