MONTPENSIER, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de (1627-1693), one of the most remarkable names on the somewhat arbitrary list of royal and noble authors, was born at the Louvre on 29th May 1627. Her father was Gaston of Orleans, " Monsieur,” the brother of Louis XIII., celebrated for the invariable ill fate which attended his favourites and partisans. Her mother was Marie de Bourbon, heiress of the Montpensier family. Being thus of the blood-royal of France on both sides, and an heiress to immense property, she appeared to be very early destined to a splendid marriage. It was perhaps the greatest misfortune of her life that “Mademoiselle ”'(as her courtesy title went) was encouraged or thought herself encouraged to look forward to the throne of France as the result of a marriage with Louis XIV., who was, however, eleven years her junior. Ill-luck, or her own wilfulness, frustrated numerous plans for marrying her to various persons of more or less exalted station, including Charles II. of England, then Prince of Wales. She was just of age when the Fronde broke out, and, attributing as she did her disappointments to Mazarin, she sympathized with it not a little. It was not, however, till the new or second Fronde that she displayed in a very curious fashion a temper and courage as masculine and adventurous as those of her father Gaston had always been effeminate and timid. She not only took nominal command of one of the armies on the princes’ side, but she literally and in her own person took Orleans by escalade, crossing the river, breaking a gate, and mounting the walls with the applause of the populace of the city, but in face of the refusal of the authorities to admit her. No good result, however, came to her party from this extraordinary act, and she ...had to retreat to Paris, where she practically commanded the Bastille and the adjoining part of the walls. On the 2d of July (1652) the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, between the Frondeurs under Condé and the royal troops under Turenne, took place, and the former, being beaten, found themselves in an awkward situation, between their conquerors and the walls of a city, which, though not exactly hostile to them, was not nominally on their side, and had closed its gates against them. Mademoiselle saved them by giving orders not merely for the gates under her control to be opened but for the cannon of the Bastille to fire on the royalists, which was done. Her own residence (and indeed her property) was the Luxembourg, and here she found herself during the riots which followed the battle; but in the heat of the émeute she installed herself in the hôtel de ville, and played the part of mediatrix between the opposed parties. Her political importance lasted exactly six months, and did her little good, for it created a lifelong prejudice against her in the mind of her cousin, Louis XIV., who never forgave opposition to his sovereign power. Nor had she any support to look for from her pusillanimous father, who hastened to make terms for himself,—a matter the less difficult that his known faithlessness had prevented the chiefs of the Fronde from engaging him at all deeply in their schemes. Mademoiselle, on the other hand, was for some years in disgrace, and resided on her estates. It was not till 1657 that she reappeared at court, but, though projects for marrying her were once more set on foot, she was now past her first youth. Her incurable self-will, moreover, still stood in her way, and suitor after suitor was rejected for reasons good or bad. She was nearly forty, and had already corresponded seriously with Madame de Motteville on the project of establishing a ladies’ society “sans mariage et sans amour,” when a young Gascon gentleman named Puyguilhem, afterwards celebrated as Μ. de Lauzun, attracted her attention. It was some years before the affair came to a crisis, but at last, in 1670, Mademoiselle solemnly demanded the king’s permission to marry Lauzun. Madame de Sévigné’s letter on this occasion is one of the most famous of her collection. Louis, who liked Lauzun, and who had been educated by Mazarin in the idea that Mademoiselle ought not to be allowed to xarry her vast estates and royal blood to any one who was himself of the blood-royal, or even to any foreign prince, gave his consent, but it was not immediately acted on. The pride of the other members of the royal family, and the spite of the king’s brother, Monsieur, who had, after the death of Henrietta of England, made offers to his cousin, prevailed with Louis to rescind his permission. Not long afterwards Lauzun, for another cause, was imprisoned in Pignerol, and it was years before Mademoiselle was able to buy his release from the king by settling no small portion of her estates on Louis’s bastards. The elderly lovers (for in 1681, when Lauzun was released, he was nearly fifty, and Mademoiselle was fifty-four) were then secretly married, if indeed they had not gone through the ceremony ten years previously. But Lauzun, a coarse and brutal adventurer, tyrannized over his wife, and her spirit, which was yet unbroken, at length got the better of her passion. It is said that on one occasion he addressed her thus, “Louise d’Orléans, tire-moi mes bottes,” and that she at once and finally separated from him. She lived, however, for some years after he had achieved his last adventure (that of assisting the family of James II. to escape from England, and attempting to defend their cause in Ireland), gave herself to religious duties, and finished her Mémoires, which extend to within seven years of her death (9th April 1693), and which she had begun when she was in disgrace thirty years earlier. These Mémoires (Amsterdam, 1729) are of very considerable merit and interest, though, or perhaps because, they are extremely egotistical and often extremely desultory. Mademoiselle writes without art, but with the hereditary ability of her family, and the strongly personal view which she takes of public events is rather an advantage than a disadvantage. They are to be found in the great collection of Michaud and Poujoulat, and have been frequently edited apart. (g. sa.)
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