A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Montpensier, Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchess de
MONTPENSIER, ANNE MARIE LOUISE D'ORLEANS, DUCHESS DE,
Daughter of Gaston, Duke d'Orleans, brother of Louis the Thirteenth, was born 1627. She inherited boldness, intrigue, and impetuosity from her father; and during the civil wars of the Fronde, she not only embraced the party of the Duke de Condé, but she made her adherents fire the cannon of the Bastile on the troops of Louis the Fourteenth. This rash step against the authority of her king and cousin, ruined her hopes, and after in vain aspiring to the hand of a sovereign prince, she, in 1669, married the Count de Lauzun, a man much younger than herself. The king, though he had permitted the union, threw obstacles in the way of the lovers, and Lauzun was kept in prison for ten years; but after the cession of Dombes and Eu, of which the Duchess de Montpensier was the sovereign, she was allowed to see her husband. But she was violent and jealous, and Lauzun was ungrateful and faithless; and she at last forbade him to appear in her presence, and retired to a convent. She wrote two romances, and some devotional books. There is a collection of letters to Madame de Motteville, written by Mademoiselle Montpensier, and her most important work, the "Memoirs," a farrago of curious anecdotes, valuable from the sincerity, good faith, and vivacity with which they are written. These "Memoirs" have been and will be sought for among the literary curiosities of the seventeenth century, though they contain much that is trifling, or rather, mere gossip. She was known by the name of Mademoiselle.