Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé

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Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé

Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé , Mademoiselle d'Enghien, then Mademoiselle de Charolais, after her marriage Duchess of Maine (born November 8, 1676 in Paris ; †  January 23, 1753 ibid), was a French high aristocrat. It enjoyed itself as the center of a small court, gathered intellectually interested nobles and writers around it, and in 1718 acted as the driving force of a conspiracy against the regent Philip of Orléans , the conspiracy of Cellamare .

Origin and family

Louise Bénédicte in the year of her marriage

She was the granddaughter of the great Condé , daughter of the first Prince of the Blood Henri Jules de Bourbon-Condé , Prince of Condé, and the Countess Palatine Anna Henriette von Pfalz-Simmern . On March 19, 1692 she married Louis Auguste I de Bourbon, duc du Maine , the legitimate son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan . According to the writer Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon , Maine chose the rather short woman from among her three sisters as a wife because she was the tallest of them.

The marriage resulted in seven children, three of whom reached adulthood but had no offspring:

Life

Sceaux Castle, painting by Adam Pérelle

In her castle in Sceaux she had a small court, which was called “ la petite cour de Sceaux ” compared to Versailles . The night costume parties, the famous grandes nuits , in which the king also participated, and theatrical performances in which she herself shone were well known. She was already known for her enthusiasm for costume parties at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles and was not even deterred by pregnancy and childbirth. Your circle was the center of attraction for numerous writers and artists. This circle was also called the order of the honey bee ( French Ordre de la Mouche à Miel ). The members had to swear obedience to her as the "queen bee". These included Voltaire , the Marquise Émilie du Châtelet , Madame du Deffand , Fontenelle , Montesquieu , d'Alembert , the President Hénault , the future Cardinal von Bernis , Jean-Baptiste Rousseau , Sainte-Aulaire , Cardinal Melchior de Polignac , the later salon lady Baroness de Staal-Launay , Philippe Néricault Destouches , René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur , Abbé Genest , Bossuet , Marivaux u. a. She also had an orchestra with which u. a. François Couperin , Jean-Baptiste Matho and Jean-Joseph Mouret played or composed.

The Duchess sponsored Voltaire, who first performed his tragedy Oedipe in Sceaux in 1718 and wrote pamphlets against the regent on her behalf , which earned him banishment and imprisonment in the Bastille . In 1747, the Duchess Voltaire hid in Sceaux from an arrest warrant because Voltaire had caused an uproar by a careless word in a game of players at the court. Voltaire's stay in Sceaux in 1747 was fruitful. It was here that the first philosophical stories were written: Babouc , Le Crocheteur borgné , Cosi-sancta and Memnon . On December 15, 1747, Voltaire was played in Sceaux, an otherwise unperformed comedy La Prude . Voltaire opened the play at the Théâtre d'Anet with a prologue that he presented himself.

The Cardinal of Polignac also spent a lot of time in Sceaux before 1718, where he recited anti-Lucretius from his Latin poetry. According to the memoirs of the Duchess of Orléans, he was a lover of the Duchess.

Because of her temperament - she could be quite palpable in her outbursts of anger - she was occasionally given the nickname Donna Salpetria , in reference to the bee in her coat of arms, she was also called la mouche à miel ( German  for honey fly ). In the words of the Duchess of Orléans and mother of the regent, Liselotte von der Pfalz , she completely controlled her husband .

During the reign, which 1715 to 1723 Duke Philip of Orléans for the underage Louis XV. exercised, she intrigued in 1718 in association with the Spanish cardinal Giulio Alberoni with a view to transferring the office of regent to King Philip V of Spain (Cellamare conspiracy). The hostility of the Maines against Philip of Orléans stemmed primarily from the fact that he had the will of Louis XIV , which provided for a joint reign of him and Maine , annulled with the help of the parliament and ruled alone. The hostility was then exacerbated by the fact that in August 1718 Philip had downgraded the illegitimate children of Louis XIV, and thus also the Duke of Maine, to the level of ordinary pairs , so that they were no longer “princes of the blood” and were in the ranking of the Court fell far behind.

When the conspiracy was exposed, the Duchess was exiled separately from her husband in 1719 to Dijon Castle , which ironically belonged to her nephew. According to the memoirs of the Duchess of Orléans, she was initially only able to suppress her anger about the arrest by constantly playing cards. Later she came to Chalons-sur-Saone. A year later, the Maines were reunited in their castle in Sceaux, where they resumed their lavish courtship. The Duchess had assumed all the guilt and both of them, tolerated by the regent, publicly played the acts of a comedy, from repudiation by the deceived, completely innocent husband to a forgiving fin heureuse .

The widow's residence Louise Bénédictes, the Hôtel Biron

After the death of her husband in 1736, who left three million livres in debt , the Duchess was forced to abandon the castle of Montrond, which was then used by the inhabitants as a quarry. Her city ​​palace in Paris (Hôtel Biron, now Musée Rodin ) she rented from the widow of the banker Abraham Peyrenc de Moras (1686–1732), Marie Anne Fargès de Polizy.

The Duchess was educated ( Jean de La Bruyère had been one of her teachers ) and was also active as a writer. She translated from Latin and published her story La Crête du coq d'Inde - Conte historique mis en vers par Madame la Duchesse du Maine in 1749 (The crest of the Indian rooster - A historical tale, set in verse by Madame la Duchesse du Maine ).

literature

  • Rose Delaunay: Memoires de la Madame Staal-Delaunay. 1970.
  • Jean-Luc Gourdin: La duchesse du Maine: Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon, princesse de Condé. Pygmalion, Paris 1999, ISBN 2-85704-578-6 .
  • Adolphe Jullien: Les grandes nuits de Sceaux - le théâtre de la duchesse du Maine. Paris 1876 (Reprint Geneva 1978), also in: La comédie à la cour. Paris 1885 (online at gallica.bnf.fr ).
  • Warren Lewis : The sunset of a splendid century - the life and times of the Duc de Maine. London 1955.
  • André Maurel: La Duchesse du Maine - pure de Sceaux. Hachette, Paris 1928.
  • Georges Poisson : La petite cour de Sceaux. Historia, August 1987.

Web links

Commons : Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ family relationships
personal data
SURNAME Bourbon-Condé, Louise Bénédicte de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bourbon, Anne Louise Bénédicte de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French nobleman and writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1676
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 23, 1753
Place of death Paris