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 Charles, Duke of Berry. She is known affectionately by the moniker "Joufflotte".
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. She was given the honorary title of Mademoiselle d'Orléans at birth, and was baptised at Saint-Cloud on 29 July 1696.Boudet. Antoine: Dictionnaire de la noblesse, seconde édition, [French], Paris, 1776, p.107.
Known as Louise Élisabeth, she grew up at the Palais-Royal, the Orléans residence in Paris. She recovered from a near fatal illness at the age of six; her father personally nursed her day and night in order to save her life.Dufresne, Claude: les d'Orléans, CRITERION, Paris, 1991, p. 94 [French]. Her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, wrote in her memoirs that from a very early age, Louise Élisabeth:
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.The Orléans Daughter. Accessed 20 May 2009.
Marriage It was decided, with the help of Marie Adélaïde, Duchess of Burgundy, that Louise Élisabeth would marry Charles, Duke of Berry, the youngest son of the Grand Dauphin. Papal dispensation having arrived on 5 July 1710, the marriage took place 6 July 1710 at the Palace of Versailles. The presiding bishop was the Cardinal de Janson. The King ordered his other Orléans granddaughters, Mademoiselle de Chartres and Mademoiselle de Valois, back from their convent at Chelles.
The position of dame d'honneur was given to Marie Gabrielle de Durfort de Lorges, the wife of the Duke of Saint-Simon, while her first cousin Marie Anne de Bourbon became her lady-in-waiting, a post Marie Anne later resigned because of her cousin's wayward nature. She stated:
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.Lady Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV. 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 Duke of Alençon. After several attacks of convulsions, the child died at Versailles on 16 June. His heart was taken to the Val-de-Grâce convent in Paris by the Bishop of Sens, and his body to the Basilica of Saint-Denis. The Duchess ordered that her son's governesses continue receiving their annual salary.
In November 1713 it became public that the Duke of Berry had taken as a mistress one of her chambermaids. 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.
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:E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.68. "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-MaurepasÉmile Raunié (ed.), Chansonnier historique du XVIIIème siècle: recueil Clairambault-Maurepas, Paris, 1880, pp.36-38. 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 Château de Meudon after giving back to the Crown the Château d'Amboise, which had been the official country residence of the Duke of Berry. On 21 May 1717, the Duchess received a visit at the Luxembourg from Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, on a semi-official visit to France. In March 1718 she nursed her mother who was ill.
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"),E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.180. 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.Jean-Michel Raynaud,Voltaire soi-disant, Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983, vol.1, p.289. 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.E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Regence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.175-176. 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!E. de Barthélémy (ed.), Gazette de la Régence. Janvier 1715-1719, Paris, 1887, p.192 The "Gazette" reports by the end of JulyE. 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 that Madame de Berry was rumored to be in critical condition as she was finally delivered of this new fruit of her amours.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 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.Alexandre Dumas, La Régence, Brussels, 1849, vol.1, pp.161-163. This well-documented historical novel by Dumas is only one of the publications in which appears this notorious satirical Christmas song. It was already circulated in print right after the Regency in: Labadie, Les avantures de Pomponius chevalier romain, ou l'histoire de notre tems, Rome, 1728. The song opens the "recueil de pièces touchant la Régence" which comes right after the "Adventures of Pomponius", a "Libertine novel" first published in 1724 (not in Rome as printed but in Amsterdam) and written in fact by Antoine François Prévost, better known as L'Abbé Prévost (1697-1763). The verses translated here appear on p.4.
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.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. 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.