Anne, Duchess of Maine

Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse du Maine (November 8, 1676 - January 23, 1753), daughter of Henri Jules de Bourbon, prince de Condé and Anne of Bavaria .

On March 19, 1692 she married Louis Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine , son of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan.

The duchesse du Maine held a little court at Sceaux, where she gave brilliant entertainments and immersed herself in political intrigues. Displeased with the action of the regent Orléans in degrading the illegitimate children of Louis XIV from their precedence above the peers of France, she induced her husband to join in the Cellamare conspiracy for the transference of the regency to the king of Spain.

The plot, however, was discovered, and she was imprisoned in 1719. The following year she returned to Sceaux, where she resumed her salon and gathered round her a brilliant company of wits and poets. She died in Paris on the 23rd of January 1753.

See Général de Piepape, La Duchesse du Maine (1910).

Reference

• This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.