A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Motteville, Frances Bertrand de
MOTTEVILLE, FRANCES BERTRAND DE,
Was born in Normandy, in 1615. Her wit and agreeable manners recommended her to Anne of Austria, Regent of France, who kept her constantly near her. The jealousy of Cardinal Richelieu, however, caused her disgrace, and she retired, with her mother, to Normandy, where she married Nicolas Langlois, Lord de Motteville, an old man, who died two years after. On the death of Richelieu, Anne of Austria recalled her to court. Here she employed herself in writing memoirs of Anne of Austria, giving an apparently correct account of the minority of Louis the Fourteenth, and the interior of a court. She died at Paris, in 1689, aged seventy-five.