MONTMORENCY, CHARLOTTE MARGARET,
The wife of Condé, was famous for her beauty, which captivated Henry the Fourth of France. To escape the importunities of this powerful lover, her husband carried her off, on their wedding night, 10 Brussels, where she remained till Henry's assassination, in 1610. She died in 1650, aged fifty-seven. Her son was the great Condé.
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.
MONTPENSIER, JACQUELIN LONG VIC, DUCHESS DE,
Was the youngest daughter of John de Longvic, lord of Guny, and was married, in 1588, to Louis de Bourbon, the second of the name, Duke de Montpensier. She was a lady of great merit, and a favourite of Catharine de Medicis; and had she lived, she might have, by her counsels, prevented many of the cruel deeds of this princess; but she died in 1561. She openly avowed, in her last illness, what her husband had long suspected, that she was a Protestant; and two of her daughters professed the same faith.
Thuanus praises this lady for her talents, prudence, and masculine understanding. She was intelligent and skilful in the affairs of government, and always solicitous for the public tranquillity. It was to her that the Archbishop of Vienna addressed himself, when, foreseeing the ruin of the princes of the blood, during the reign of Francis the Second, he told her that if she kept not her promise of opposing the house of Guise, all was lost. It was by her influence with Catharine de Medicis, that Michael de l'Hôpital was made Chancellor of France. "Had this been the only meritorious action of her life," says Bayle, "it ought to have consecrated her memory. No other person could have afforded, in so dangerous a conjuncture,
