Private Life
Apart from a large apartment in the palace, and a separate house in Versailles, Bontemps had a "maison particulier" (townhouse) on the Île Saint-Louis in the centre of Paris, with thirty rooms and a staff of twelve. According to Saint-Simon, he copied his master with a secret second marriage to the mother of La Roche, head-valet to Louis's grandson, Philip V of Spain. The children of his first marriage married very well, and two generations later a Bontemps married the last Prince of Conti, a cadet branch of the Royal Family. Others married into the largest banking families in France. There is a portrait of the Comptesse de La Châtre, daughter of Louis XV's Bontemps head valet, by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated 1789, the last year of the Ancien Regime.
Read more about this topic: Alexandre Bontemps
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