Death
Louise Henriette died on 9 February 1759 at the age of thirty-two, with her husband and children at her side, at the Palais-Royal, the Orléans residence in Paris. Her premature death was a consequence, it was said, of her debaucheries. Her son and daughter were, respectively, eleven and eight years old.
After her death, her husband had several mistresses, ultimately finding the love of his life, the witty but married marquise de Montesson, whom he married after she became a widow.
Like her mother, who had inherited the title through her Condé's ancestry, Louise Henriette was the duchesse d'Étampes in her own right, having inherited the title on the occasion of her husband's rise to the head of the House of Orléans in 1752. At her death, her son inherited the ducal title, which he held until it became extinct in 1792, during the French Revolution.
In June 1759, shortly after his twelfth birthday, Louis Philippe, her only son, was presented before the court at Versailles, officially meeting King Louis XV and the royal family. Despite their detached relationship, the Duke of Orléans was greatly affected by his wife's death, and so was their son. Louise Henriette was buried at the Val-de-Grâce in Paris.
Read more about this topic: Louise Henriette De Bourbon
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
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“For ‘tis not in mere death that men die most.”
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“The One remains, the many change and pass;
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Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)