Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (La Grande Mademoiselle)
Cód:
491_9781907322013
Anne-Marie-Louise, duchesse de Montpensier (1627-1693), known as the Grande Mademoiselle, was the first cousin of Louis XIV. She began working on her memoirs at the age of twenty-five when she was exiled from Paris following her involvement on the wrong side in the Fronde, the civil war that threatened for a time to dislodge the young king from his throne. She returned to them at least twice, each time bringing the story up to date from the point at which she left it so that, in the end, they cover a period of nearly sixty years. They have never been translated satisfactorily into English.Mademoiselle is best remembered for her colourful life, both at court and in exile, including military exploits and a doomed love affair that she recounts with touching honesty even though, at times, we may think her attitudes and her actions naïve. She was the daughter of Gaston dOrléans (1608-1660), known as Monsieur, the troublesome brother of Louis XIII whose gullibility and serial treachery might have been comic had they not had such a damaging effect on the efforts of the Cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, to unite France under the Bourbon monarchy and cement the authority of the king. Neither did he love his daughter as she wanted to be loved and as she loved him, for, Anne-Marie-Louises mother having died within days of her birth, Gaston had married again, and over time, his refreshing new bride was transmuted into a wicked (or at least, scheming) stepmother, while her three daughters by Gaston who lived into adulthood were an irritant, at best, to someone whose consciousness of her own position and self-worth dominated almost her every waking thought.Mademoiselle writes well and engagingly, so that her pen brings Gaston to life in a way that no other author of the period ever equalled, and the same liveliness of description and analysis colours a galaxy of other characters who include Louis XIII and his wife, Anne of Austria, Louis XIV and Queen Maria Theresa, his
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