Louise Élisabeth, Duchess of Berry

Colored engraving of the Duchess of Berry.

On 5 May 1714, her husband died from internal injuries sustained in a hunting accident, whereupon Louise Élisabeth became the Dowager Duchess of Berry. On 16 June 1714, seven weeks after the death of her husband, she gave birth, at Versailles, to a daughter who died the following day.

In September 1715, Louise Élisabeth was given the Luxembourg Palace as her Parisian residence, where she gave magnificent banquets. The closing of the Luxembourg Garden to the public made her unpopular with the Parisian population.

Louis XIV had died on 1 September and Madame de Berry, officially in mourning, promised she would not attend any shows for six months, but she soon openly turned into a "merry widow". On 23 September 1715, she established her residence in the Luxembourg Palace and obtained from her father a whole company of guards. Despite the mourning, the Duchess of Berry allowed gambling in her new palace, in particular the Lansquenet game. She even entertained herself in public. Dangeau noted in his diary dated Saturday, 4 January 1716: There was ball in the evening in the hall of the Opera, the Duchess of Berry and many other princesses were there masked. Radiantly beautiful, the Duchess paraded in a splendid dress at this carnival ball that her father the Regent had just installed at the Opera.

Three weeks later, Madame de Berry shut herself up in the Luxembourg Palace, officially "bothered with a bad cold". The princess who had been hiding her pregnancy until she reached her term was really suffering the pains of labour. This clandestine confinement is reported in the Gazette de la Régence on 6 February 1716:[5] They say the Duchess of Berry gave birth to a daughter who lived only three days. This conduct reminds of Messalina and of Queen Margot. This secret childbirth soon became public knowledge and excited the verve of satirists. A song dated 1716 ("Les couches de la Duchesse de Berry") and later satirical verses from the Collection Clairambault-Maurepas[6] lampoon the unbridled lust of the young widow, poking fun at her "countless" lovers and her clandestine pregnancies.

During the Regency, Louise Élisabeth was given an annual income of 600,000 livres. In addition to the Orléans residences, she was also given the use of the Château de Meudon after giving back to the Crown the Château d'Amboise, which had been the official country residence of the Duke of Berry.

On Friday 21 May 1717, the duchess received at the Luxembourg Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, on a semi-official visit to France. In March 1718, she nursed her mother who was ill.

According to the Gazette de la Régence, when the Duchess of Berry received the Russian emperor at the Luxembourg, she appeared at the reception "stout as a tower" ("puisssante comme une tour"),[7] a rare idiom implying she was big with child. It is then (May 1717) that Voltaire (Arouet) got arrested after saying to a police informer that the daughter of the Regent was a whore, adding that she had retired for six months at La Muette to give birth.[8] Dangeau's diary confirms that the Duchess spent most of Spring and Summer 1717 at her Château de la Muette. The Gazette de la Régence mentions that her prolonged stay there and also the fact she had given up hunting and horse-riding had given rise to salacious gossip.[9] The Gazette de la Régence states that in early July, the Duchess, who by then kept secluded in La Muette, was being "inconvenienced", "having grown so big" ("puissante") that it was feared for her life![10] The "Gazette" reports by the end of July[11] that Madame de Berry was rumored to be in critical condition as she was finally delivered of this new fruit of her amours.[12] As in 1716, this clandestine birth was an open secret and satirical songwriters mocked the loose morality of the princess who always armed with a large c..k, gets f....d from both front and behind. In a Christmas satirical song of 1717, the whole court of France, renders homage to the Holy Child in Bethlehem, led by the Regent and his very pregnant daughter :

Very big with child

The fruitful Berry

Said in a humble posture

Very sorry at heart :

Lord, I will no longer have such lusty ways

I only want Rions,

Sometimes my dad,

Here and there, my guards.[13]

Portrait by Pierre Gobert, 1718.

In the spring of 1718, it seems likely that the "fecund Berry" was again with child. The anonymous author of the letters sent from Paris to Holland and collected in the Gazette de la Régence mentions on 9 May 1718 that the Duchess of Berry will remain in La Muette until All Saints and has been bled over the past days because of "the situation in which she finds herself".[14] The princess was probably 3–4 months pregnant. At the time, bloodletting was commonly performed at various stages of pregnancy and also at childbirth. Soon later, Berry miscarried. But she conceived again in July and this new pregnancy which soon became public gossip would prove fatal to her.

Voltaire had been sent to the Bastille in May 1717 after suggesting in presence of a police informer that the Duchess of Berry was expecting a child conceived by her own father.[15] During his imprisonment, Voltaire completed his play Oedipus which premièred on 18 November 1718 at the Comédie-Française. The Régent was present at the première and congratulated Voltaire for his success. Berry's clandestine pregnancies were often attributed to her alleged incestuous relationships with the Regent. These malicious rumors had made Voltaire's play controversial long before it was performed.[16] Ironically, the Duchess of Berry was also present at the première. She entered the theater in royal style escorted by the ladies of her court and her personal guard. The young princess was rumored to be expecting again and her condition, which she could not fully conceal, inspired the satirists' malicious comments that spectators would not only see Oedipus (the Regent) and Jocaste (Berry) but also detect the presence of Eteocles! The appearance at the premiere of the infamous Duchess, visibly enceinte, thus contributed to the public success of the play.[17] On 11 February 1719, the Duchess of Berry attended another performance of Oedipus played for her nephew Louis XV at the Louvre. Wearing a splendidly embroidered robe à la Française, the princess sat next to the infant king. As with her previous pregnancies, she had put on enormous weight during gestation and her loose fitting gown failed to hide her advanced condition. The room was very crowded and hot. Madame de Berry felt unwell and fainted when some allusion made in the play to Jocasta's incestuous pregnancy was loudly applauded by the public. She thus paid the price for her open flouting of public morality and outraging the public sense of decency by displaying her illegitimate pregnancy. The incident instantly awakened the jubilation of scandalmongers who expected Berry/Jocasta to go into labor and give birth to Eteocles in the middle of the performance. But a window was opened and the Duchess recovered from her swoon, thus frustrating the public taste for oedipian scandals.[18]

Nearing her term, the Duchess of Berry still played a lead role in the "little suppers" of the Regent, freely indulging in strong drink. On 2 April 1719, after four days of gruesome labor, she was delivered of a baby girl. According to Saint-Simon the father was her lieutenant of the guards, Sicaire Antonin Armand Auguste Nicolas d'Aydie, the Chevalier de Rion.[19] The princess nearly died during childbirth, shut up in a small room of her Luxembourg palace. The curé of Saint-Sulpice (Paris) church, Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gergy refused to give her the absolution or to let anyone else administer her the sacraments unless she would expel her paramour from the palace. The Regent tried in vain convincing the irate curé to attend his suffering daughter. But the "illustrious sinner" put an end to Languet's vigil by finally giving birth. According to Saint-Simon, the Duchess of Berry secretly married Rion a few days later hoping thereby to lessen the public scandal caused by her confinement and the refusal of the Church to administer her the sacraments.[20] The means adopted by the princess to conceal her delivery ended in her death. Her health fatally undermined by her harrowing lying-in, she left Paris for her Château de Meudon where she gave a reception in honour of her father who did not approve of her marriage to Rion and had sent him away from Paris. She had not recovered from her horrendous childbirth and this evening reception at which she caught a chill severely affected her health.

The Duchess then took up residence at the Château de la Muette, where she died on 21 July 1719, at the age of twenty-three. According to Saint-Simon, the autopsy revealed that "the poor princess" had in her womb a new fetus with several weeks of gestation. On Saturday 22 July 1719, her heart was taken to the Val-de-Grâce church in Paris, and on 24 July 1719, she was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.[21] Her funeral arrangements were made by Saint-Simon himself.[22]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie Louise Élisabeth d'Orléans.

Concerning her last visit to her granddaughter, Madame wrote:

28th May, 1719. I went to see her last Sunday, the 23rd May, and found her in a sad state, suffering from pains in her toes and the soles of her feet until the tears came into her eyes. I went away because I saw that she refrained from crying out on my account. I thought she was in a bad way. A consultation was held by her three physicians, the result of which was that they determined to bleed her in the feet. They had some difficulty in persuading her to submit to it, because the pain in her feet was so great that she uttered the most piercing screams if the bedclothes only rubbed against them. The bleeding, however, succeeded, and she was in some degree relieved. It was the gout in both feet

During her lifetime, Louise Élisabeth gained a reputation for scandal. In an irony of history, the next duchesse de Berry, Princess Caroline Ferdinande of Naples and Sicily, was also known for her scandalous behaviour.