Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
A Very Grand Girl
By Benedetta Craveri
La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France, 1627–1693
by Vincent J. Pitts
Johns Hopkins University Press, 367 pp., $47.00
Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans
edited and translated from the French by Joan DeJean
University of Chicago Press, 86 pp., $35.00; $14.00 (paper)
Only three living members of the royal family in seventeenth-century France were given the title 'Grand,' a word that historians would later apply to the entire age, the Grand Siècle. Two of the three were men. Louis XIV, known as Louis Le Grand, was the supreme embodiment of absolute monarchy. His cousin the Prince of Condé, known as Le Grand Condé, was perhaps the greatest military commander in the France of his time. The third member of this exclusive trio was a woman: Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, who would pass into history as La Grande Mademoiselle. Famous during her lifetime, a leading figure in the insurrection known as the Fronde, and France's richest woman, La Grande Mademoiselle was also a writer of considerable ability; she brings to her memoirs the unique double perspective of a woman and an insider, and they provide a rare portrait of aristocratic life during the most tumultuous and dazzling decades of the century.
Review, 4073 words
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