Marie dOrleans-Longueville, duchesse de Nemours

Marie d’Orleans-Longueville, duchesse de Nemours, engraving by Pierre Drevet, c. 1707, after a painting by Hyacinthe Rigaud; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of Mrs. George Nichols, 1943.5.3

Marie d’Orleans-Longueville, duchesse de Nemours,  (born March 5, 1625Paris, France—died June 16, 1707, Paris), sovereign princess of Neuchâtel (from 1699), best known for her Mémoires (1709).

The daughter of Henri II d’Orleans, duc de Longueville, and his first wife, Louise de Bourbon-Soissons, Marie lost her mother at age 12 and in 1642 came under the authority of her stepmother, the celebrated intriguer of the Fronde, Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse de Longueville. Raised in a strict, studious atmosphere, Marie came to have little in common with her scandalous stepmother and eventually fled to Dieppe and then to Flanders (1651) upon the renewed outbreak of the wars of the Fronde. For a time she was considered a possible bride for the duke of York and even for Charles II of England, who asked for her hand. She eventually married Henri II, duc de Nemours (1657), a near invalid who died in 1659, leaving her childless. The rest of her life was spent in a cruel, arduous legal battle with her stepmother’s relatives, trying to establish her own inheritance. She lost her case as far as the French property was concerned (1698), but she did establish her right to the sovereign principality of Neuchâtel (1699). In her Mémoires she dealt with the Fronde, writing with sympathy toward her father and with particular hatred for her stepmother and other Condés.