Les enfants - the children of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière, marble high-reliefs, circa 1669-70

 

Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Légitimée de France, mademoiselle de Blois, at approximately three or four years old.

Louis de Bourbon, Légitimé de France, comte de Vermandois, at approximately two or three years old.

The sculptures, by an unknown artist, are in the collection of the château de Versailles.

*

The duchesse de La Vallière with mademoiselle de Blois and the comte de Vermandois, studio of or a copy after Pierre Mignard.

Louise de La Vallière (Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière and de Vaujours 6 August 1644 – 6 June 1710) had four children by Louis XIV, two of whom survived early childhood, and only one who reached full adulthood. The first two were registered under false surnames: Charles ‘de Lincourt’ (19 December 1663 – circa 1665 or 1666), who died in infancy and was never legitimized, and Philippe ‘Derssy’ (7 January 1665 – July 1666), who also died in infancy and never legitimized.

Mademoiselle de Blois and the comte de Vermandois, a nineteenth-century copy after Pierre Mignard.

*

Marie-Anne de Bourbon, the dowager princesse de Conti, by François de Troy, circa 1690-91.

Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Légitimée de France, mademoiselle de Blois (2 October 1666, Vincennes – 3 May 1739, Paris). In the first of the king's series of scandalous marriages between his illegitimate offspring and members of the royal family, she was wed at the age of thirteen to her eighteen-year-old distant relative Louis Armand I, prince de Conti. Widowed five years later - she contracted smallpox, passed it to her husband; she recovered, he died - she never remarried and had no issue. She inherited the titles of duchesse de La Vallière and de Vaujours from her mother.

The dowager princesse de Conti, by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1706.

*

The comte de Vermandois, attributed to François de Troy, before 1683.

Louis de Bourbon, Légitimé de France, comte de Vermandois (2 October 1667, Saint-Germain-en-Laye – 18 November 1683, Flanders). He was seven years old when his mother entered a Carmelite convent in Paris and he was put into the care of his aunt, the duchesse d'Orléans, wife of the king's famously homosexual/bisexual brother. Later, at the age of only fifteen, having joined a secret group of young aristocrats calling themselves La Sainte Congregation des Glorieux Pédérastes, he was involved in a great scandal implicating members of the duc d'Orléans' circle. Several men who practiced le vice italien were banished from court; he was exiled to Normandy. In an attempt at "rehabilitation," his father the king sent him to join a military campaign in Flanders, where he soon fell ill and died. He was just barely sixteen.

The comte de Vermandois, by Pierre Mignard, before 1683.