Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de Chevreuse
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Marie Aimée de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de Chevreuse (1600- August 12, 1679) was a French aristocrat of great personal charm who placed herself at the center of all the intrigues of the first half of the 17th century in France.
Marie de Rohan, styled "Mlle de Montbazon", was the daughter of Hercule de Rohan, duc de Montbazon of the House of Rohan, possessed of great estates in Brittany and Anjou. In September 1617 she married the Grand Constable (supreme commander of the French armies) Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes, a favourite of Louis XIII; he formed her taste for unscrupulous political intrigue, introducing her at court, where she gained the confidence of both king and queen. In December 1618, Louis XIII named her surintendante of the Queen's household, ousting the connétable de Montmorency. Her influence with the queen consort Anne of Austria was unrivalled. In 1620 she gave birth to Louis-Charles d'Albert, for whom Louis XIII stood godfather.
After Luynes died in combat in 1621, she married Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse 21 April 1622. From this second marriage she had three daughters. Two of them were religious, Anne-Marie de Lorraine (1625-1652), abbess of Pont-aux-Dames, and Henriette de Lorraine (1631-1693), abbess of Jouarre and later at Port-Royal. The third daughter, Charlotte-Marie de Lorraine (1627-1652), having failed to wed Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, became the mistress of Cardinal de Retz and played a role in the Fronde, never having married.
Friend and confidante of the Queen, she was banished from Court after an incident in which she had encouraged the pregnant queen in boisterous games in the corridors of the Louvre, resulting in a mishap and the abortion of the child.The duc de Chevreuse used all his influence to have her reintegrated at Court.
In her attempts at regaining her lost position, she provoked or encouraged the conspiracies of the court, such as the Buckingham affair (1623-24) that compromised the Queen, which she instigated with the connivance of her English lover, Henry Rich, later created Earl of Holland, and of the highest-ranking aristocrats against Richelieu, such as her complicity in the conspiracy of her lover, the comte de Chalais, that she set up in 1626, with the unlikely intention of replacing Louis XIII with his brother, Gaston d'Orléans, for which Chalais, deeply embroiled, lost his head, 19 August 1626, while the duchesse de Chevreuse fled to Lorraine, where she soon carried on an affair with Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine, who intervened on her behalf to allow her back in France; once she was reestablished at Dampierre, her subversion of royal power continued.
She was at the center of all the intrigues that involved foreign powers against France: negotiations with the duchy of Lorraine and with Spain conducted by Charles de l'Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf, keeper of the seals, who ruined himself on her behalf, revealing to her the councils of the king (1633). Secret exchanges of correspondence with Spain carried out by Anne of Austria were unmasked in 1637, requiring Mme de Chevreuse to flee to Spain, then to England and finally to Flanders. She was involved in the conspiracy of the comte de Soissons (1641) and at the death of the king, a clause in the testament of succession forbade the return to France of the Duchess: a decision of the parlement of Paris was required to break the will.
After the death of Richelieu, once again in France, she conspired at the center of the cabale des Importants led by Chateauneuf against Mazarin, in 1643; with the arrest and exile of César de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme she too fled once again. During the Fronde, she came closer to Mazarin for a time (1649-1650), but then she switched back to the aristocratic party when the parliamentary Fronde and the aristocratic Fronde joined forces in 1651.
She died in retirement in the convent of Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis département) in 1679.
She was a tempting subject for colorful biography in the Romantic era: Alexandre Dumas, père entangles her in the plots of The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, in which Raoul, the hero of the third novel of Dumas' trilogy, is the secret son of La Chevreuse and the musketeer Athos. Gaetano Donizetti's tragic opera Maria di Rohan, which debuted at the Kärntnertortheater, Vienna, 5 June 1843, followed by a success in Paris in November, was freely based on the conspiracy of Chalais. Victor Cousin published a more serious biography in 1856 Modern biographies are by Denis Tillinac (L'Ange du désordre, (Paris: Robert Laffont) 1985, by Christian Bouyer, La Duchesse de Chevreuse : L'Indomptable et voluptueuse adversaire de Louis XIII (Paris: Pygmalion-Gérard Watelet) 2002, and by Georges Poisson (Paris:Librairie Académique Perrin) 1999. The most recent biography in English is H. Noel Williams, A Fair Conspirator: Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse 2005.
