At seventeen she married the heir to Monaco. Her inheritance made her a prize. Years later, she and her younger son were prisoners in Paris. It was a doctor, not a prince, who got them out.
Louise Félicité Victoire d'Aumont was born in Paris on 22 October 1759, the only daughter of Louis Marie Guy d'Aumont and Louise-Jeanne de Durfort. Her father was a duke. Through her mother came the Mazarin inheritance, a fortune with its own long procession of estates and titles. Her mother's family descended from Hortense Mancini, the niece to whom Cardinal Mazarin had left a great part of his wealth, and the inheritance had already passed through women more than once on its way down to Louise. There were families whose daughters needed an advantageous marriage to establish them. Louise brought advantages of her own.
On 15 July 1777, she married Honoré Grimaldi, the future Honoré IV of Monaco. His father, Honoré III, was still the reigning prince. It was a union between a ruling house and a French heiress, with the attractions of her fortune plain enough. The Grimaldis acquired a connection to the Mazarin inheritance; Louise became the wife of a prince's eldest son. On paper, there was a great deal to recommend it.
When her mother died in 1781, Louise became duchess of Mayenne. The inheritance came with substantial debts, a badly managed domain and lawsuits against its vassals. There was a difference between possessing a great fortune and finding that fortune in good order. The marriage had joined two distinguished names, but it had also brought the couple into the practical business of creditors, estates and disputed rights. A family could take considerable care over the descent of a title and rather less over the accounts that accompanied it.
Two sons were born to the marriage: Honoré in 1778 and Florestan in 1785. The elder shared his father's name and stood before his brother in the succession. Florestan was the younger boy. The marriage itself was unhappy, the couple separated, and it ended in divorce. The family connection, and the children, remained.
Then the institutions that had made the match so desirable began to disappear.
In February 1793, revolutionary France annexed Monaco. The decree called it the former principality and incorporated it into the French Republic. A dynasty could preserve its descent on a family tree; it could no longer govern a country that the new authorities had declared part of France. Louise's father-in-law and the man she had married were both imprisoned in Paris during the Terror. Princely birth had ceased to provide the protection it once promised.
Louise was taken to prison too. Florestan was taken with her.
He was still a child. The estates that had made his mother so desirable as a bride could not keep either of them out of confinement, and his father and grandfather were prisoners themselves. An alliance between two great houses had narrowed to a mother and her younger son, held together in a Paris prison.
The man who intervened was Doctor Desormeaux, the princely family's own physician. He obtained Louise's release and hid her in his own home with Florestan. That domestic refuge was the next stage of their survival. Getting out of prison had not made it safe for them to resume their former lives; mother and son remained concealed until the Terror ended.
For all the grandeur of the marriage, the practical help came down to one man making room in his house.
Louise survived. So did Florestan. Monaco was returned to the Grimaldis in 1814, in the settlement that followed Napoleon's fall, and Honoré IV became sovereign prince of the principality whose heir she had married. By then Louise was his former wife. He died in 1819, and she was still alive when the elder son of that marriage succeeded him.
She died in Paris on 13 December 1826, aged sixty-seven. Florestan was then forty-one and still the younger brother of the reigning prince. His turn came on 2 October 1841, when Honoré V died without a legitimate son and Florestan succeeded him. Both sons of the seventeen-year-old bride became rulers of Monaco. The boy who had been taken to prison with her became its prince nearly fifteen years after her death.
