Mademoiselle, fille de Monsieur : le prince et le père dans les Mémoires de la Grande Mademoiselle

Abstract

Gaston d’Orléans’s daughter, ‘la Grande Mademoiselle’, wrote memoirs in which Monsieur, Louis XIII’s brother, occupies a prominent place. The study of this figure — father, member of the Fronde and among the first men of the kingdom — highlights the construction of an ambiguous figure, where the private and the public, the expression of filial affection and the portrait of a great man intersect. This article examines the ancient paradigms – in particular the Roman virtue of pietas – on which the crossed portraits of the daughter and the father are based, and their relevance in the definition of the memoir as a literary practice.

Keywords

• Orléans (Gaston d’)
• Grande Mademoiselle
• family
• portrait
• memoirs
• pietas