The high-piled lace Fontanges headdress identifies this as turn of the century. Anne-Louise-Benedicte de Bourbon-Cond�, duchesse du Maine (1676 - 1753), daughter of Henri-Jules de Bourbon, prince de Conde and Anne of Bavaria. On March 19, 1692 she married Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duc du Maine, the illegitimate son of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan. The duchess of Maine held a little court at Sceaux, where she gave brilliant entertainments and immersed herself in political intrigues. Displeased with the action of the regent Orleans in degrading the illegitimate children of Louis XIV from their precedence above the peers of France, she induced her husband to join in the Cellamare conspiracy for the transference of the regency to the king of Spain. The plot, however, was discovered, and she was imprisoned in 1719. The following year she returned to Sceaux, where she resumed her salon and gathered round her a brilliant company of wits and poets. She died in Paris on the 23 January 1753.

Sumptuous late Louis XIV gown and a wonderful Fontanges headdress.