List of counts and dukes of Chartres

The Princess de Conti, legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de la Vallière, born in 1666, married in 1681 to Prince Armand de Conti, nephew of the great Condé, a young woman of exceptional grace and beauty.

The two other legitimated daughters of the king, Mademoiselle de Nantes, born in 1673, and Mademoiselle de Blois in 1677, who were to marry some years later, one the Duke of Bourbon and the other the Duke of Chartres, the future regent.

Madame de Montespan, their mother, then forty-one years old, already at the end of her left-handed reign, but still living at court in the double capacity of Lady of the Queen's Palace and the mother of legitimated children, but no longer bearing any sway over either the heart or the senses of Louis XIV, and finally Madame de Manteno, already very influential under her modest exterior, still beautiful in spite of her forty-seven years, on equally good terms with both king and queen, and rewarded since 1680 for the cares she had bestowed as governess on the children of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan by a place expressly created for her which did not bind her to any assiduous service while it gave her an honorable position at court, that of second lady-in-waiting to the Dauphiness.

The parts played by the women of Versailles cannot be understood without studying beforehand the character of the sovereign who was the animating spirit of this palace and who strongly impressed himself not merely on his own realm but on all Europe.

He made a marriage treaty with his great rival, by which his little daughter Margaret and Henry's eldest boy were betrothed.

On his wife's death in 1160 he married Alice of Champagne, daughter of Count Thibaut V, whose four brothers, William, an ecclesiastic, Henry, Count of Champagne and Brie, Thibaut, Count of Chartres and Blois, and Stephen, Count of Sancerre, formed the strongest family alliance that could be opposed to the menacing power of Henry II.

He maintained a firm alliance with the orthodox Pope Alexander III.

He showed himself a constant vindicator of ecclesiastical rights.