social inferior that he was. From her marriage to her death, Isabelle d'Orléans was known to the French as Madame de Guise. Her brief union with the Duke of Guise produced one child: Francis Joseph de Lorraine, Duke of Guise (Hôtel de Guise, Luxembourg Palace, Paris, 28 August 1670 – 16 March 1675). Widowhood Isabelle's husband died in 1671, from smallpox contacted on his way back from a visit to the court of Charles II, King of England. Her son inherited his father's titles: duc de Guise et de Joyeuse and prince de Joinville. At the death of her mother in 1672, she moved into the Luxembourg Palace along with the little Francis Joseph. Still unable to walk unaided at age four, he was dropped by his nurse and died from a head injury in 1675. He died at the Luxembourg Palace. Upon her son's death, she became the Duchess of Alençon and Angoulême in her own right. After the death of her son, Isabelle (whom the French knew as "Madame de Guise") spent every summer in her duchy of Alençon and most winters at the royal court. When in Paris, she would stay at the Luxembourg Palace which had been ceded to her after her mother's death in 1672. (Haunted by her little son's death throes there, she found it difficult to stay very long at the Luxembourg.) In 1672 she created a private apartment for herself at the abbey of Saint Pierre de Montmartre, where she often saw Mlle de Guise and her sister, the abbess. After 1675, this little circle expanded when Isabelle's sister Marguerite Louise, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, left her husband, moved into an apartment within the abbey walls, and was kept under what amounted to house arrest. Always very devout, Isabelle commissioned religious pieces from Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the composer of Mlle de Guise. She also commissioned secular works (operas and pastorales) from him, some of which were performed at the royal court. Isabelle was a fervent supporter of her cousin Louis XIV's policies to bring Huguenots back into the Catholic fold. As early as November 1676, when she supervised the conversion of a Protestant lady, Isabelle commissioned from Marc-Antoine Charpentier the first of a succession of oratorios that recounted how St. Cecilia had won over her bridegroom and his brother to Christianity. The probable author of the libretti was Philippe Goibaut, a protégé of