Élisabeth Marguerite d'Orléans (26 December 1646 - 17 March 1696), known as Isabelle d'Orléans, was the Duchess of Alençon and, during her husband's lifetime, Duchess of Angoulême. She was a daughter of Gaston d'Orléans and a first cousin of Louis XIV of France. She has no descendants today. She was suo jure Duchess of Alençon and Angoulême. Life Élisabeth d'Orléans was born in Paris at the Luxembourg Palace, then called the Palais d'Orléans, and now the seat of the Senate of France. The palace had been given to her father on the death of his mother, Marie de' Medici in 1642. Élisabeth was known by her first name, Élisabeth, but she always signed Isabelle. One of five children, she was not raised with her siblings but in a convent, because she was destined to become abbess of Remiremont and was styled as such. Marriage Known as Mademoiselle d'Alençon until her marriage, Isabelle (Élisabeth Marguerite) was acquainted with the young Louise Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc, who was to become duchesse de La Vallière, mistress of Louis XIV, and who grew up at Blois in the entourage of Isabelle's sister Marguerite Louise d'Orléans. It was assumed that Isabelle's older and more beautiful sister, Marguerite Louise, would marry Louis, and that Françoise Madeleine would marry another European prince. A possible match was one with Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, who later married her younger sister on 4 March 1663. Another possible spouse was her cousin Henri Jules de Bourbon - the future Prince de Condé and Prince du Sang. This was dropped as Henri Jules preferred the German Anne Henriette of Bavaria who was a granddaughter of the Queen of Bohemia. The choice for Isabelle (who was humpbacked) fell upon a "foreign prince (prince étranger) naturalized in France": Louis Joseph de Guise. The Duke of Guise was the titular head of the House of Guise, a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine of which Isabelle's mother was a member. Isabelle and the Duke were married at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 15 May 1667 in the presence of the Court and the Princes of the Blood. Her husband, four years younger than she was, was not only under the legal control of his aunt and guardian, the "magnificent" and proud Mademoiselle de Guise (Marie de Lorraine de Guise), but in day-to-day protocol, he was treated by Isabelle as the