Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (), (); known as Liselotte von der Pfalz, 27 May 1652 – 8 December 1722) was a German member of the House of Wittelsbach and, as Madame (Duchesse d'Orléans), the second wife of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (younger brother of Louis XIV of France), and mother of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, France's ruler during the Regency. She gained literary and historical importance primarily through preservation of her correspondence, which is of great cultural and historical value due to her sometimes very blunt descriptions of French court life and is today one of the best-known German-language texts of the Baroque period. Although she had only two surviving children, she not only became the ancestress of the House of Orléans, which came to the French throne with Louis Philippe I, the so-called "Citizen King" from 1830 to 1848, but also became the ancestress of numerous European royal families, so she was also called the "Grandmother of Europe". Through her daughter she was the grandmother of Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, the husband of Maria Theresa, and great-grandmother of Joseph II and Leopold II (both Holy Roman Emperors) and Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France before the French Revolution. Life Early years Elizabeth Charlotte was born on 27 May 1652 in the castle of Heidelberg as the second child and only daughter of Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine, and his wife Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel. Named after her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Stuart and her own mother, from a young age she was nicknamed Liselotte, a portmanteau of both her names. An emergency baptism was performed shortly after her birth due to her being very weak and thin. She was raised in the Reformed Protestant faith, the most widespread denomination in the Electoral Palatinate at that time. Liselotte was a lively child who liked to run around and climb trees to nibble on cherries. She sometimes claimed that she would have preferred to be a boy, and referred to herself in her letters as a "wild child" (rauschenplattenknechtgen). The marriage of Liselotte's parents soon turned into a disaster, and Liselotte was frequently witness to acts of domestic violence. In 1657, Elector Charles I Louis separated from his wife Charlotte in order to marry morganatically with Marie Luise von Degenfeld, who thus became Liselotte's stepmother. Liselotte likely perceived her as an intruder, but had good relationships with