The most important caregiver in Liselotte's life was her aunt Sophia of the Palatinate, her father's youngest sister, who also lived in Heidelberg Castle with Charles I Louis until her marriage in 1658 with Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Liselotte now received a courtly education customary for princely houses at the time, consisting of lessons in French, dancing, playing the spinet, singing, handicrafts and history.

[25] Before her marriage, she was required to convert to the Catholic faith for dynastic reasons, though she remained skeptical of dogmatism throughout her life, and was often critical of "the priests", even while attending mass on a daily basis.

The wedding per procurationem took place on 16 November 1671 at the Cathedral of Saint Stephen in Metz by Bishop Georges d'Aubusson de La Feuillade; in representation of the groom was the Duke of Plessis-Praslin.

[38] The couple lived mostly at the royal court, where they had to be present for about three-quarters of the year, first in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye and, after its completion in 1682, in the Palace of Versailles, where they had two adjacent apartments in the main wing.

From around 1680 massive problems arose in the Orléans marriage, as the Chevalier de Lorraine, the Marquis d'Effiat and other favorites of her husband intrigued against Liselotte in order to eliminate her influence on the Duke.

To make matters worse, her personal relationship with the King had cooled as his mistress Madame de Maintenon gained influence,[63] leading Louis XIV to be less and less inclined to intervene in Liselotte's quarrels with his brother.

[72][73][74] At the instigation of the increasingly powerful Maintenon, contact between Liselotte and her brother-in-law was restricted to formal occasions, and if the King retired to his private apartments with some chosen relatives after dinner, she was no longer admitted.

She blamed the situation on the influence of Madame de Maintenon, who she regarded as hypocritically bigoted, corrupt and greedy for power:[78] The King...didn't know a word about our Bible; he had never been allowed to read it; said that if he only listened to his confessor and talked about his Pater Noster, everything would be fine and he would be completely godly; I often complained about it, because his intention has always been sincere and good.

The Maintenon, nor does the Archbishop of Paris say; only the King believes in them in religious matters.Liselotte, however, also saw the opportunities that the Huguenots brought to Protestant countries after emigrating: The poor Reformed ... who settled in Germany will make the French common.

She was punished with contempt above all by Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, Monsieur's granddaughter from his first marriage and granddaughter-in-law of Louis XIV, who was a spoiled child, but an outspoken favorite of both the monarch and his mistress.

She rarely went to her remote widow's residence, Montargis Castle; but she refrained from selling it in case the King should grow tired of her presence at Versailles, which Maintenon endeavored to work towards:[104] ...she does every day (Madame de Maintenon) abrupt to me, have the bowls I want to eat taken away from my nose at the King's table; when I go to her, she looks at me through an axel and says nothing to me or laughs at me with her ladies; The old woman ordered that express, hoping I would get angry and amport myself so that they could say they couldn't live with me and send me to Montargis.

That makes you despair with evil...Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715 after a reign of 72 years and 110 days; one of the last people he summoned to his deathbed was Liselotte, saying goodbye to her with noble compliments.

The Parlement of Paris overturned the will's provisions at the request of Liselotte's son, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who, being the only legitimate agnate of the royal family in France, became Regent for the underage sovereign, beginning the time known as the Régence.

Liselotte became the first lady of the court; as she had been at least officially once before, between the death of Maria Anna Victoria of Bavaria, Dauphine of France (20 April 1690) and the marriage of Marie Adélaïde of Savoy with Louis, Duke of Burgundy (7 December 1697).

I love it myself that I hate your air and home so much.Although she had not made it a habit to interfere in politics,[107] only one month after the Louis XIV's death, Liselotte successfully campaigned for the release of Huguenots who had been sent to the galleys for many years because of their beliefs.

She loathed the foreign minister and later prime minister, Father Guillaume Dubois (cardinal from 1721) and mistrusted the economist and chief financial controller John Law, who caused a currency devaluation and speculative bubble (the so-called Mississippi bubble): I wanted this Law to come to Blockula with his art and system and never come to France.As a clergy advisor, she valued two staunch supporters of the Age of Enlightenment: Archbishop François Fénelon (who fell from grace under Louis XIV) as well as her intermittent confessor Abbé de Saint-Pierre.

[118] Liselotte tended to use coarse formulations, which was not uncommon in letters from princely persons of the 16th and 17th centuries, but in Helmuth Kiesel's view she had gone extraordinarily far in this, being psychological in disposition and frivolous in tone.

Perhaps her previously reformed faith had contributed to the polemics known to her; in any case, their tone differed greatly from the Précieuses of the Parisian salons of their time, and also from the naturalness of the German bourgeois lettering style of the 18th century, as shaped by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert.

Her favorite saying (and personal motto) is often quoted as: "What cannot be changed, let go as it goes" (Was nicht zu ändern stehet, laß gehen wie es gehet) Unlike Madame de Sévigné, she did not write for the public, but only as direct communication to her correspondents.

Sophia's strong personality offered her support in difficult life situations; Liselotte had also shaped the atmosphere of the Hanoverian court with her scientific and literary interest, her religious tolerance and her thoughts on morality and virtue in consideration of human inadequacies.

Numerous letters to other relatives and acquaintances have also been found, including to Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and his librarian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had previously been in the service of Sophia and her husband.

She knew that the Cabinet noir opened her letters to copy critical passages and translate them; hence, she sometimes even incorporated derisive remarks addressed directly to the government, particularly to her favorite enemy, Foreign Secretary Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquess of Torcy.

The Tatars have to hold more of the feeling than of the face in the 5 senses because they prefer old women to young women...... How I (as a child) in the Hague with IL (my beloved, what is meant is the later English King William III of England) and met verlöff met verlöff —in Low German: "mit Verlaub" (with all due respect)— in mein hembt schiß (shat in my shirt), I thought he would become in such a great figure one day; if only his big hits are not sealed like I sealed our games back then; but if it were to happen and peace would come about as a result, I would really want to be satisfied......for it has been known to me all my life to be a woman, and to be Elector, forbid me to tell the truth, better to be aware than to be Madame; but if god's sake didn't know, it is unnecessary to bear in mind...I would prefer to be a rich ruling imperial count with his freedom, rather than a fils de France (royal prince of France), for we are nothing but crowned slaves; I would be suffocated if I hadn't said this......that makes me bleed heartily, and if you still think I'm sick that I'm sad about it......I believe that M. de Louvois burns in hell because of the Palatinate; he was terribly cruel, nothing could complain...As EL now describe the German court to me, I would find a big change in it; I think more of sincerity than of magnificence, and I am quite happy to hear that such is lost in homeland.

It could easily be that the Princess of Wales could be content to have my silly letters only once a week and to write only once; but that doesn't suit me at all, so I'll continue as I've done so far.This morning I find out that the old Maintenon died, yesterday evening between 4 and 5 o'clock.

This Chronique scandaleuse became popular in Germany when the editors of the letters succeeded in identifying the author as a moral and honest German princess in the midst of the depraved and frivolous French court life.

Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz published a new selection of the letters in 1820, also emphasizing the "strong contrast between the old, truly German simplicity, loyalty, honesty and efficiency...to the glamour, opulence, etiquette and gallantry, such as the unlimited intriguing spirit and the whole, systematically developed frivolity and hypocrisy of this court, for a full half of a century."

"In the further course of the 19th century, the letters lost their immediate political relevance, but because of their cultural and historical significance and their German usability, they found equally committed editors and a broad public.

"[141] Wolfgang Menzel, who in 1843 edited a volume of letters addressed to her half-sister Raugräfin Luise, saw in the Duchess of Orléans the simple German woman and the most open soul in the world, who only had to watch too much moral corruption... understandable that she sometimes expresses herself about it in the crudest words.

Originally, she was mocked by the French court because of her "old" furs that she wore when she arrived from Heidelberg, but since she was very popular with the king in the 1670s, the ladies began to imitate this trend during the unusually cold winter of 1676.