[1] Immediately after his birth, Louis-Auguste was placed in the care of one of his mother's acquaintances, the widowed Madame Scarron, who took him to live in a house on rue de Vaugirard, near the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.

One of his legs was shorter than the other and Scarron took him to consult, first, a famous quack at Antwerp and later to the waters of Barèges, a small town near the Pyrenees, whither they traveled incognito (she as the marquise de Surgeres).

On 19 December 1673, when Louis-Auguste was three years old, Louis XIV legitimised his children by Montespan by letters patent registered by the Parlement of Paris.

The king also blackmailed his cousin, the wealthy La Grande Mademoiselle, into ceding some of her estates to du Maine in return for the liberation of her imprisoned lover, Antoine Nompar de Caumont, Duke of Lauzun.

However, the Grand Condé, a more distant relative of the king but still France's premier prince du sang, was willing to overlook the discrepancy in social status.

The incredible constraint, to say the least of it, in which the strange temper of Monsieur le Prince kept everyone who was subject to his yoke, made the choice of her sister a cause of bitter heartburning to her[6] On 19 May 1692, Louis-Auguste and Anne Louise Bénédicte were married in a ceremony at the Palace of Versailles.

Madame de Montespan, who had fallen out of favour with the king after the Affaire des Poisons, did not attend her son's wedding.

As the groom and bride were both physically handicapped (Louise Bénédicte had a bad right arm and Louis had a lame leg), people at court snickered: Voici l'union d'un boiteux et d'une manchote.

Their daughter, baptised at Versailles on 9 April 1714, was known as Mademoiselle du Maine and named Louise-Françoise de Bourbon.

In July 1714, pressed by Maintenon, Louis XIV raised Louis-Auguste and his younger brother, the comte de Toulouse, to the rank of princes du sang, and compelled the Parlement of Paris to acquiesce to their being placed in the line of succession to the French throne, following all of the legitimate lines of the House of Bourbon.

On 22 August, he was unable to attend a troop parade in the gardens of Versailles, and he ordered the duc du Maine to take his place at this event.

The plot was named after Antonio del Giudice, Prince di Cellamare, the Spanish ambassador to the French court.

She remarked: I owe a full and rightful explanation to M. le Duc du Maine which is more precious to me than my own liberty or life[8] After their release, Louis-Auguste and his wife led a more subdued, compatible life at the Château de Sceaux, bought by Louis XIV for du Maine, where his wife created a little court attended by popular literary figures of the day.

It was at Sceaux that du Maine died on 14 May 1736 at the age of sixty-six, during the reign of his grandnephew Louis XV, by now a young man of twenty-six years.