Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (12 May 1725 – 18 November 1785), known as le Gros (the Fat), was a French royal of a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon.

After considering the possibility of such a marriage, Louis XV and his chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, decided against it because this union would have brought the House of Orléans too close to the throne.

After a few months of a passion that surprised everyone at court, the couple started to drift apart as the young Duchess of Chartres began to lead a scandalous life.

Louis Philippe wanted to have both his children inoculated in order to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of the methods, but his wife Louise Henriette was against it.

After the death of Louise Henriette on 9 February 1759 at the Palais-Royal, the Orléans residence in Paris, Louis Philippe took as his mistress Étiennette Le Marquis, a former dancer who liked to act in comedy plays, and who introduced him into the world of the theater.

The same year, his son Louis Philippe, married Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, heiress to the fortune of her father, the Duke of Penthièvre.

[8] As a wedding gift, the Duke of Orléans gave his new wife the château de Sainte-Assise at Seine-Port, in today's Seine-et-Marne department of France.

In 1780, Louis Philippe gave his son the Palais-Royal, a gift that was to mark their reconciliation after the rift provoked by the Duke's second marriage.

[10] In Sainte-Assise, du Raincy and Paris, the couple received nobles, intellectuals, playwrights, scientists, such as the Duchess of Lauzun, the Countess of Egmont, the Marquis of Lusignan, the Marquis of Osmond, the mathematician d'Alembert, the German writer Melchior Grimm, the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, the composers Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, André Grétry, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and playwright Louis Carrogis Carmontelle.

Surrounded by all the members of his immediate family, even his three children by Etiennette Le Marquis, Louis-Philippe died on 18 November 1785, at Sainte-Assise at the age of sixty.