She was said to have been named after her godmother, Louise de La Vallière,[2] the woman her mother had replaced as the King's mistress.

She was later a leading member of the cabale de Meudon,[4] a group centered on her half-brother Louis, Grand Dauphin.

While her son Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, was Prime Minister of France, she tried to further her political influence, but to little avail.

Considered attractive, Louise Françoise had a turbulent love life and was frequently part of scandals during her father's reign.

Later in life, she built the Palais Bourbon in Paris, the present seat of the National Assembly, with the fortune she amassed having invested greatly with John Law.

After returning from Tournai, her parents placed her and her older siblings in the care of one of her mother's acquaintances, the widowed Madame Scarron.

As for Mademoiselle de Nantes, she has felt it as deeply as if she were twenty and has received the visits of the Queen and Madame la Dauphine.

Sportive, gay, and merry, she passed her youth in frivolity and in pleasures of all kinds, and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, they extended even to debauchery.

After her mother officially left court in 1691, Louise Françoise would visit her at the convent of the Filles de Saint-Joseph, in the Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris,[11] where she had retired.

[2] In 1692, her youngest sister, Marie Françoise, was married to their first cousin, Philippe d'Orléans, the only son and heir of their uncle, Monsieur.

[10] When her husband discovered her infidelity, he was furious but did not openly quarrel with the Prince of Conti due to a fear of his father-in-law, Louis XIV.

Her older half-brother, the Dauphin, allowed the couple to meet at his country estate at Meudon away from her husband and the court.

[14] Louise Françoise's husband, who had by this time descended into madness,[5] did not survive his father long and died within the year in 1710.

[8] Perhaps in the hope of ingratiating herself with the future King, Louise Françoise frequently attended the court of her older half-brother, Monseigneur,[12] at the Château de Meudon.

Marie Adélaïde and Louise Françoise were to become bitter enemies because of the new Dauphine's condescending attitude toward ladies of inferior rank.

As a dowager, Louise Françoise became a good friend of Jeanne Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes, the former mistress of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy.

Within two years, in 1712, the new Dauphin and his young wife died, leaving only a small son, the Duke of Anjou, as the legitimate heir of Louis XIV.

This, of course, exacerbated the rivalry between Louise Françoise and her younger sister, the Duchess of Orléans, now the highest-ranking woman in France.

[5] The only son of the Conti couple, Louis François de Bourbon, was thought to have been the result of his mother's adulterous relationship with La Fare.

When her son was disgraced during the regency of the Duke of Orléans, Louise Françoise regarded his mistress Madame de Prie as the cause.

During her long widowhood, Louise Françoise built the Palais Bourbon in Paris, not far from the residences of her surviving siblings.

She was buried at the Carmel du faubourg Saint-Jacques,[21] a Carmelite convent on the Left Bank in Paris's Latin Quarter.