Marriage
Initially, Bathilde was considered as a possible bride for a distant cousin, Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, the favourite grandson of King Louis XV of France and Queen Marie Leczinska. However, that marriage never materialised. She first met her future husband, the Duke of Enghien, the son and heir of the Prince of Condé and Charlotte de Rohan, at the Palace of Versailles when attending the wedding of her brother in July 1769. The young duke also held the rank of prince of the blood; however, he was descended from a younger branch of the House of Bourbon. His sister Louise Adélaïde attended the same convent as Bathilde, which gave the Duke a pretext to visit the convent and see Bathilde. Still just thirteen years old, the Duke asked for her hand and their parents agreed to the marriage. Bathilde's reservations about marrying someone so young were overcome by her desire to leave the convent, return to the bosom of her family and marry into such a prestigious family.
The couple married on 20 April 1770 at the Palace of Versailles in front of the court. Bathilde was nineteen and her husband was fourteen. Due to the age of the groom the marriage was not consummated and Bathilde returned to her convent. Before long, her husband had carried her off from the convent. After only six months he began to tire of marriage and turned his attention to other women. The periodic reconciliations between Bathilde and her husband eventually allowed her to give birth to their only son, Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, in August 1772. From marriage until the birth of her son, she was known as the Duchess of Enghien; after the birth she was known as the Duchess of Bourbon.
Both husband and wife had lovers, and in 1778 Bathilde gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Adelaïde-Victoire, who was registered under the surname Dumassy (and not Damassy as was often mentioned in genealogical works). Her father was a young naval officer, Alexandre Amable de Roquefeuil. The relationship ended in tragedy in 1786 when Roquefeuil was drowned in Dunkirk harbour. The scandal of the duke's adultery came out in 1778, and the consequences fell entirely on Bathilde's shoulders; she was believed to have commissioned a play from Pierre Laujon which featured a thinly disguised Duke of Bourbon and his mistress. That same year, in March, the Duchess had an encounter with the Count of Artois (the future King Charles X), younger brother of King Louis XVI, who was escorting a "lady of the town" while attending a masked ball. "After exchanging a few words, the irritated Duchess reached up and snatched off his mask whereupon he pulled her nose so hard and painfully that she wept." Her husband subsequently challenged Charles to a duel, during which he wounded him in the hand, though the two men were reconciled the next year. This affair became known as: An Incident at the Opera Ball on Mardi Gras in 1778. The couple formally separated in 1780.
As a separated spouse, the duchess was never received at court, although she visited Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon at Versailles. She lived for a time with her father and his second wife, Madame de Montesson, at their château de Saint-Assise at Seine-Port. When her father died, in 1785, her brother Philippe became the Duke of Orléans. It was around this time that Bathilde bought a house in Paris called the Hôtel de Clermont and the château de Petit-Bourg. She was able to see her son once a week, and kept her daughter with her.
In 1787, she purchased the Élysée Palace from Louis XVI and had a hamlet constructed there; inspired by the Hameau de Chantilly at the Château de Chantilly. Her salon was renowned throughout Europe for its liberty of thought and the brilliant wits who frequented it.
She became interested in the occult, studying the supernatural arts of chiromancy, astrology, dream interpretation, and in particular animal magnetism, which she studied directly under Franz Mesmer. Bathilde's houses, the Élysée Palace and the Château de Petit-Bourg, became the most important meeting centres for mysticism in revolutionary France, and were frequented by important occult figures including: the Marquis de Puységur, a founder of hypnotism; Christian mystics Dom Gerle, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, and Pierre Pontard, who conceptualized the French Revolution as divinely ordained; and the prophets Suzette Labrouse, who foretold the calling of the Estates General and the revolution ten years before they occurred, and Catherine Théot, who believed she was destined to be the mother of the new, revolutionary, Messiah. Labrouse and Théot's predictions were published in the Journal prophétique, which was funded and edited by Bathilde. Since 1775, she had been the Grand Mistress of the French Masonic Lodge of Adoption, in parallel to her brother Philippe being the Grand Master of the male Freemasons in France.
