101 Secret Agent: François de Bussy
Eveline Cruickshanks tells the tale of a French secret agent and his works in England during the mid-eighteenth century.
François de Bussy was baptised on January 27th, 1699, at the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont as the son of Pierre de Bussy, a lieutenant of dragoons. He was really the illegitimate son of Pierre’s brother, Duplessis de Bussy by Mile, de Chausseraye, a member of an impoverished noble family, who became secretly mistress to Louis XIV in the time of Mme. de Maintenon. Under the Regency, she appears to have been one of the Regent’s mistresses and had as her lover and man of affairs Duplessis de Bussy, a member of the Regent’s set. In 1725 she obtained for her son the post of secretary to the Ambassador at Vienna, the Due de Richelieu, with whom she had been on good terms since the Regency.
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