Felicitas St. Maxent, Wife of Bernardo de Gálvez: From French New Orleans Belle to Exiled Spanish Dowager Countess

When Marie-Felicité Saint-Maxent La Roche was born in New Orleans on December 27, 1755, her future looked easy to predict: a pampered childhood, an arranged early marriage to the scion of a wealthy family, the motherhood of many children, and long summer days sipping mint juleps on her veranda chatting with friends. For a while she followed this well-traveled and traditional path. Before her twenty-second birthday, she married Jean Baptiste Honore d’Estrehan, the son of a former French treasurer, and shortly after had a daughter, Adelaide. While the death of her husband at the age of twenty-five left her a young widow, her destiny was to be much more affected by events on the other side of the world.

On November 3, 1762, when Felicité, or Felicitas as she was known, would have nothing else on her mind but to prepare for her seventh birthday party, the king of France declared: “Deeply moved by the sacrifices made by the Catholic king [of Spain] during the war . . . His Most Christian Majesty [of France] relinquishes in perpetuity to His Catholic Majesty and his successors all the country known under the name of Louisiana, and the city of New Orleans.”[1]

The transfer of Louisiana from France to Spain would not be quick or easy. The new Spanish governor did not arrive in New Orleans until March 1766 to take possession of what the Spanish government considered a “poisonous gift” from France. Two years later, the former French subjects rebelled against their new Spanish masters. This rebellion was swiftly suppressed with the support of part of the population, among whom Felicitas’s father, Gilbert Antoine, played a very significant role. Gilbert Antoine’s fidelity to Spain was rewarded with trade concessions that made him one of the richest persons in Louisiana, and his attachment to His Catholic Majesty was sealed by the marriage of his first daughter, Marie Elizabeth, to Luis de Unzaga, Louisiana’s Spanish governor between 1770 and 1776. But Gilbert-Antoine, or Gilberto Antonio as he soon started to sign his name, would not be satisfied until four of his six daughters married high-ranking Spaniards.

Eyewitness accounts of the young widow Felicitas attest to her beauty and her kind character, which made her beloved by everyone. Even the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, usually impervious to feminine charms, was favorably impressed when he met her in 1803. Felicitas, who later hispanized her name to Feliciana, was portrayed as the perfect example of what the historian Berndt Ostendorf has called the “myth of Creole womanhood.”

Felicitas’s charms were certainly encouraged by her father, since they served the family’s interests well, at a time when marriage was a family alliance at the service of plans for social advancement more than a matter of sentiment. Although this may be true in the case of Feliciana and Bernardo de Gálvez, sentiment also played a very important role. In terms of mid-eighteenth-century social conventions, their courtship was extremely short.

On November 2, 1777, Feliciana married Gálvez, who, in January of that year, had become governor of Louisiana, and the circumstances of the marriage were unusual. The official version is contained in the marriage certificate signed by Friar Cirilo de Barcelona: “Being seriously ill, he [Bernardo de Gálvez] informed me about his engagement with Doña Feliciana Maxent, widow of Don Juan Bautista Honorato Dethrean [sic], and that in the predicament in which he was, he wanted to marry the above-mentioned lady, so if God would take his life, he would die with the consolation of having honored his word. In consideration of these Christian reasons, and having been assured of his bachelorhood, I proceeded to take the mutual consent of the above-mentioned Don Bernardo de Gálvez and Doña Feliciana Maxent.”

Their marriage was secret by necessity, since the groom was going against not one but two direct prohibitions. First, for a military officer such as Gálvez, prior permission from the king was required to marry. Second, as acting governor of Louisiana, Gálvez was forbidden to marry within his jurisdiction without a special royal permit in advance, under “the penalty of being deprived of [his] office, and of being ineligible for any other in the Indies.”[2] According both to Spanish and Canon Law, a secret marriage was dispensed from all the usual formalities as long as it was in extremis or inarticulo mortis.

Keeping such a secret in New Orleans could not have been easy, but it certainly became impossible in August of the following year. On the 13th of that month, almost exactly nine months after the marriage, Matilde Bernarda Felipa Isabel Juana Felicitas y Fernanda de Gálvez y Saint Maxent was born. So, either Bernardo de Gálvez’s illness was not serious enough, or his marriage to Feliciana performed the miracle of his speedy recovery.

In any case, from the very beginning, Felicitas had to endure the opposition of her husband’s family. Gálvez’s uncle José, the all-powerful Minister for the Indies, was consolidating his recently achieved high social position by marrying Concepción Valenzuela de Fuentes, daughter of the fourth Count of Puebla de los Valles, and while Felicitas was the daughter of the richest merchant in Louisiana, neither her fortune nor her rank made her a suitable match for his nephew.

From the moment of their marriage on, the only time the couple was separated was when Bernardo de Gálvez was commanding the Spanish troops fighting against the British in the American War for Independence. But even then, sometimes they managed to be together. Such was the case in 1782, when French and Spanish troops were concentrating in Guarico, present-day Haiti, for a final assault against Jamaica. Instead of comfortably waiting in New Orleans, Felicitas arrived at the military encampment several months into her third pregnancy, and even gave birth to their son Miguel in the presence of the troops.

When Bernardo de Gálvez was appointed Viceroy of New Spain—an area spanning present-day Mexico as well as most of Central America and the South of the United States—the couple continued to defy social conventions by taking long walks around Mexico City or by sleeping in the same bed, which at the time was considered improper by the extremely traditional Spanish and Mexican upper class. Nevertheless, their kind nature and good humor, and most importantly their commitment to helping the victims of a great famine that devastated Mexico made them extremely popular.

After the death of her husband in Mexico in 1786, Felicitas went to Madrid, where her life took another turn. Feliciana Saint-Maxent de Gálvez, the Countess of Gálvez, was not easily confined to the limited role assigned to an aristocratic widow by Spanish standards of the time. Her residence in Madrid became the center of a popular and prestigious French-style political and literary salon. There she brought together some of the best minds of the time: politicians such as the Count of Aranda, the former Spanish ambassador to France who helped to orchestrate Spain’s support of the American patriots during their struggle for independence; writers such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Leandro Fernández de Moratín, both Enlightenment thinkers who believed that progress could be achieved only by reason; artists such as the Italian-born architect Francisco de Sabatini, designer of some of the most important monuments and palaces built during that time; and even bankers such as Francisco de Cabarrús, who established Spain’s first national bank, which was essential for funding the war against the British during the American Revolution.

Feliciana’s popularity would not last long, since the political environment was quickly changing. In less than two years, pro-French sentiments went from being fashionable to suspicious, if not treasonous. The Spanish government that had embraced the Enlightenment became horrified by its offspring, the French Revolution. In June 1790 all foreigners were deported from Madrid and, although Feliciana was legally Spanish, she became highly suspect.

Feliciana’s close friend Francisco de Cabarrús, a prominent banker of French origin, was suspected of being sympathetic to the new French government and was closely followed by the police. In July Cabarrús asked her to deliver some jewels to the French Embassy, with the result that he was accused of passing contraband and Feliciana’s house was subjected to close surveillance. One of the police reports stated that at her residence a great number of foreigners and Spaniards met, where they ate, had coffee, drinks, and dinner, and where Cabarrús “remained most if not all nights well after dinner until one, since at twelve the gathering dispersed, while Cabarrús dined alone with the countess.”

It was only a question of time before Feliciana attracted the attention of the authorities. On September 11, 1790, she was ordered to leave Madrid for Valladolid. There the police were instructed to keep a record of people she met and to pay close attention to her conduct and conversations. From her exile, Feliciana wrote to the king, the queen, and the Count of Floridablanca to proclaim her innocence. She suspected that the accusations against her originated with the Countess of Sonora, the widow of José de Gálvez, with whom she had an especially bad relationship. After some months in Valladolid she was allowed to move to Zaragoza, where she stayed until June 1793, when she was allowed to return to Madrid and was finally acquitted of any responsibility in the Cabarrús affair. Felicitas Saint-Maxent de Gálvez died in Aranjuez on May 21, 1799.

Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, SJD, PhD, is a former Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the former Ambassador of Spain to Pakistan, and the author of several books on eighteenth-century Spanish American history, including Bernardo de Gálvez: Spanish Hero of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

[1] Preliminary act of cession of Louisiana and New Orleans, granted by the Crown of France in favor of Spain, signed at Fontainebleau, November 3, 1762.

[2] Julián de Paredes, Recopilación de Leyes de los reynos de las Indias, mandadas imprimir, y publicar por la magestad católica del rey Don Carlos II, nuestro señor, Madrid, 1681, edic. facs. de Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1973, t. II, p. 151r. Numbers 130 to 133 of the Royal ordinance of December 18, 1701, and Book I, Title 17 of the Ordenanzas of 12 June 1728 on the marriage of officers and soldiers.