In 1695, King Louis XIV of France quietly ordered that a nun living in a small convent near Fontainebleau receive a generous royal pension for life. No explanation accompanied the decree, and rumors spread quickly. Some whispered that she was the king’s illegitimate daughter. Others claimed something even more scandalous: that she was black, perhaps even the queen’s secret child.
For centuries, the truth remained hidden, and so did the woman herself—known only as the Black Nun of Moret. The story begins with a painting now housed in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève near the Panthéon in central Paris. It depicts a Black woman dressed in the habit of a nun, produced by an unknown artist most likely between 1695 and 1700. The work is remarkable for several reasons.
In seventeenth-century France, it was highly unusual to paint an ordinary nun at all. It was even more extraordinary that the subject was a Black woman, at a time when very few people in France—let alone cloistered nuns—had dark skin. The painting remained hidden for centuries, only discovered in an attic in 2014, restored, and placed on public display. The woman in the painting was Louise Marie Thérèse.
Her exact birth date is uncertain; some studies suggest around 1664, others place it in the late 1650s. The painting itself offers little clarity, as its date is unknown and its artistic skill is modest. She appears to be in her late twenties or thirties. Virtually nothing is known of her early life.
She enters the historical record only in the 1690s and 1700s, when prominent French aristocrats began writing about her. She lived at the Benedictine convent of Villiers-sur-Morin, north-central France, near the château of Fontainebleau, a residence the court of Louis XIV used frequently, particularly in autumn during hunting season. There she was known as La More—the Moor—a term commonly used in early modern Europe to describe dark-skinned people. The question that drew so much attention was why a Black woman had ended up as a nun in a convent in northern France, and why aristocrats visited her and wrote about her.
The answer, contemporaries believed, lay with the king and queen themselves. Louis XIV had ascended the throne in 1643 at the age of four and a half and would reign until 1715, the longest of any European monarch. He had numerous mistresses and fathered many illegitimate children. His wife, Maria Theresa of Spain, daughter of King Philip IV, had married him in 1660 as part of a peace agreement ending a long-running war between France and Spain.
She was well aware of her husband’s infidelities. Yet for a reigning queen to bear illegitimate children would have been almost unthinkable, far more shocking than the king’s behavior. Against this backdrop, three main theories emerged to explain the Black Nun of Moret and the royal family’s interest in her. The first theory holds that she was the king’s daughter.
Seventeenth-century European monarchs were notorious for extramarital affairs. Charles II of England famously lost count of his illegitimate children. Louis XIV was no exception. By the mid-seventeenth century, France had become a colonial power engaged in the slave trade between West Africa and the Caribbean, and while Black women were rare in France, some were present.
It is plausible that Louis fathered a daughter with a Black woman at court and sent her to a convent to be raised quietly. He then arranged for courtiers to visit her periodically and provided her pension in 1695. There are hints that he may have fathered another dark-skinned child named Dorothy, but the evidence for her existence is even thinner. Louis was famously secretive, concealing what he deemed unfit for public knowledge, including his discreet marriage to Madame de Maintenon in 1683.
That he could have hidden such an arrangement is entirely plausible. The second theory, favored by many historians, holds that Louise Marie Thérèse was actually the daughter of the queen. In the seventeenth century, it was common for royal courts to retain people considered oddities, including dwarves and individuals from Africa. One such figure was Nabo, a Black dwarf said to reside at the court.
The theory suggests that after her husband’s philandering began, Queen Maria Theresa engaged in a liaison with Nabo, resulting in a child who had to be secretly sent away to avoid embarrassment. There is another layer to this theory. On November 16, 1664, Maria Theresa gave birth to her third child, a daughter officially named Marie Anne. Barely six weeks later, the child was declared dead, her body publicly displayed before burial.
Proponents of the theory insist the child never died, arguing that a substitute body or empty coffin was used to conceal the devastating secret that the princess was Black. Alexander Bontemps, the king’s discreet first valet, is said to have quietly removed the child from court, sending her first to the provinces, then through religious houses, before she finally disappeared into the Benedictine convent. Critics of this theory are unequivocal. Raised in an intensely pious court, Maria Theresa could not have borne a child by anyone other than the king.
Royal births were public events carefully watched by courtiers and foreign ambassadors, none of whom ever reported the birth of a Black princess. Such news would have reverberated across Europe. Some historians instead point to a grim medical reality: Marie Anne was born after a brutal delivery, premature and gravely ill. Her skin, darkened by a lack of oxygen, may have inspired rumors later transformed into legend.
Louise Marie Thérèse’s name would certainly suggest she was the queen’s daughter. But Louise is also the female counterpart of Louis, so the name could have been chosen if she were the king’s illegitimate child. It does not automatically imply she was the biological child of either. She could simply have been given the names of both king and queen as a sponsored orphan of the royal couple.
This was not uncommon in seventeenth-century France, where the crown sometimes became the ward of infants. Hundreds of orphaned women, known as the daughters of the king, were sent to New France—modern-day Quebec—under Louis XIV’s patronage to help populate the colony. Millions of North Americans today descend from them. The third theory is that Louise Marie Thérèse was a Black orphan given royal patronage.
This would explain the pension provided by the king in 1695 and why court nobles were occasionally sent to Morêt to check on her. The sources for her story come from several prominent French aristocrats of the era. The king’s first cousin, the Duchess of Montpensier, kept an extensive diary noting that the king frequently sent people to Morêt to look in on the Black Nun. By then the queen was long dead, having died in 1683 at age forty-four.
These accounts also claim Louise was baptized at court before being discreetly removed to the convent, where she was notably well educated. Surviving letters reveal she could read and write with ease. The most detailed account came from Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, a prominent courtier and memoirist whose enormous diaries are considered the finest account of the courts of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He too was unsure of Louise’s parentage.
He wrote that she was a woman of color, a Moorish woman placed in the convent very young by Bontemps, the king’s valet. She received the utmost care and attention, but never was shown to anybody. When the late queen or Madame de Maintenon went to the convent, they did not always see her, but always watched over her welfare. She was treated with more consideration than people of the most distinguished rank, and she herself made much of the care taken of her and the mystery by which she was surrounded.
Although she lived regularly, she was not too contented with her position. Hearing the king hunt in the forest one day, she forgot herself so far as to exclaim, “My brother is hunting. ” It was pretended that she was a daughter of the king and queen, but that she had been hidden away on account of her color, and the report was spread that the queen had had a miscarriage. Many people believed it, Saint-Simon noted, but whether it was true or not remained an enigma.
Louise’s later life is nearly as obscure as her early years. After the queen’s death in 1683, Louis XIV lived until 1715, but thereafter there was little reason for the royal court to maintain contact with the mystery woman at the convent. Nuns lived a private, cloistered existence behind closed walls. What can be inferred suggests an outwardly ordinary life of prayer, reading, and routine labor, though the privileges she enjoyed set her apart, hinting at ties to the court that never fully faded.
A document she wrote in April 1725 attests to her continued presence at the convent in her sixties. The last surviving document she signed is dated January 10, 1730. It is speculated that she died in 1732, at around seventy years of age, but even this cannot be established with certainty. The story has captured modern imagination.
In 1978, the French writer Pierre Mariel de Jol published an elaborate theory in his book tying the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask to the Black Nun, claiming the masked prisoner was actually Nabo the Black dwarf, imprisoned after the king discovered that the queen had borne the nun following an affair with him. It made for a good story, but there is almost no evidence to support it. Nevertheless, it sparked renewed interest in Louise Marie Thérèse. Her story featured in the television series Versailles, produced between 2015 and 2018, following the theory that she was the queen’s daughter.
The discovery of her painting in 2014 also generated fresh academic interest, with numerous papers appearing in the following decade. An exhibition titled La More de Morêt ran at the Musée Château de Bruyères in 2019. To this day, the identity of the Black Nun of Morêt remains unresolved. Her parents may have been the king, the queen, or neither.
What is certain is that a Black woman lived for decades in a French convent, protected and watched over by the most powerful royal family in Europe, surrounded by mystery that was never lifted.