Mademoiselle de Montpensier's entry into Orleans during the 1652 slingshot.

In 1829, the Duc d'Orléans, with his passion for history, commissioned paintings from artists of the new school to turn the Galerie d'Orléans into a historical gallery recounting the great events that took place there. Now King of the French, Louis-Philippe continued to support the Romantics, and among the subjects delivered by Vernet, Scheffer, Devéria and Steuben, the Fronde occupied three compositions, including L'Entrée de Mademoiselle de Montpensier à Orléans, pendant la Fronde, in 1652, commissioned from Alfred Johannot. Fortunately, the painter produced a reduced version, which he exhibited at the Salon of 1833, and which gives us an insight into this composition, the first version of which burned down with the entire gallery in February 1848. The reduced version was probably commissioned by Madame Adélaide, the king's sister, who had it in the second salon of her Palais-Royal apartment. The subject itself recounts a crucial episode in the Fronde, which pitted the Prince de Condé against Mazarin under the regency of Marie de Médicis, between 1651 and 1653. Allied with her cousin Condé, Mlle de Montpensier, led by her father Gaston, decided to occupy Orléans in order to close the way to the royal army moving up the Loire. While the people of Orléans hesitated to receive her, fearing reprisals from the king's troops arriving at the same time, she had herself led to an old burnt gate, which she had knocked down, and entered shouting: "Vive le roi, vive les princes, et point de Mazarin I", As a historian, Johannot borrows from the Mémoires de la Grande Mademoiselle all the details necessary for historical accuracy, mastering as no other the costume and mores of the 17th century, which this close friend of Vigny and Hugo has been tackling in his literary subjects since the late 1820s. A central figure in Romantic circles, in a manner dear to the Devéria brothers, he also had friends pose for him, as Jean Gigoux, recognizable among the Orléanais, recounts.