Within a year after her marriage she gave
birth to twins; in the next year to triplets; in the third year
to quadruplets; in the fourth year to quintuplets, and in the
fifth year bore sextuplets; in this last labor she died. The then
present Lord de Maldemeure, he says, was one of the final
sextuplets. This case attracted great notice at the time, as the
family was quite noble and very well known. Seaux, their home,
was near Chambellay. Picus Mirandulae gathered from the ancient
Egyptian inscriptions that the women of Egypt brought forth
sometimes 8 children at a birth, and that one woman bore 30
children in 4 confinements. He also cites, from the history of a
certain Bishop of Necomus, that a woman named Antonia, in the
Territory of Mutina, Italy, now called Modena, had brought forth
40 sons before she was forty years of age, and that she had had 3
and 4 at a birth. At the auction of the San Donato collection of
pictures a portrait of Dianora Frescobaldi, by one of the
Bronzinos in the sixteenth century, sold for about $3000. At the
bottom of this portrait was an inscription stating that she was
the mother of 52 children. This remarkable woman never had less
than 3 at a birth, and tradition gives her as many as 6.
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