Mary Gwendolin Byrd Caldwell

Mary Gwendolin Byrd, Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville (; 1863–1909) was an American philanthropist and socialite. She funded the foundation of the Catholic University at Washington, D.C. in the 1880s, but had renounced the Roman Catholic faith by 1904.

Family The Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville and her sister, the Baroness von Zedtwitz, were the daughters of William S. Caldwell, a Kentucky gas baron and his wife Mary Eliza (d. 1867), a German nobleman, the Baron von Zedtwitz, a Lutheran, and since then left the Roman Catholic communion. The baron and his wife Mary Elizabeth had one son, Waldemar Konrad von Zedtwitz, a future bridge champion.

Debutante Likeness printed in The Savannah Morning News in 1904. Her sister, the Baroness von Zedtwitz, gave Caldwell Chapel to the university. The young heiress went to Italy in 1887, and there met Joachim, 4th Prince Murat, who was thirty-three years her senior, and deeply in debt. He was the grandson of Joachim-Napoleon, King of Naples, and of Caroline, sister of Napoleon I. the ceremony being performed by Bishop Spalding in Paris. Mary Gwendolin told her sister in 1901 that she had been sexually involved with Spalding for twenty years, beginning when she was nineteen. "here is general consensus that the sisters' stories about Spalding bore little relation to the facts, that their tragic marriages and psychic illnesses, plus Spalding's unwillingness to arrange an annulment for Mary Elizabeth, contributed to their turning against the Church."

Death

Honors Golden Rose (1887)