The pregnancy of Marie Louise of Orléans, Queen of Spain in 1685 came as a surprise for all involved. The Spanish Consort, married already for 6 years to an invalid whose tongue was so large he could not shut his mouth, relayed the story of the conception to her uncle, who demanded every detail:
The King is prone to exorcisms so that he might be whole. And so, one night, the Queen (the old one) called myself and the King to her rooms. She had brought a mystic man in, from who knows where, and had me undress the King for him. After an hour or so of chanting and dancing, he had the King so riled up that he told me to undress, which I would not do. So they instead left the room, and it was then I undressed, and the King mounted me and the deed was finally done. We have not done this again, and for that I am glad. The mystic man has left, and the Queen searched for another to repeat his miracles. I remain in doubt she will succeed.
Thus, an heir was conceived. Marie Louise of Orléans was no longer the pretty girl she had been when she had arrived, but a fat, sickly woman who was perpetually homesick. However, with this pregnancy she did finally have some purpose, and in November of that year, four months pregnant, she demanded that new female attendants be sent from France to aide her during this time. Not something the Queen Mother wanted, she was at first denied, but she had the King's support, for he loved her in his own way. Thus, six women from the French court, all of high birth, joined her household.
With these women, Marie Louise was able to grown more comfortable during her pregnancy, and actually seemed to regain some of the youthful prettiness she had lost in the previous years at court. In particular, she seems to have leaned upon Mademoiselle de Bouillon, who would describe the situation of the Queen almost perfectly in a letter to her elder brother:
She is almost pretty, almost Queenly and almost happy. But none are quite there and that is a shame.
It was the 21st of May, 1686, when the Queen of Spain gave birth to her first and only child, a daughter, named Juana Maria Luisa Anna de Spain, who at birth became the heir to the Spanish Empire, falling though it was. The first person to hold the baby was the Queen Mother, who apparently had to be manhandled to have the baby given to it's mother. The mother herself looked down at her baby and said a quote that would become famous in time:
It is a girl. That means I shall have to do this all again.
However, she would not. It seems whatever that mystic man had done to push the King into such a state that he was able to impregnate his wife, it could not be repeated, and the King and Queen would not have another child. Instead, the heir to would stay Juana Maria, and all the hopes and dreams of the Spanish Hapsburgs lay in that infant girl's hands.