Catherine de Vivonne, the "Incomparable Arthénice"

Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (died 2 December 1665)

Although she herself was not a writer, Madame de Rambouillet exerted a powerful influence over the development of French literature in the early-modern period. She was the central figure in establishing a literary salon that cultivated intellectual and artistic conversation, shaped a sophisticated literary language, and fostered the development of writers and thinkers. The writer Jean Regnault de Segrais would later write of her that she "corrected the wicked customs that went before her" and that she "taught politesse to all those of her time who visited her."

A seventeenth-century portrait of
Catherine de Vivonne,
marquise de Rambouillet

Catherine de Vivonne was born in Rome in 1588 (the exact date is unknown). Her father, Jean de Vivonne, was a counselor to Henry III of France and an ambassador to Spain and to Rome. Three years before Catherine's birth, her father was granted the honorific military title of marshal of France (Henry III granted eight such titles between 1574 and 1589); in 1596, Jean de Vivonne was granted the title of marquis and the lordship of Pisani, in south-west France.

Catherine de Vivonne's mother, Giulia Savelli, was from a noble Roman family, the daughter of Cristoforo Savelli, prince of Albano, and Clarice Strozzi, who was the daughter of Roberto Strozzi and Maddalena de' Medici. (At the time of her marriage to Savelli, Guilia was the widow of Luigi Orsini; she married Savelli, then the French ambassador in Rome, in 1587.)

When she was just twelve years old, Catherine de Vivonne was married to Charles d'Angennes, a member of the French court (he would later be the French ambassador to Italy and Spain), who would inherit the title of marquis of Rambouillet.

Although Catherine de Vivonne and her husband were both intimates of the French court, by then the court of Henry IV and Marie de’ Medici (indeed, Catherine de Vivonne took part in the coronation), she withdrew from the court and from participation in its ceremonies and entertainments, disgusted by its coarseness and the "brutality" of the king's behavior and appetites. 

At the former Hôtel Pisani, which she had restored in an Italian-inspired decorative scheme and renamed Hôtel de Rambouillet, she opened her home, and in particular her Chambre bleu (the Blue Room) as a refuge from the harsh realities of city and court. 

In her salon (though the word was not in use until later), social differences were put aside--in this world, intellectual merit, not rank or title, was what mattered. There men and women with royal blood mingled with writers, philosophers, and actors. Among those whom she gathered in her Blue Room and whom she influenced were women we have met before: la Grande Mademoiselle, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier; the novelist Madame de la Fayette; the writer Madame de Sévigné; and the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry. 

l'Hôtel de Rambouillet, 
1929 illustration drawn from Gossuet's 1652 map of Paris

Catherine de Vivonne maintained her conversations at the Hôtel de Rambouillet until her death.

There is no biography of Catherine de Vivonne, at least not in English, but you will find an extended discussion of her, along with many other women famous and not-so-famous for their literary salons, in Benedetta Craveri's The Age of Conversation.

Madeleine de Scudéry, "the Incomparable Sappho"

Madeleine de Scudéry (born 15 November 1607)

Ridiculed and satirized by many of her male contemporaries, Madeleine de Scudéry was, despite her critics, a wildly successful novelist whose works were quickly translated and published in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Madeleine de Scudéry

The daughter of a minor aristocratic family, Scudéry was orphaned at the age of six. She was raised by an uncle who provided her with an extraordinary education: in addition to reading, writing, painting, dancing, and music, he exposed her to the study of agriculture, medicine, and "domestic economy." On her own, seemingly, she learned Spanish and Italian and developed an interest in philosophy.

After her uncle's death in 1637, Scudéry left Normandy for Paris, where she joined her brother, the playwright Georges de Scudéry, who introduced her into the vibrant salon life of the city. Her "pretensions" in becoming a regular figure in the salons--and then in establishing one of her own--are what seems to be the source of the ridicule directed at her.

Or at least one source. She also dared to write, at first using her brother's name as her pseudonym. Her first two works, the historical novel Ibrahim, ou l'illustre Bassa (Ibrahim or the Ilustrious Basa,1641) and the series of angry orations delivered by famous women, Les femmes illustres, ou Les harangues héroïques (Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues, 1642), were both published under Georges de Scudéry's name.

Her Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène or the Great Cyrus), published in ten volumes (over two million words!!!) between 1648 and 1653 brought her fame and acclaim (and the subsequent ridicule).* The historical romance was set in ancient Assyria and featured fictionalized versions of her contemporaries, with Scudéry writing herself as Sappho. 

After 1653, the Scudéry siblings moved to the Marais, where Madeleine established her Saturday salon, which she called her "Société du samedi." There the group discussed many literary works, including those of Marguerite de Navarre. Among those who regularly attended was a writer whom we have met before, Madame de la Fayette. (Her work was also appreciated and praised by another woman we've met, Madame de Sévigné.)

She continued to publish fiction, both multi-volume novels and novellas, but Scudéry also published philosophical dialogues (such as Conversations sur divers sujets, [Conversations upon Several Subjects, 1680] and Conversations morales [Moral Conversations, 1686) and epistolary fictions, following the model of Ovid's Heroides, in her Lettres amoureuses de divers autheurs de ce temps (Amorous Letters from Various Contemporary Authors, 1641).

More recently, Scudéry's philosophical achievements have come to be recognized. In the introduction to his entry on Scudéry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, John Conley notes,

A prominent novelist, Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) composed a series of dialogues dealing with philosophical issues. Primarily ethical in focus, her dialogues examine the virtues and vices proper to the aristocratic society of the period. They also explore questions of moral psychology, in particular the interplay between temperament and free will. In the area of epistemology, Scudéry analyzes the problem of certitude and self-knowledge. Theologically, she defends cosmological arguments demonstrating God's existence. Her aesthetic theory endorses the mimetic thesis concerning art as the imitation of nature but the individuality of artistic perception also receives attention. In her philosophical speculation, Scudéry stresses questions of gender; the relationship of philosophical theories to the condition of women receives substantial analysis.

Long framed by her critics as a pedantic précieuse, Scudéry has only recently attracted the interest of professional philosophers. . . . In the recent feminist expansion of the canon of humanities . . . the philosophical significance of her writings has emerged. Her literary corpus presents a novel version of the ancient philosophical method of dialogue; it also expresses original, sophisticated theories concerning the ethical, aesthetic, and theological disputes of early modernity.

For a wonderful introduction to Scudéry's diverse work, Jane Donawerth's Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues offers an excellent sampling. And if you're not up to tackling the two million words of Scudéry's Artamène, Karen Newman's The Story of Sapho offers a "self-contained section" of the historical romance:

The Story tells of Sapho, a woman writer modeled on the Greek Sappho, who deems marriage slavery. Interspersed in the love story of Sapho and Phaon are a series of conversations like those that took place in Scudéry's own salon in which Sapho and her circle discuss the nature of love, the education of women, writing, and right conduct. This edition also includes a translation of an oration, or harangue, of Scudéry's in which Sapho extols the talents and abilities of women in order to persuade them to write.

Madeleine de Scudéry died on 2 June 1701, at the age of ninety-three. To her friends, she was "the incomparable Sappho." (When they are not being described as a "tenth muse," women seem to be identified as a new Sappho . . . )

*When I was in graduate school, my professors went on and on about Samuel Richard's Clarissa, estimated to be 984,870 words long. Ha!!!!! Less than half as long as Artamène!

Madame de Sévigné, a Woman of Letters

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (born 5 February 1626)

Best known as Madame de Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was married, gave birth to two children, and widowed by the time she was twenty-five years old. She never remarried, choosing instead to devote herself to raising and educating her children and to the lively, intellectually stimulating salons of Paris.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
c. 1665

After her daughter Françoise married in 1669 and moved to Provence two years later, Sévigné began to write to her. On 6 February 1671, Sévigné sent the first of what would become more than a thousand letters to her daughter. Their exchange of letters continued until Sévigné's death in 1696. 

Her letters--which contained accounts of fashionable society, notes on various members of Sévigné's wide circle of friends and acquaintances, discussions of politics, morality, philosophy, and religion, and details of Sévigné's daily life and reading--were copied and circulated during her lifetime. The first small collection of selected letters from this voluminous correspondence was published in the early eighteenth century.

Sévigné's brilliant letters have long earned her a place as a significant literary figure. Despite the rather dismissive attitude of the writers of the "venerable" Encyclopedia Britannica (this is from the 2013 online edition: "The letters provide little that historians cannot find information about elsewhere, but Sévigné’s manner of telling her stories makes her version of current events and gossip unforgettable"), the significance of the content of her letters is now more widely recognized.  

Writing about Sévigné as a philosopher, John J. Conley notes, "in her correspondence, Sévigné presents her personal position on contested philosophical questions of the day. In many passages she defends her theories concerning nature, religion, moral psychology, and art." 

For Conley's introduction to Sévigné and her letters, an account that doesn't dismiss them as amusing trifles for purveying "gossip" but pays attention to the philosophical themes and issues she discusses, click here (this is an entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The bibliography of this essay notes useful studies for an introduction to Sévigné's moral philosophy, epistemology, and engagement with "Cartesian concepts."

But, maybe the best introduction to Sévigné is her letters. You can read them in a wonderful Penguin anthology or in a digitized edition from the Internet Archive.

Update, 4 February 2022: The Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Sévigné was "revised and updated" on 1 February 2022, but its evaluation of her work has not changed, nor is there any acknowledgement of her philosophical interests and engagement.