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!

Hélisenne de Crenne, Tormented by Love

Marguerite Briet, "Hélisenne de Crenne" (died after 25 August 1552)

In a post back in March, I noted that the French writer Madame de la Fayette is frequently said to have written the first modern novel--and yet today's writer, "Hélisenne de Crenne," published her extraordinarily popular novel, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours (The Torments of Love), in 1538, more than a hundred years before La Fayette's La Princesse de Montpensier appeared in 1662.

So popular was Hélisenne de Crenne's The Torments of Love that, by 1560, eight complete editions had been published. And between 1538 and 1541, she published three other works: Les Epistres familieres et invectives de ma dame Hélisenne (The Personal and Invective Letters of Madame Hélisenne, 1539), an epistolary novel; Le Songe de madame Hélisenne (The Dream of Madame Hélisenne, 1540), a dream allegory; and Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes (The First Four Books of the Aenead, 1541), a prose translation of the first four books of Virgil's Aeneid.

Who was this prolific and popular sixteenth-century woman writer? "Hélisenne de Crenne" is the pseudonym adopted by Marguerite Briet, born in Abbeville, Picardy, about the year 1510.

Little is known of her life aside from the fact that she married a minor noble, Philippe Fournelle, sieur de Crenne, but her work makes clear that she had received some sort of humanist education--she is familiar with biblical and classical sources and and shows a knowledge of Renaissance writers, including Italian writers like Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Jacopo Caviceo as well as a later French contemporary, Jean Lemaire de Belges.

There is also a reference to de Crenne in Nicolas Rumet's Historia Picardiae (History of Picardy, c. 1562): "In the year 1540, in the month of May, a learned woman, originally from Abbeville, named Marguerite Briet (commonly called Hélisenne de Crenne), a Gallic poet, lived in Paris at the sign of Augustus."

Just four legal documents survive, only one of those offering much personal information, and even that is suggestive rather than conclusive. A document from 1552 indicates that Marguerite Briet is "separated" from her husband and living in Saint-Germain-des-Près.

Given the lack of much biographical data, the tendency has been to read Hélisenne's work autobiographically, in particular The Torments of Love, in which a young woman, named "Hélisenne," narrates her own story. "Hélisenne" is beautiful (of course) and happily married (she married at age eleven!!!!) to a young nobleman--until one day her mutually satisfying marriage is destroyed when she looks out a window and sees a young, beautiful, but not noble, man, Guenelic.

A great deal of physical cruelty, torment, and despair follows--ultimately, both lovers die, and it is interesting to see how this story plays out in relationship to Madame de la Fayette's most well-known work, The Princess of Clèves--in which a young and beautiful woman who is happily married to a young nobleman sees and falls in love with another man. But, unlike Hélisenne, the princess does not give in to her passion. And she doesn't die, either, though her unfortunate husband does . . . Even then, however, the princess will not marry the man she loves (and who loves her)--it would dishonor her dead husband. 

While the exact date of Marguerite Briet's death is not known, the 1552 legal document that makes a series of gifts is dated 25 August--and that's why we know her death can be dated "after" that date.

For an online biographical essay, the piece by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu at the SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l'Etude des Femmes de l'Ancien Régime) website can be accessed by clicking here. (Sometimes the SIEFAR site is unavailable--if so, you can view a cached version of the essay from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by clicking here.)

For an excellent study, see Diane Wood's Hélisenne de Crenne. At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism. And The Torments of Love is available in an excellent and affordable translation by Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall (used copies sometimes cost as little as one cent!! why not snag one?)

Madame de la Fayette and "La Princesse de Clèves"

Madame de la Fayette (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette, baptized 18 March 1634) 

Born in Paris, educated in Greek, Latin, and Italian, appointed maid of honor to the French queen, Anne of Austria, and married to a widowed nobleman, the comte de la Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, madame de la Fayette, became one of the foremost cultural figures in seventeenth-century Paris. While literary history has often focused on male writers as originators of the novel, Madame de la Fayette has been frequently been called the creator of the modern novel.

Madame de la Fayette's first published work, a novella, La Princesse de Montpensier, was published anonymously in 1662. In 1669, the first volume of her historical romance, Zaïde, appeared. Set in Spain, the novel was published under the pseudonym Segrais; the second volume was published two years later, in 1671.

La Fayette's most important--and influential--work is also attributed to "Segrais." Published in 1678, La Princesse de Clèves is a historical novel, set in the mid-sixteenth century at the court of Henry II of France. The novel was enormously popular, both a critical and commercial success.

I like its presentation of a young, married woman who is awakened to romantic love--but who also has a strength of character and sense of self that allow her to act honorably. She is neither faithless to her worthy husband nor a victim of her own desires and passions.

Three additional works were published after Madame de la Fayette's death on 15 May 1693: a novel, La Comtesse de Tende (1718), a memoir of her friend, Queen Henrietta Maria of England, Histoire d'Henriette d'Angleterre (1720), and Mémoires de la Cour de France (1731), her memoirs of the court of Louis XIV.

The Princess of Montpensier and The Princess of Clèves are both available online, in the original French or in English, at Project Gutenberg and at the Internet Archive.

But there's nothing like a real book, in my estimation, and so I'd recommend an affordable, accessible paperback edition--Penguin and Oxford's Worlds Classics both have editions for under ten dollars. 

There is no full-length biography of Madame de la Fayette in English, but there is an excellent biographical essay by Elizabeth Goldsmith in Europe, 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, which you can access by clicking here.