Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles

For the cultivated people of the time, it was a true honor to be admitted to the celebrated "Tuesdays", where the dignity and high class of the "Great Century" were still in the air.

According to her friend the Abbé de La Rivière, "She fell victim to a colic of cultivation and wit, an illness which stuck her suddenly and which remained incurable until her death."

She encouraged writers to the highest moral tone and contributed to orienting the movement of ideas toward new literary forms: from her salon originated Antoine Houdar de la Motte's attacks on the three unities, on versification, and on Homer, whom Madame de Lambert thought dull; which did not prevent her from receiving such partisans of the Classical writers as Anne Dacier, Father d’Olivet, or Valincour.

Madame de Lambert, says Fontenelle, "was not only ardent to serve her friends, without waiting for their request, nor the humiliating exposition of their need; but a good deed to be done, even for someone she had no connection with, always interested her intensely, and the circumstances had to be especially contrary, for her not to succumb.

This text finely evokes the paradoxes of the feminine condition: I have examined whether women could be better employed : I have found respectable authors who have thought that they had qualities which might carry them to great things, such as imagination, feeling, taste : gifts which they have received from Nature.

Since feeling dominates them, and leads them naturally towards love, I have sought whether they could be saved from the disadvantages of that passion, by separating pleasure from what is called vice.

I have therefore imagined a metaphysics of love : let her practise it who can.Without rejecting the attractions of femininity, the author revolts against the emptiness of women's education, reproaching Molière with '"having attached to learning the shame which was the lot of vice."

She had a true talent for crafting maxims with a new and original turn : "It is often well thought," writes the nineteenth-century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "but it is even better said.

The Marquise de Lambert's Works were published a number of times, beginning in 1747; besides the pieces listed above, they contained Dialogue entre Alexandre et Demosthène sur l’égalité des biens [Dialogue between Alexander and Demosthenes on the Equality of Happiness]; Psyché, en grec Âme [Psyche, Soul in Greek]; La Femme ermite, nouvelle [The Female Hermit]; letters, portraits, and discourses.