Born in Rome, she was the daughter and heiress of Jean de Vivonne, marquis of Pisani, and Giulia Savelli, who belonged to a noble Roman family.

[1] The young and witty marquise found the coarseness and intrigues of the French court little to her taste and, in 1620, she began to gather around her the circle that gave its renown to her salon.

The marquise had a genuine kindness and a lack of prejudice that enabled her to entertain princes and princesses of the blood royal and literary men with the same grace, whilst among her intimate friends was the actress Angélique Paulet.

Moreover, the almost uniform excellence of the memoirs and letters of 17th century French men and women may be traced largely to the development of conversation as a fine art at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and the consequent establishment of a standard of clear and adequate expression.

They especially favoured an elaborate and quintessenced kind of colloquial and literary expression, imitated from Giambattista Marini and Luís de Góngora y Argote, then fashionable throughout Europe.

Molière's immortal Précieuses ridicules was no doubt directly levelled not at the Hôtel de Rambouillet itself, but at the numerous coteries which in the course of years had sprung up in imitation of it.