Initially famous as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a novel published in 1747, she became the world's best-known living woman writer after the success of her sentimental comedy Cénie in 1750.
On her side, the bride received a large house inherited by her mother from Jacques Callot, situated in Villers-lès-Nancy, where the couple lived for about six years.
In 1718, deeply in debt and already living apart, the Graffignys signed a document, which gave her authority to deal with the family's finances and required him to leave Lorraine for Paris.
[7] As a widow, Françoise de Graffigny was free from her brutal husband, but she never fully recovered from the financial losses or the emotional trauma of her marriage.
[8] By that date, the court of Lorraine had moved to Lunéville, where she lived with the support of the duke's widow, the dowager duchess and regent, Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans.
[10] She also met an even younger man, François-Antoine Devaux, who had trained to become a lawyer but dreamed of being a writer; known to everyone as Panpan, he became her closest friend and confidant, and in 1733 they began a correspondence that continued until her death.
[11] This idyllic period came to an end in 1737, when duke François-Étienne de Lorraine ceded his duchy to France to obtain French support for his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria.
[13] Françoise de Graffigny planned to join them in Paris in spring 1739, but she needed to bridge the winter months, and wheedled an invitation to Cirey, the château where Émilie, marquise du Châtelet, had been living since 1734 with her lover, Voltaire.
He or she inserted anecdotes and witticisms to make Voltaire seem more illustrious, and took every opportunity to show Françoise de Graffigny as a sentimental, foolish and irresponsible gossip.
Émilie intercepted a letter from Devaux which mentioned the work, leapt to the false conclusion that her guest had copied a canto and circulated it, and accused her of treachery.
For a month after that, Françoise de Graffigny was a virtual prisoner at Cirey, until her lover Desmarest passed through en route to Paris and took her on the final leg of her journey.
Her lover Desmarest was away much of the time with his regiment, and was trapped in the besieged city of Prague in late 1741; when he returned to Paris without funds to re-equip himself, he accepted money from his mistress even though he had already decided to leave her.
Comte de Caylus gave her the outline of a "nouvelle espagnole", a type of short fiction in vogue since the seventeenth century, which she developed on her own.
[28] Her confidence restored with the two short stories, she began writing two more substantial works, an epistolary novel, published in December 1747 as Lettres d'une Péruvienne (Letters from a Peruvian Woman), and a sentimental comedy, staged in June 1750 as Cénie.
[34] Madame de Graffigny's fame also made her house a popular place for social gatherings, and she was one of the important salon hostesses in mid-century Paris.
[35] She was assisted by the presence of her cousin's daughter, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, a charming young woman whose high nobility and low wealth seemed to condemn her to a convent or a marriage of convenience.
Françoise de Graffigny brought her from a provincial convent to Paris in September 1746, and played a major role in arranging her love-match marriage to the financier philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius on 17 August 1751.
[37] Here she received her friends, visitors from all over Europe, and many of the most famous French writers and political figures of the era, including d'Alembert, Diderot, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Prévost, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Turgot, and Voltaire.
[43] Scores of excellent critical and interpretive articles and chapters in books have been devoted to Françoise de Graffigny and her works in the past thirty years.