Les Neuf Sœurs

Its name referred to the nine Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne/Memory, patrons of the arts and sciences since antiquity, and long significant in French cultural circles.

During the French Revolution, while the Académie Royale des Sciences et des Arts was drastically reorganised, two members of the lodge, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Gilbert Romme, in collaboration with Henri Grégoire, helped to organise a "Société Libre des Sciences, Belles Lettres et Arts", to subsidise what had become the Institut de France so as to keep the original influence of the "Neuf Soeurs" intact.

In 1778, the year Voltaire became a member, Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones also were accepted along with Jean Sylvain Bailly.

When Franklin, after a long and influential stay in Europe, returned to America to participate in the writing of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson a non-Mason took over as American Envoy.

At the same time Jefferson's friend, American Founding Father John Adams, was the neighbour, at Auteuil, of Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, who hosted the famous Cercle d'Auteuil where the influence of Les Neuf Sœurs was at its highest.