In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris.

In 1840, she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity.

Though married to Hippolyte Colet, Louise had a steamy eight-year affair, in two stages, with Gustave Flaubert.

[1] In 1859, Louise wrote a novel, Lui, a thinly disguised account of her affair with Musset and her frustration with Flaubert.

In many others, Flaubert gives lengthy appreciations and critical comments on the poems that Colet sent to him for his judgment before offering them for publication.