Madame Ulrich

Madame Ulrich was the daughter of one of King Louis XIV's Vingt-Quatre Violons (a five-part string ensemble at the French royal court).

According to André Blanc, "the careful composition, the considerable role of disguises and their final resolution, a certain confusion at times, a romantic intention, the very attack of the comedy, very brilliant, hardly resembles Dancourt's manner of this period."

Following the death of her friend Jean de La Fontaine, Madame Ulrich published Posthumous Works in 1696, for which she wrote a preface and a dedication to the Marquis de Sablé, as well as a portrait of the poet, and included unpublished works (including the Tale of the Quiproquos, new versions of certain fables, of which she owned the manuscripts, verses and two letters written to her by La Fontaine).

Initially sent with her daughter Thérèse to a convent to repent, she was then regularly arrested and confined at Les Madelonnettes, from which she escaped, at Le Refuge, and then at Hôpital Général.

[6] Far from the "debauched courtesan, unworthy mother and venal muse" to which history has long reduced her, Aurore Évain concludes that "the few biographical and literary elements we have today enable us to re-establish the portrait of a free, cultivated woman, a promising writer [...], but whose auctorial recognition and literary creation were violently thwarted by the social and moral conditions imposed on women".