According to Edmond de Goncourt, when d'Alembert was asked why dancers like La Guimard made such prodigious fortunes, when singers did not, he responded, "It is a necessary consequence of the laws of motion".

[4] The portrait painter Mme Vigée-Lebrun said, "her dancing was but a sketch; she made only petits pas, simple steps, but with movements so graceful that the public preferred her to every other dancer.

[10] In truth there were three dinner parties a week, according to Edmond de Goncourt, one for the grandest of grands seigneurs and those of the highest consideration at Court; a second composed of writers and artists and wits that all but rivaled the salon of Mme Geoffrin; and a third to which were invited all the most ravishing and lascivious young women, according to the Mémoires secrets attributed to Bachaumont.

At the same time, according to Baron Grimm, during a bitter cold spell in January 1768, she asked for her allowance in coins, and, without taking an entourage, climbed to all the garrets of her neighborhood at Pantin, giving purses of money, coats and warm bedclothes.

[11] In the early 1770s, in defiance of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris, she opened the gorgeous hôtel Guimard in the Chaussée d'Antin designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the latest neoclassical taste, decorated with paintings by Fragonard, and with a theater seating five hundred spectators.

[12] The house was almost finished March 1773 when Grimm's Correspondance littéraire reported the famous anecdote of Fragonard's revenge: La Guimard had quarreled with the painter, who had depicted her as Terpsichore in large panels of her salon, and found a substitute.

Finding his way into the house unaccompanied, Fragonard picked up a palette of paints, and with a few deft touches transformed Mlle Guimard's Terpsichorean smile into a grimace of fury, without lessening in the least the likeness.