Born in 1699, Madame Geoffrin was the first child of a bourgeois named Pierre Rodet, a valet de chambre for the Duchess of Burgundy, and Angélique Thérèse Chemineau, the daughter of a Parisian Banker.

At thirteen, she was engaged to be married to the widower Pierre François Geoffrin, a lieutenant-colonel of the National Guard and a prosperous general cashier of the Saint-Gobain Venetian mirror manufactory.

Nearly two years after the wedding, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named also Marie Thérèse, and the future Marquise de La Ferté-Imbault.

[6] Madame Geoffrin's popularity in the mid-eighteenth century came during a time where the center of social life was beginning to move away from the French court and toward the salons of Paris.

"Geoffrin, who acted as a mentor and model for other salonnières, was responsible for two innovations that set Enlightenment salons apart from their predecessors and from other social and literacy gatherings of the day.

After Geoffrin launched her weekly dinners, the Parisian salon took on the form that made it the social base of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters: a regular and regulated formal gathering hosted by a woman in her own home which served as a forum and locus of intellectual activity.

Historian Denise Yim writes: "The most distinguished salonnières were discerning women who selected their company with care, set the tone, guided the conversation, and could influence the fortunes of those appearing there.

The hostess herself had gained a European reputation even before her journey to Poland, and to dine with Madame Geoffrin was by some people considered almost as great an honor as being presented at Versailles.

"[13]" Yim continues, "Whether it was Madame Geoffrin's design to attract all the most eminent foreigners to her salon, thereby spreading the reputation of her home throughout Europe, as Marmontel wrote, or whether this was the natural consequence of the presence of so many philosophes and Encyclopédistes, it was a fact that no foreign minister, no man or woman of note who arrived in Paris failed to call on Madame Geoffrin in the hope of being invited to one of her select dinners.

"Regularity was part of a greater sense of organization that defined all aspects of Madame Geoffrin's life and every hour of her day, from a 5 a.m. rising, through a morning of domestic duties, letter writing, and errands, to the afternoons she devoted twice a week to her salon.

For example, with no education or remarkable mental gifts of a sort that leave permanent traces, she was the best representative of the women of her time who held their place in the world solely through their skill in organizing and conducting a salon.

"[16] Denise Yim adds that "these women considered themselves the purveyors, the disseminators, the nurturers, the very guardians of taste in the belles lettres, in the fine arts, and in the music.

It was more about simply reinforcing a social bond through gift-giving, as it was for the socialites who exchanged little gifts with each other, but instead made a financial relationship part of urbane sociability––especially when the rapport became more or less permanent in the form of allowances, such as the ones that Madame Geoffrin bestowed upon d'Alembert, Thomas, and the abbé Morellet.

[22] Goodman writes, "The battle of the hearts and minds of the elite of the eighteenth century was, for a few years, fought out in a single house on the rue Saint-Honoré!

"[25] In relation to her (possible) conception and patronage of the highly regarded historical artist Carle Van Loo's painting, Une Conversation the historian Emma Barker writes, "most recent commentators have agreed in locating the interest and significance of these works in their having been commissioned by an exceptional female patron, the hostess of a celebrated Parisian salon whose guests included some of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment.

Her correspondence with both Catherine the Great of Russia and King Stanislaw August of Poland, as well as several other dignitaries and heads of state often centered around the commission of several paintings that were often hung in her salon.

She writes, "Under the guidance of Marie-Therese Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse and Suzanne Necker, Parisian salons became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment.

"[31] Goodman uses Geoffrin to argue that salonnières in the eighteenth century represented a re-shaping of an existing form of sociability that would serve the ambitions of the women who ran them.

Instead he claims that the politeness and gift giving would have been unthinkable without the presences of fashionable men of letters, which attracted to her salon the finest representatives of the Parisian and European aristocracy, and which permitted her to appear as a protector of talents and an accomplished socialite.

He states, "There is no reason to contradict the widely held view that the salon was a feminist space insofar as it was more often than not presided over by a woman who gave it tone and structure.

"[37] However, he states, "But it is one thing to say that the presence of a woman is a distinguishing feature of salons and another to argue that female dominance set them apart from other institutions of elite sociability.

"[39] Kale rejects the notion that Geoffrin held any semblance of power; his argument debases the long-held idea that the female-run salons were, "institutions of democratic sociability.