Women of Modern France

by Hugo P. Thieme

Mme. de Lambert believed that the demands of the time were just the opposite of those of the seventeenth century: "What a multitude of tastes nowadays—the table, play, theatre! When money and luxury are supreme, true honor loses its power. Persons seek only those houses where shameful luxury reigns." In her own salon, none might enter who were not of the small number of the elect.

Very little is known of the life of Mme. de Lambert. She was born in 1647, and, in spite of the unfavorable surroundings of her youth and of a dissolute, extravagant, and unrefined mother, the observance of decorum and honor became the actuating principle of her life. Until her marriage (in 1666) to Henri de Lambert, Marquis de Bris en Auxerrois, she was in the midst of the grossest licentiousness and freedom of manners; when married, she entered a family the very opposite of her own.

She was a woman who believed in the power of ambitious energy. To her son she once said: "Nothing is less becoming to a young man than a certain modesty that makes him believe that he is not capable of great things. This modesty is a languor of the soul, which prevents it from soaring and rapidly carrying itself to glory."

At first she lived in the Hôtel de Lambert (in the Ile Saint-Louis), renowned for its splendidly sculptured decorations, painted ceilings, panels, and staircases. Her famous Salon des Muses and Cabinet d'Amours were filled with the finest works of art and the most exquisite paintings. There the élite of all classes were entertained until the death of her husband (1686), when the hôtel was closed; it was not reopened until 1710.

Though left with immense wealth, her affairs were in a very complicated state. While actively employed in untangling her difficulties, she at the same time superintended the education of her son and daughter. After long and trying lawsuits, she managed to put her fortune in order and established herself at Paris, where the Duc de Nevers ceded to her, for life, a large portion of the magnificently furnished Palais Mazarin, now the National Library. On the completion of her work in remodelling this palace and furnishing it with the most costly and beautiful panel paintings by Watteau and other artists, she inaugurated her Tuesday and Wednesday dinner parties.

One remarkable characteristic of her company was the age of her intimate associates—the Marquis de Saint-Aulaire, Fontenelle, Mme. Dacier, and her husband, Louis de Sacy, all of whom, as well as Mme. de Lambert herself, had passed threescore and more; but they still kept alive the cherished memories of the brilliant society of their youth. Mme. de Lambert did not personally know Mme. de Rambouillet, but she visited the latter's daughter, Julie d'Angennes, from whom she learned the customs and etiquette in vogue at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The Wednesday dinners of Mme. de Lambert were to her intimate friends, while every Tuesday afternoon she received a general circle which indulged in general conversation and read and discussed books which were about to be published; gambling, which seemed to be the principal means of entertaining in those days, had no place there. Fontenelle says: "It was, with very few exceptions, the only house which had been preserved from the epidemic of gambling—the only house where persons congregated simply for the sake of talking sensibly and with esprit. Those who had their reasons for considering it bad taste that conversation was still carried on in any place, cast mean reflections, whenever they could, against the house of Mme. de Lambert." In the evening, she received only a few select friends with whom she talked seriously. Her salon soon became the envy of those who were not admitted (and they were numerous), and was the object of many calumnies and attacks.

During this time she found leisure to write two treatises of practical morality, Avis d'une mère à son fils, and Avis d'une mère à sa fille, which appeared without her permission. The manuscripts, lent to friends, fell into the hands of a publisher; and although the authoress endeavored to prevent the distribution of the works by buying up the entire editions, they were published outside of France. The two works written to her children form an important contribution to the educational literature of the time; in them the religion of the eighteenth century is first defined.

"Above all these duties—civil and human (says the mother to her son)—is the duty you owe to the Supreme Being. Religion is a commerce established between God and man through the grace of God to man and through the duty of man to God. Elevated souls have for their God sentiments and a cult apart, which do not resemble at all those of the people; everything issues from the heart and goes to God."

In these works, she attacked also the fad of free-thinking in vogue among the young men of the time. She was one of the few women of that age who could not separate themselves from reason and thought, even in religion; the latter was a matter for the reason and the intellect to decide, and was thus an elevated product of the mind rather than an instinct coming from the heart, or a positive revelation as it was in the seventeenth century. In this view, Madame de Lambert indicated the beginning of the later eighteenth-century spirit.