Madame de Sablé (1598–1678)

Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé, was born in 1598 at the Château de Courtanvaux in northwestern France, the estate of her ancient and powerful aristocratic family. Her parents were Gilles de Souvré, a marshal of France, viceroy of the province of Touraine, and governor of King Louis XIII in his minority, and his wife Françoise de Bailleul, dame de Renouard. In 1610, at age 12, Madeleine was named a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie de' Medici, then the regent of France. Four years later, she was married to Philippe Emmanuel de Laval, marquis de Sablé. The couple had nine children, of whom only four survived childhood. The spouses led increasingly separate lives and conducted barely concealed affairs. Madame de Sablé frequented the literary salons of Paris and learned more about literature and writing. By 1648, she had become the hostess of her own salon, first in the fashionable Place Royale and then in the apartment she had constructed on the grounds of the Port-Royal convent. Her salon specialized in the production of the literary genre of the "maxim," a concise, epigrammatic phrase that explored the contradictions of human psychology. François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, emerged as the master of the genre, and Madame de Sablé served as a critic and editor for his maxims, but also composed her own, which were published posthumously. Other leading members of her salon included Blaise Pascal, and Madame de Sévigné. During the Fronde, the intermittent civil war that pitted French aristocrats and Parliamentarians against the king, Madame de Sablé managed to maintain close friendships with those on both sides of the conflict. Her collection of maxims, published as Maximes: Précédé de La femme en France, is still in print.