Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (
baptized 18 March 1634 – 25 May 1693), better known as
Madame de La Fayette, was a
French writer, the author of
La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical
novel and one of the earliest novels in literature.
Life
Christened
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in
Paris to a family of minor but rich nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the
maid of honor to
Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from
Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in
Italian and
Latin. Ménage would lead her to join the fashionable
salons of
Madame de Rambouillet and
Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of
Madame de Sévigné, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend.
In 1655, de la Vergne married François Motier, Comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen years her senior, with whom she would have two sons. She accompanied him to country estates in
Auvergne and
Bourbonnais although she made frequent trips back to Paris, where she began to mix with court society and formed her own successful salon. Some of her acquaintances included
Henrietta of England, future Duchess of Orleans, who asked La Fayette to write her biography;
Antoine Arnauld; and the leading French writers
Segrais and
Huet. Earlier on, during the
Fronde, La Fayette had also befriended the
Cardinal de Retz.
Settling permanently in Paris in 1659, La Fayette published, anonymously,
La Princesse de Montpensier in 1662. From 1665 onwards she formed a close relationship with
François de La Rochefoucauld, author of
Maximes, who introduced her to many literary luminaries of the time, including
Racine and
Boileau. 1669 saw the publication of the first volume of
Zaïde, a Hispano-Moorish
romance which was signed by Segrais but is almost certainly attributable to La Fayette. The second volume appeared in 1671. The title ran through reprints and translations mostly thanks to the preface Huet had offered.
Marie de LaFayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678)
La Fayette's most famous novel was
La Princesse de Clèves, first published anonymously in March 1678. An immense success, the work is often taken to be the first true French novel and a prototype of the early psychological novel.
The death of La Rochefoucauld in 1680 and her husband in 1683 led La Fayette to lead a less active social life in her later years. Three works were published posthumously:
La Comtesse de Tende (1718),
Histoire d'Henriette d'Angleterre (1720), and
Memoires de la Cour de France (1731).
