Madame de La Fayette

Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), French novelist, revolutionized the 17th-century novel by abandoning the excessive length and extravagance of précieuse romance for a concise and coldly rational vision of love.

Madame de La Fayette was born Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne in Paris to a family of the lesser nobility. Her mother's remarriage in 1650 provided Marie Madeleine with brilliant court connections, and at 16 she became a maid of honor to the Queen, enjoying warm association with Henriette (sister of Charles II of England) and Madame de Sévigné, as well as the tutelage of Gilles Ménage, Pierre Daniel Huet, and Jean Regnault de Segrais, respected literary arbiters of the time. Married in 1655 to François Motier, Comte de La Fayette, she bore him two sons; in 1659 the couple separated amiably, the count preferring country life to his wife's taste for the bustling capital.

Madame de La Fayette's first novel, actually a short story, was L'Histoire de la Princesse de Montpensier (1661), a rather somber tale of violent passion and jealousy set in the fateful triangle of love that would be her constant theme. Ménage corrected her uncertain style, and even broader collaboration brought about the second novel usually attributed to her, Zaïde (1669), a series of "Spanish" tales grouped after the manner of traditional romance. In accordance with proper usage of the times, none of her works appeared under her own name.

In 1665 Madame de La Fayette began her long association with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld; whether platonic or otherwise, their relationship endured until the moralist's death in 1680. She almost surely had a hand in correcting later editions of his Maximes, and he is usually credited with greatly influencing her masterpiece, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), often referred to as the single most important novel of the century. In a bare, voluntarily unornamented style, Madame de La Fayette related the tragic confinement of a young woman's love. Unfree, the heroine can only hope to defeat forbidden desire by avowing her weakness to her husband; after his death, she persists in her retreat before this love, once found impossible and so doomed to be forever untrue. Critics have seen in the novel an image of the closed universe of late-17th-century Versailles, as well as that trace of darkening pessimism related to the thought of La Rochefoucauld, Blaise Pascal, and the Jansenist movement. The brief Comtesse de Tende and some historical writings were published after Madame de La Fayette's death in Paris on May 25, 1693.

Further Reading

Translators of The Princess of Clèves include Nancy Mitford (1951) and Walter J. Cobb (1961), both editions containing useful introductions. Martin Turnell's The Novel in France (1951) includes a chapter on Madame de La Fayette.

La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine De (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, countess of La Fayette; 1634–1693), French novelist. Born in Paris to a family of the lower nobility with close ties to the court of King Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643), Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne became a lady-in-waiting at the age of fifteen to Anne of Austria, the French queen. She received a broad education in the classics and languages, was an enthusiastic reader of the popular new novels of her day, and, from an early age, was close to prominent figures including the moralist and philosopher François de la Rochefoucauld, the cardinal of Retz, and the writers Gilles Ménage and Madeleine de Scudéry. In 1655 she married Francis Motier, count of La Fayette, and moved with him to his property in the Auvergne. The first of her two sons was born in Poitou in 1658, but after three years in the provinces Marie-Madeleine moved back to Paris, leaving her husband behind to manage his country estates. She lived independently in Paris for the rest of her life in her home next to the Luxembourg palace, where she remained closely involved with the intellectual and political life of the court and the salons of the capital.

Literary history has traditionally designated Madame de La Fayette as the originator of the modern novel. She turned to writing fiction soon after her return to Paris, and in 1662 anonymously published a short historical fiction, La princesse de Montpensier (The princess of Montpensier) followed by two novels, Zaïde (1670) and La princesse de Clèves (1678; The princess of Clèves). La Fayette's great innovation was her particular way of blending history, romance, and psychological analysis. In her fiction she incorporated some of the features of pastoral and epic narrative into a framework more closely resembling memoirs and historical documents. In her most important and influential novel, La princesse de Clèves, she designed a plot drawn from events at the French court of the sixteenth century. Into a group of characters including Catherine de Médecis, the duc of Guise, and the young Mary Stuart, she placed a central figure of her own invention, presenting the story of the psychological development of a young woman maturing in the oppressive atmosphere of courtly intrigue. Madame de La Fayette's first readers recognized in her novel more a reflection of their own time than that of history. The book precipitated a major literary quarrel, conducted in print via a popular gazette of the day, Le Mercure galant (The gallant Mercury). Readers argued passionately about the novel's realism, the plausibility of the heroine's behavior, and the moral implications of her story. The controversy extended to La Fayette's readers in England, where each of her novels was published in translation within a year of its appearance in France.

Themes central to La princesse de Clèves are examined in all of La Fayette's fiction: the difficulty of sincere communication, the fugitive quality of love, the tensions between religious principles and worldly demands, and the constraints of marriage. Retreat from the world is the solution that holds the strongest appeal for her female characters, but the difficulty of decisions such as these, and their slow maturation in the minds of the protagonists, are what most fascinate La Fayette: exemplary behavior is achieved at a great cost. In the darkest of La Fayette's scenarios, as in the posthumously published La comtesse de Tende (1724; The princess of Tende), the heroine's urge for escape is suicidal. In La princesse de Clèves, retreat is a solution that is closer to a form of religious devotion.

Also published posthumously were historical memoirs of the court of King Louis XIV, Mémoires de la cour de France (1731; Memoirs of the French court). La Fayette used the memoir genre to dramatize the inevitable confrontation with death in her more personal historical memoir, Histoire de Madame Henriette d'Angleterre (The Story of Madame Henrietta of England) begun as a biography at the request of her friend Henrietta of England and transformed by the princess's abrupt death in 1670.

In the last decade of her life Madame de La Fayette withdrew from Parisian society but continued to engage in social life through letter correspondence. Her closest friend, after the death of her companion La Rochefoucauld, was Madame de Sévigné, whose letters are an important source for our knowledge of La Fayette's life. Their correspondence also provides documentation of Madame de La Fayette's ambivalent attitude toward her own status as an author and her strategic use of the practice of anonymous publication. Sévigné's letters record the popularity of La Fayette's writings.

Madame de La Fayette has remained a canonical figure in French literary history. The innovative aspects of her fictional plots are increasingly explored in literary criticism, with particular interest in her invention of new models for describing women's psychological and social development.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

La Fayette, Madame de. La princesse de Clèves; La princesse de Montpensier; La comtesse de Tende. Translated by Terence Cave. Oxford and New York, 1999.

——. The Secret History of Henrietta, Princess of England, First Wife of Philippe, Duc d'Orléans; Together with, Memoirs of the Court of France for the Years 1688–1689. Translated by J. M. Shelmerdine. New York, 1993.

Secondary Sources

Green, Anne. Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Madame de Lafayette. Oxford, 1996.

Henry, Patrick, ed. An Inimitable Example: The Case for the Princesse de Clèves. Washington, D.C., 1992.

—ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: French soldier who served under George Washington in the American Revolution (1757-1834)
  Synonyms: Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Madame de La Fayette
Born	18 March 1634(1634-03-18) Paris, France
Died	25 May 1693 (aged 59) Paris, France
Occupation	novelist
Notable work(s)	La Princesse de Clèves

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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).

External links

Marie de LaFayette's Zayde (1670)

• Works by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette at Project Gutenberg
• Catholic Encyclopedia entry
• Works by or about Madame de La Fayette in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

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