Louise d'Épinay

• 1. Introduction

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  Louise d'Épinay appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions as a woman who pursued him against his indifference. That portrait, composed by a man who had by then become her bitter enemy, has been one of the most-circulated accounts of her life. It is also one of the least complete.

  Diderot, d'Alembert, and Baron d'Holbach gathered at her table. She gave Rousseau a cottage to write in and corresponded with European courts. She produced a body of work that earned her, in her final months, a prize from the Académie.

  Rousseau told the world what kind of woman she was. Her own account remained locked away in manuscript for decades after she died. Which version is closer to the truth?

• 2. A Soldier's Daughter

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  At Valenciennes, a garrison fortress in northern France, Louise d'Épinay was born on the 11th of March 1726. Her father, Tardieu d'Esclavelles, held the rank of brigadier of infantry. He died in battle when she was ten.

  In Paris, she was placed in the care of her aunt, Marie-Josèphe Prouveur. Her aunt's husband, Louis-Denis de La Live de Bellegarde, was a fermier-général, a collector-general of royal taxes. De Bellegarde was immensely wealthy. The education a girl could expect in that household was narrow by design.

  On the 23rd of December 1745, she married her cousin Denis Joseph de La Live d'Épinay, who was later made a fermier-général himself. The marriage soured quickly. Her husband's extravagance, dissipation, and infidelities left her with little recourse under the law. In May 1749, she obtained a formal separation of assets, the closest available form of financial independence the law would allow.

  The Château of La Chevrette, a few miles north of Paris, became her home. Distinguished visitors began to arrive. Among them would be a man whose presence would define, and then damage, her reputation for generations.

• 3. The Hermitage Rupture

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  Louis Dupin de Francueil introduced Rousseau into d'Épinay's circle. Francueil was at the time both her social contact and her lover. The small cottage she named the Hermitage, in the valley of Montmorency, became Rousseau's home in 1756.

  Rousseau found there the rural quiet he had long celebrated in his writing. He wrote La Nouvelle Héloïse at the Hermitage. In his Confessions, he would later insist that the inclination between them had been entirely on her side. He presented himself as a reluctant figure in a friendship she pressed upon him.

  In 1757, she traveled to Geneva, where she spent two years as a frequent guest of Voltaire. When she returned, the friendship with Rousseau was over. The two had become implacable foes.

  Rousseau's account of their time together was written after the rupture. By then he had every reason to cast himself as the injured party. D'Épinay's own version of those years existed too, though it would take generations for it to be read.

• 4. Grimm and the European Republic

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  Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, had been part of d'Épinay's life since 1755. Their friendship would prove the longest and least turbulent close relationship of her adult years.

  Grimm had established a private correspondence circulated to royalty and courts across Europe. When he left France from 1775 to 1776, d'Épinay took over the work. Diderot supervised her efforts during that absence.

  In 1778, Mozart arrived at the household and stayed for two months. Both Grimm and d'Épinay welcomed him.

  D'Épinay spent most of her later years at La Briche, a small house near La Chevrette. She remained in the company of Grimm and a close circle of men of letters. They remained close until d'Épinay died on the 17th of April 1783.

• 5. The Buried Autobiography

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  L'Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant is not quite a memoir and not quite a novel. D'Épinay began writing it when she was thirty years old. She continued working on it for years but never published it in her lifetime.

  Baron Grimm inherited the manuscript when d'Épinay died. What followed was a long tangle of editing, omission, and name-changing. In 1818, a printed version appeared in Paris, edited by J. P. A. Parison and J. C. Brunet. Every name in it had been altered: d'Épinay appears as Madame de Montbrillant, Rousseau is called René, Grimm becomes Volx, and Diderot is Gamier.

  The 1818 edition is generally considered a mangled version of what she wrote. No accurate text existed for more than a century after that publication. George Roth finally produced a reliable edition in 1951, in three volumes, under the title Les Pseudo-mémoires de Madame d'Épinay.

  Diderot is sometimes credited with major revisions to the original text, which complicates any reading of the work as d'Épinay's alone. The work weaves fictionalized scenes reflecting the sensibility of early Romanticism with authentic letters and autobiographical material.

  Roth's 1951 edition made it possible, for the first time, to read what d'Épinay actually wrote. The question of how much Diderot shaped that text remains unsettled.

• 6. A Prize Three Months Early

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  The Prix Monyon was established by the Académie to honor the book of the current year most likely to benefit society. In January 1783, three months before her death, d'Épinay received it.

  The winning work was Conversations d'Émilie, published in 1774. It took the form of a dialogue and drew directly on the education of her granddaughter, Émilie de Belsunce.

  D'Épinay had also published two anonymous works from Geneva: Lettres à mon fils in 1758 and Mes moments heureux in 1759. Many of her letters survive in the Correspondance de l'abbé Galiani, published in 1818. That collection later provided material for a joint biography by Francis Steegmuller.

  Simone de Beauvoir cited d'Épinay in The Second Sex as an example of noble expansion of women's rights during the eighteenth century. That placement gave d'Épinay's story a reader it had not previously had: a twentieth-century audience asking precisely the questions her life had posed.