LA FAYETTE, MARIE-MADELEINE de. — French writer, born in Paris in March 1634 to the Pioche de la Vergne family, of the lesser nobility; died there on 25 May 1693.
At her father’s behest—he was marshal and governor of Le Havre—she received an excellent education under the guidance of Fr. Rapin and Gilles Ménage, and soon distinguished herself among the cultivated society of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. In 1655 she married the Count of La F., François Motier; through her sister-in-law (mère Angélique), she entered into relations with Henrietta of England, of whom she was lady-in-waiting for a decade. Bound by a tender friendship to M.me de Sévigné, she produced a Portrait of her (1659), the first work she published; this was followed by several love stories that rank among the most profound studies of the female psyche in seventeenth-century France: La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), Zayde (1670), La Princesse de Clèves (1678), La Comtesse de Tende (published posthumously in the Mercure de France of 1724). Deprived of La Rochefoucauld’s friendship in 1680 and of her husband in 1683, she spent her final years in the company of her old teacher Ménage and the ecclesiastics Rancé and Duguet, working on memoirs concerning the people and events with which she had been involved: Histoire de M.me Henriette d’Angleterre and Mémoires de la Cour de France pour les années 1688 et 1689 (posthumous, 1720 and 1731).