Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles d'Epinay

Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles d'Épinay (11 March 1726 – 17 April 1783), better known as Mme. d'Épinay, was a French writer, a saloniste and woman of fashion, known on account of her liaisons with Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gives unflattering reports of her in his Confessions, as well as her acquaintanceship with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Baron d'Holbach and other French men of letters during the Enlightenment. She was also one of many women referenced in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex as an example of noble expansion of women's rights during the 18th century.

Louise d'Épinay was born at the fortress of Valenciennes, where her father, Tardieu d'Esclavelles, a brigadier of infantry, was commanding officer. After her father was killed in battle when she was nine, she was sent to Paris in the care of an aunt who was married to Louis-Denis de La Live de Bellegarde, an immensely wealthy fermier-général, a collector-general of taxes; treated to the stultifying education that was a girl's lot, in 1745 she married her cousin Denis Joseph de La Live d'Épinay, who was made a fermier-général. The marriage was at once an unhappy one; and the prodigality, dissipation and infidelities of her husband justified her in obtaining a formal separation of assets in May 1749. She settled in the Château of La Chevrette in the valley of Montmorency, a few miles north of Paris, and there received a number of distinguished visitors.

Conceiving a strong attachment for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she furnished for him in 1756 in the valley of Montmorency a cottage which she named the Hermitage, and in this retreat he found for a time the quiet and natural rural pleasures he praised so highly. Rousseau, in his Confessions, asserted that the inclination was all on her side; but as, after her visit to Geneva (1757–59), Rousseau became her bitter enemy, little weight can be given to his statements on this point.

...
Wikipedia