Marquise de Lambert

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles (1647 – 12 July 1733), who on her marriage became Madame de Lambert, Marquise de Saint-Bris, and is generally known as the Marquise de Lambert, was a French writer and salonnière.

During the Régence, when the court of the Duchesse du Maine, at the Château de Sceaux, was amusing itself with frivolities, and when that of the Duc d’Orléans, at the Palais-Royal, was devoting itself to debauchery, the salon of the Marquise de Lambert passed for the temple of propriety and good taste, in a reaction against the cynicism and vulgarity of the time. For the cultivated people of the time, it was a true honor to be admitted to the celebrated "Tuesdays", where the dignity and high class of the "Great Century" were still in the air.

The only daughter of Étienne de Marguenat, Seigneur de Courcelles, and his wife, Monique Passart, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles was born and died in Paris. She lost her father, an officer of the fiscal court of Paris, in 1650, when she was just three years old. She was raised by her mother, who was distinguished by the lightness of her habits, and by her mother’s second husband, the literary dilettante François Le Coigneux de Bachaumont, who instilled in her a love of literature. At a young age, writes her friend Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, "she often stole away from the pleasures of youth to read alone, and she began, of her own accord, to write extracts of what struck her the most. It was either subtle reflections on the human heart, or ingenious turns of phrase, but most often reflections."

On 22 February 1666, she married Henri de Lambert, marquis de Saint-Bris, a distinguished officer who was to become a lieutenant-general and the governor of Luxembourg. Their union was very happy and they had two children: a son, Henri-François (1677–1754), and a daughter, Marie-Thérèse (†1731), who became Comtesse de Saint-Aulaire by her marriage. The Marquise de Lambert was widowed in 1686 and raised her two young children while carrying on lengthy and troublesome lawsuits against her husband’s family to save her children’s property.

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