Françoise de Graffigny (née Françoise d'Issembourg du Buisson d'Happoncourt; 11 February 1695 – 12 December 1758), better known as Madame de Graffigny, was a French novelist, playwright and salon hostess.
Initially famous as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a novel published in 1747, she became the world's best-known living woman writer after the success of her sentimental comedy Cénie in 1750. Her reputation as a dramatist suffered when her second play at the Comédie-Française, La Fille d'Aristide, was a flop in 1758, and even her novel fell out of favor after 1830. From then until the last third of the twentieth century, she was almost forgotten, but thanks to new scholarship and the interest in women writers generated by the feminist movement, Françoise de Graffigny is now regarded as a significant French writer of the eighteenth century.
Early life, marriage, and widowhood in Lorraine Françoise d'Issembourg d'Happoncourt was born in Nancy, in the duchy of Lorraine.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 1. Her father, François d'Happoncourt, was a cavalry officer. Her mother, Marguerite Callot, was a great-niece of the famous Lorraine artist Jacques Callot. While she was still a girl, her family moved to Saint-Nicolas-de-Port, where her father was commander of the duke of Lorraine's horse guards.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 8-10.
On 19 January 1712, not yet seventeen years old, Mademoiselle d'Happoncourt was married in the church of Saint-Nicolas-de-Port to François Huguet, a young officer in the duke's service.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 11-15. He was a son of the wealthy mayor of Neufchâteau, Jean Huguet. Like her father, he was an écuyer or squire, the lowest rank of nobility. In honor of the marriage, the groom received from his father the estate at Graffigny and the couple took the title "de Graffigny" as their name. On her side, the bride received a large house inherited by her mother from Jacques Callot, situated in Villers-lès-Nancy, where the couple lived for about six years.Jacques Choux, Dictionnaire des châteaux de France: Lorraine. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1978. "Villers-lès-Nancy", p. 238.
François de Graffigny seemed to have a promising future, and the couple produced three children within five years: Charlotte-Antoinette (born June 1713, died December 1716); Jean-Jacques (born March 1715, lived only a few days) and Marie-Thérèse (born March 1716, died December 1717).Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 15-16. But he was a gambler, drunk and wife-beater, who was jailed for domestic violence. In 1718, deeply in debt and already living apart, the Graffignys signed a document, which gave her authority to deal with the family's finances and required him to leave Lorraine for Paris. In 1723 she obtained a legal separation.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 16-19. He died in 1725, under mysterious circumstances.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 20-21. As a widow, Françoise de Graffigny was free from her brutal husband, but she never fully recovered from the financial losses or the emotional trauma of her marriage.
Françoise de Graffigny's mother died in 1727, and her father remarried just months afterward, and moved to a remote town in Lorraine, where he too died in 1733, leaving his daughter free of all family obligations.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 1. By that date, the court of Lorraine had moved to Lunéville, where she lived with the support of the duke's widow, the dowager duchess and regent, Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 22-24. There she met a dashing cavalry officer, Léopold Desmarest, thirteen years her junior, whose father Henry Desmarest was in charge of the court's music; around 1727 he and Françoise de Graffigny began a passionate affair which lasted until 1743.Michel Antoine. Henry Desmarest (1661-1741): Biographie Critique. Paris: Picard, 1965, pp. 167-69. She also met an even younger man, François-Antoine Devaux, who had trained to become a lawyer but dreamed of being a writer; known to everyone as Panpan, he became her closest friend and confidant, and in 1733 they began a correspondence that continued until her death.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 26-29. This idyllic period came to an end in 1737, when duke François-Étienne de Lorraine ceded his duchy to France to obtain French support for his marriage to Maria Theresa of Austria. Françoise de Graffigny's friends and protectors were dispersed and she herself had nowhere to go.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 25, 31-32.
From Lorraine to Paris Finally in 1738 she arranged to become a companion to the duchesse de Richelieu; this lady had been Marie-Élisabeth-Sophie de Lorraine, princesse de Guise, before her marriage in April 1734.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 32. Françoise de Graffigny planned to join them in Paris in spring 1739, but she needed to bridge the winter months, and wheedled an invitation to Cirey, the château where Émilie, marquise du Châtelet, had been living since 1734 with her lover, Voltaire.René Vaillot, Avec Mme Du Châtelet, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988, pp. 93-115.
The journey from Lunéville to Cirey took two and half months; she stopped at Commercy, where the dowager duchess of Lorraine and her court had moved into the famous château, and at Demange-aux-Eaux she stayed with a friend, the marquise de Stainville, mother of the future duc de Choiseul.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 33-39. Her two-month stay at Cirey has been the best-known part of her life, because the thirty-odd letters she wrote about it to Devaux were published in 1820.La Vie privée de Voltaire et de Mme Du Châtelet, Paris, 1820. The letters were, however, inaccurately transcribed, severely cut, revised and in fact added to by the anonymous 1820 editor. He or she inserted anecdotes and witticisms to make Voltaire seem more illustrious, and took every opportunity to show Françoise de Graffigny as a sentimental, foolish and irresponsible gossip.English Showalter, "Graffigny at Cirey: A Fraud Exposed." French Forum 21, 1 (January 1996), pp. 29-44.
"The first few weeks at Cirey seemed like a wonderful dream come true". Voltaire read from his works in progress and joined in performances of his plays. The hostess, Émilie, showed off her estate, her furnishings, her clothes and jewelry, and her formidable learning. There were constant visitors, including luminaries like the scientist-philosopher Pierre Louis Maupertuis. The conversation ranged over every topic imaginable, always enlivened by Voltaire's sparkling wit.
Yet trouble was brewing. Voltaire read from his scandalous burlesque poem about Joan of Arc, La Pucelle. Émilie intercepted a letter from Devaux which mentioned the work, leapt to the false conclusion that her guest had copied a canto and circulated it, and accused her of treachery. For a month after that, Françoise de Graffigny was a virtual prisoner at Cirey, until her lover Desmarest passed through en route to Paris and took her on the final leg of her journey.Dainard, ed., Correspondance, vol. 1, letters 60-91.
Paris Her plan to live as companion to the duchesse de Richelieu worked only for a short time, because the duchess died of tuberculosis in August 1740.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 47-62. She then lived as a boarder in two convents, and stayed with a wealthy friend.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 63-80. Finally, in autumn 1742, she rented her own house on the rue Saint-Hyacinthe.This street no longer exists. It was located in the present 6th arrondissement, near the rue Soufflot and the boulevard Saint-Michel.
These first years in Paris were difficult, but not unproductive. She began to make new friends, the most important being the actress Jeanne Quinault, who retired from the stage in 1741, and began to receive her friends from the literary world at casual dinners, called the "Bout-du-Banc".Judith Curtis, "Divine Thalie": the career of Jeanne Quinault, SVEC 2007:08. "Bout-du-banc" means literally "end of the bench" but idiomatically something like "potluck". Through Jeanne Quinault, Françoise de Graffigny met most of the authors writing in Paris in this era – Louis de Cahusac, Claude Crébillon, Charles Collé, Philippe Néricault Destouches, Charles Pinot Duclos, Barthélemy-Christophe Fagan, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Pierre de Marivaux, François-Augustin de Paradis de Moncrif, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, Alexis Piron, Claude Henri de Fuzée de Voisenon, and others – as well as nobles who enjoyed their company and dabbled in writing themselves, like comte de Caylus, comte de Maurepas, duc de Nivernais, comte de Pont-de-Veyle, and comte de Saint-Florentin. Her lover Desmarest was away much of the time with his regiment, and was trapped in the besieged city of Prague in late 1741; when he returned to Paris without funds to re-equip himself, he accepted money from his mistress even though he had already decided to leave her. The emotional shock of his betrayal never fully healed, but his departure left her free to pursue her own ambitions.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 75-80.
She moved into her new house on 27 November 1742. In the summer of 1743 she sublet an upper floor apartment to Pierre Valleré, a lawyer, and had a brief but intense fling with him, the only liaison besides Desmarest she mentions in her letters.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 81-84. Although relations between them were often strained, he remained with her, as her lodger, legal adviser, and companion, until her death; and he was the principal executor of her will. Her finances remained a problem; in 1744 she staked her hopes on an investment that proved unsound, and she found herself in early 1746 deeper in debt than ever.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 93-106.
Writer Yet this was the time when she began the work that would eventually bring her fame and material comfort, if not wealth. As early as 1733, her letters to Devaux mention writing projects, some his, some joint, and some hers. When she went to Paris, she carried with her several of her manuscripts, including a sentimental drama called L'Honnête Homme (The Honest Man), an allegorical comedy called La Réunion du Bon-sens et de l'Esprit (The Reunion of Common Sense and Wit), and a verse comedy called Héraclite, prétendu sage (Heraclitus, alleged sage). In her letters she also mentions a traditional comedy called L'École des amis (The School for friends), a fantastic comedy called Le Monde vrai (The Truthful World) and a short supernatural novel called Le Sylphe (The Sylph). None of these works was ever published, and some of them were destroyed, but others survive in manuscript or in fragments among her papers.Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny, p. 128-31.
Her fellow participants at Jeanne Quinault's Bout-du-Banc insisted that she contribute a piece to their next collective work. Comte de Caylus gave her the outline of a "nouvelle espagnole", a type of short fiction in vogue since the seventeenth century, which she developed on her own. The volume appeared in March 1745, with the title Recueil de ces Messieurs (Anthology by these Gentlemen); her story was called Nouvelle espagnole ou Le mauvais exemple produit autant de vertus que de vices (Spanish novella, or A bad example leads to as many virtues as vices). Françoise de Graffigny's contribution was singled out for praise.Smith, "Composition," pp. 131-36. This success encouraged her to accept another task from Caylus, the outline of a fairy tale with the title La Princesse Azerolle, published later in 1745 in a collection called Cinq Contes de fées (Five Fairy Tales). Although several of her friends knew of her authorship, La Princesse Azerolle was never publicly attributed to Françoise de Graffigny until the recent publication of her correspondence.Smith, "Composition," pp. 136-41.