Louise Marie Madeleine Fontaine

Jean-Marc Nattier : Louise Dupin (portrait in Chenonceau Castle, probably after 1733)

Signatures de Madame Dupin of
the stepson, Louis-Claude Dupin de Francueil
and his wife Suzanne Bollioud de Francueil.

Louise Marie Madeleine Fontaine (born October 28, 1706 in Paris , † November 20, 1799 at Chenonceau Castle , château de Chenonceau ) was celebrated as a married Madame Dupin because of her beauty and esprit . During the Enlightenment, she maintained a famous salon in Paris and at Chenonceau Castle.

Live and act

Louise was one of the three natural daughters of the banker Samuel Bernard and Marie-Anne-Armande Carton (1684-1740), a daughter of the actor and playwright Dancourt . Her mother's husband, Jean-Louis-Guillaume Fontaine (1666-1714), Commissioner of the Navy in Flanders and Picardy , recognized her as his daughter. On December 1, 1722 she married the twenty years her senior Ferme générale Claude Dupin (1686–1769), later administrator of the royal crown property, to whom she gave a son in 1727, Jacques Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux (1727–1767).

In 1732 the Dupins acquired the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, and in 1733 the Chenonceau Castle. With the wealth of her husband and with her social talents, Louise Dupin succeeded in establishing an influential and respected literary salon , in which she knew how to gather France's leading enlighteners , among others. a. Voltaire , Montesquieu and Buffon . At the beginning of the 1740s she hired a young man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who later became her secretary from time to time, to educate her son . In 1767, the son Jacques Armand died of yellow fever on Réunion after he had been deported there in 1765 for continuing to run into debt in the game . Two years later, in 1769, her husband Claude died in Paris at the age of 83.

In 1782 M ^me Dupin retired entirely to Chenonceau, where she died in 1799 at the age of 93. It is said that she was able to save the castle from looting and destruction during the revolution thanks to her friendly treatment of the population . In his Confessions , which appeared posthumously from 1782 , Rousseau set a monument to Louise Dupin and her two sisters; He described Louise as the most beautiful of them.

The tomb of Madame Dupin
in the forest of the Chenonceau castle, forêt de Chenonceau .

Works (selection)

• Sur l'égalité des hommes et des femmes. (1745 and 1751)

Manuscript L'égalité des hommes et des femmes by Madame Louise Dupin

literature

• Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert (ed.): Le portefeuille de Madame Dupin Dame de Chenonceaux. Lettres et œuvres inédites de Madame Dupin, l'Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Mably, Mairan, Marquis de Sainte-Aulaire, Comte de Tressan , Madame de Tencin, l'Abbé d'Olivet, d'Argenson, le Maréchal de Richelieu, etc. Paris: Lévy, 1884

Web links

Category: Louise Marie Madeleine Fontaine

• Tabular curriculum vitae of Louise Dupin (eng.)
• Images by Samuel Bernard, Louise Dupin and the Paris residence of the Dupins
• Chenonceau, Rousseau

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Madame Dupin's curriculum vitae. artemis.austincollege. com ( Memento of the original of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.