Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet

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Portrait Catherine de Vivonnes

Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (* 1588 in Rome , † December 2, 1665 in Paris ) was a French noblewoman who went down in intellectual and especially literary history as the patroness of a “salon” .

Life

She was the daughter of the French Marquis Jean de Vivonne and Giulia Savelli, who came from the ancient Roman nobility, and was married to the wealthy Marquis de Rambouillet at a very young age . She was highly educated and spoke several languages. However, since she was a health-prone and spared the regular presence at the Paris royal court, she created from about 1620 a kind of small private courtyard in her near the Louvre located City Palace , de the Hôtel Rambouillet, which was built more or less according to their plans . Here she ran an open house until around 1660, in which spiritually interested high nobility, including Le Grand Condé and Cardinal Richelieu, met with petty aristocrats as well as bourgeois intellectuals. At the same time, in order not to allow a purely male society to emerge, she ensured the presence of noble women as well as noble young girls, among them, in addition to her own daughter Julie, z. B. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, later Madame de Sévigné or Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, later Madame de La Fayette .

The circle around the marquise and the imaginative animator Vincent Voiture , who felt themselves to be elitist and exclusive , mainly practiced the art of witty conversation and gallant casual poetry. In doing so, the ideal of the honnête homme (a term that was perhaps created in analogy to “gentilhomme - nobleman” and is very inappropriately translated as “man of honor”) was developed, which is in principle egalitarian, ie not bound by class .

The conscious art and sophisticated expressions of the circle found strong echoes in the literature of the era, but also acted in the Parisian society in where they soon partly imitated, but partly also as "precious" were ridiculed (actually "precious").

After Voiture's death (1648) and the start of the turmoil of the Fronde , the heyday of the Hôtel de Rambouillet was over. When, in 1661, Molière caricatured the preciousness in the shape of two outrageous bourgeois daughters with Les Précieuses ridicules (The ridiculous Preziöse), it had already become a kind of sunken cultural asset.

Well-known long-time guests of the Hôtel de Rambouillet were:

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