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After twenty years of easy existence, La Fontaine was suddenly deprived of his home. Madame de la Sabliere had been living all this time with her lover. He now deserted her. At the same time her husband was deserted by his mistress, which so affected him that he took poison and died. These events had so great an effect upon Madame de la Sabliere that she also died.
Joseph, but she gathered around her an elegant and famous circle, until she was eighty and blind. The Saturday assemblies of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, frequented by the most distinguished people of Paris, were given in a modest apartment, for she was only a novelist. The same may be said of the receptions of Madame de la Sablière, who was a childless widow, of moderate means.
In his "Pluralite des Mondes," a singular melange of science and sentiment, which he had written some years before and dedicated to a daughter of the gay and learned Mme. de La Sabliere, he talks about the stars, to la belle marquise, like a lover; but his delicate flatteries are the seasoning of serious truths.
In this Review appeared from her pen the article on Carlyle's "Life of Sterling," "Madame de la Sablière," "Evangelical Teachings," "Heine," "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," "The Natural History of German Life," "Worldliness and Unworldliness," all powerfully written, but with a vein of bitter sarcasm in reference to the teachers of those doctrines which she fancied she had outgrown.
This brilliant comedian, whose manners were not of the choicest, was more at home in the lax and epicurean world of Ninon and Mme. de la Sabliere a world which naturally did not find the decorum of the precieuses at all to its taste; the witticism of Ninon, who defined them as the "Jansenists of love," is well known.
Madame de La Fayette, that "rich field so fertile in fruits," as Ninon said of her, and Madame de la Sablière, "a lovely garden enameled with eye-charming flowers," another of Ninon's descriptive metaphors, passed as many hours as they could in her society with the illustrious Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who, up to the time of his death honored Ninon with his constant friendship and his devoted esteem.
When the Malandains had returned to their cottage, which was the last in the village of La Sablière, on the road to Fourville, the father, a thin, wrinkled old peasant, sat down at the table, while his wife took the saucepan off the fire, and Adelaide, the daughter, took the glasses and plates out of the sideboard, and he said: "I think that place at Maître Omont's ought to be a good one, as he is a widower and his daughter-in-law does not like him.
The Dowager-duchess of Orleans, Marguerite of Lorraine, had taken him as one of her gentlemen-in-waiting; the Duchess of Bouillon had him in her retinue in the country; Madame de Montespan and her sister, Madame de Thianges, liked to have a visit from him. He lived at the house of Madame de La Sabliere, a beauty and a wit, who received a great deal of company. He said of her,
You should never quarrel over quality when it is the same under any name, and follow the advice Madame de la Sablière gives you in the following madrigal: Bélise ne veut point d'amant, Mais voudrait un ami fidèle, Qui pour elle eût des soins et de l'empressement, Et qui même la trouvât belle. Amants, qui soupirez pour elle, Sur ma parole tenez bon, Bélise de l'amour ne hait que le nom.
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Madame de la Sablière, and Madame de Longueville followed the precedents established by Madame de Rambouillet and Madame de Maintenon, and successively reigned as queens of society, that is, of chosen circles of those who were most celebrated in France, raising the intellectual tone of society, and inspiring increased veneration for woman herself.
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