Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius

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Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius (23 July 1722 – 12 August 1800), also Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt, nicknamed "Minette", maintained a renowned salon in France in the eighteenth century.

Life

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius

One of the twenty-one children of Jean-Jacques de Ligniville and his wife Charlotte de Saureau, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, the niece of

Helvétius in 1751. By the time he died twenty years later, the couple had amassed a vast fortune, and with it Madame Helvétius maintained her salon which featured the greatest figures of the Enlightenment for over five decades.[1]

Among the habitués of Madame Helvétius's salon were

Napoléon Bonaparte
could also be found at her salon.

The salon also provided a steady home for a great clowder of

Angora cats. The cats were a well-known feature of Madame Helvétius's salon, always bedecked with silk ribbons and doted on by their loving caregiver.[1] Eighteen in all, the cats were kept company by the Madame's dogs, canaries, and many other pets.[3]

Madame Helvétius died at

Auteuil
.

In popular culture

Madame Helvétius appears in the 2008 television drama series John Adams, in which she is played by Judith Magre.

Madame Helvétius is mentioned briefly in the

children's book Ben and Me (1939) as having many important people at her dinners, and also having cats (distressing to the protagonist, who is a mouse
) and a particularly disagreeable dog.

Notes

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ The legend goes that when she refused, out of devotion to her late husband, Franklin claimed he had visited Heaven in a dream and found Helvétius married there to Franklin's own deceased love, Deborah. "Come, let us revenge ourselves," he said. This story is debunked in Claude-Adrien Helvétius, see refs.
  3. . Retrieved 2011-01-24.

References