Queer Places:
Madeleine-de-Scudéry Garden, 1 Rue des Oiseaux, 75003 Paris, France
Madeleine de Scudéry (15 November 1607 – 2 June 1701), often known simply as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, was a French writer.
Madeleine de Scudéry presented herself in France as a second Sappho, composing the first full-scale modern biography of Sappho. She was
an intimate friend of the illustrious
Angélique Paulet, and she devoted to
her the long History of Elise.
Her works also demonstrate such comprehensive knowledge of ancient history that it is suspected she had received instruction in Greek and Latin.[1] In 1637, following the death of her uncle, Scudéry established herself in Paris with her brother. Georges de Scudéry became a playwright.[1] Madeleine often used her older brother's name, George, to publish her works.[1] She was at once admitted to the Hôtel de Rambouillet coterie of préciosité, and afterwards established a salon of her own under the title of the Société du samedi (Saturday Society). For the last half of the 17th century, under the pseudonym of Sapho or her own name, she was acknowledged as the first bluestocking of France and of the world. She formed a close romantic relationship with Paul Pellisson which was only ended by his death in 1693. She never married.
By the late 1640s, Madeleine de Scudéry had established her own literary salon, known as the Société du Samedi (the Saturday Club), which became the gathering place for several writers and social personalities in Paris. Madeleine de Scudéry received, in her house in the rue de Beauce, a few women of bourgeois origin.
Madeleine survived her brother by more than thirty years, and in her later days published numerous volumes of conversations, to a great extent extracted from her novels, thus forming a kind of anthology of her work. Scudéry was deaf for the last 40 years of her life.[5] She outlived her vogue to some extent, but retained a circle of friends, like Marie Dupré, to whom she was always the "incomparable Sapho."[6] Her Life and Correspondence was published at Paris by MM. Rathery and Boutron in 1873.[6]
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