author
Marie-Angélique Du Gué Bagnoles Coulanges
1641–1723
A sharp-eyed French letter writer of the Grand Siècle, she moved through the same brilliant circles as Madame de Sévigné and made a name for her wit. Her surviving letters offer a lively glimpse of courtly society, friendship, and conversation in seventeenth-century France.
1 Audiobook
Lettres de Mmes. de Villars, de Coulanges et de La Fayette, de Ninon de L'Enclos et de Mademoiselle Aïssé accompagnées de notices bibliographiques, de notes explicatives par Louis-Simon Auger
by marquise de Marie Gigault de Bellefonds Villars, C. E. (Charlotte Elisabeth) Aïssé, Marie-Angélique Du Gué Bagnoles Coulanges, Madame de (Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne) La Fayette, Ninon de Lenclos
About the author
Born around 1641 as Marie-Angélique du Gué de Bagnols, the woman later known as Madame de Coulanges became a noted French epistolary writer. She died in Paris on August 3, 1723, and is remembered as a celebrated woman of wit whose letters circulated among some of the best-known literary and aristocratic figures of her time.
She is especially associated with Madame de Sévigné, with whom she shared a close friendship. Contemporary and later accounts alike link her reputation to the sparkle of her conversation and her ease in elite social circles, qualities that carried into her correspondence.
Today she is known chiefly through her letters, published after her lifetime, which help preserve the tone of salon culture and private exchange in seventeenth-century France. For listeners drawn to memoir, correspondence, and the social world behind classic French literature, her writing opens a small but vivid window onto an age of wit and ceremony.