Cottin

Cottin, SOPHIE (née Ristaud), French authoress, born at Tonneins, in the department of Lot-et-Garonne, in 1773, married at seventeen a Parisian banker, who left her a childless widow at twenty. For comfort she turned to letters, wrote verses and a lengthy history, and in fiction won unfading laurels. She had already written Claire d'Albe (1799), Malvina (1800), Amélie Mansfield (1803), and Mathilde (1805), when in 1806 she wrote Elisabeth, ou les Exilés de Sibérie, a story stamped with such real unsought pathos that it has been translated into most European languages. Madame Cottin died 25th August 1807.