Rambouillet, CATHERINE DE VIVONNE, MARQUISE DE, one of the most accomplished and illustrious women of the 17th century, was born at Rome in 1588. Her father was Jean de Vivonne, afterwards Marquis of Pisani; her mother, Julia Savelli, belonged to an old Italian family, and through her mother was connected with the Florentine banking house of Strozzis. At twelve Catherine was married to Charles d'Angennes, son of the Marquis de Rambouillet, who succeeded to the family estates and title on the death of his father in 1611. From the very beginning she disliked alike the morals and manners of the French court, and she early determined to gather round herself a select circle of friends. At once virtuous, spiritual, sympathetic, and appreciative, she gathered together in the famous Hôtel Rambouillet for a long series of years all the talent and wit of France, and in her salon met for the first time on an equal footing the aristocracies of rank and of esprit. For fifty years she received the wits, critics, scholars, and poets of Paris: Malherbe, Racan, Balzac, Voiture, Corneille, Ménage, Chapelain, Scarron, Saint-Evremond, Benserade, La Rochefoucauld. But half of the glory of the Hôtel belonged to the brilliant women who frequented it, among them Mademoiselle de Scudéry, the beautiful Duchesse de Chevreuse, the Marquise de Sablé, who inspired the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, Mademoiselle de la Vergne, afterwards Madame de La Fayette, the inimitable Madame de Sévigné; but, conspicuous beyond all by her splendid beauty and faultless grace, the idol of both sexes, shone the sister of the great Condé, and the heroine of the Fronde—the Duchesse de Longueville. As the centre of this group reigned the Marquise de Rambouillet—'la grande Marquise,' 'the divine Arthénice'—and her beautiful daughter Julie (the Parthénie of Clélie), after fourteen years of suing, wife of the Duke of Montausier, who presented her with the famous Garland of Julia, a collection of love-verses, illustrated with exquisite paintings on vellum.
The frequenters of the Hôtel were celebrated for the elegance of their manners and the refinement of their language; but the latter, on the lips of imitators, degenerated into extravagant affectation and palpable pedantry—a mark for the comic satire of Molière in Les Précieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes. It must be remembered that the title Précieuse originally meant 'distinguished' in its best sense, and that the ladies of the coterie a generation before had been proud to wear it. Madame de Rambouillet's good taste in everything was conspicuous, and she led the fashion also in the decoration of houses. Her famous 'Chambre bleue,' furnished with blue velvet relieved by gold and silver, with large windows from floor to ceiling, and her alcove with its ruelle—at first adopted merely to save her from the heat of the fire, which she could not bear—were imitated in many a great house in France. Her importance declined under Louis XIV., who distrusted clever women, but she survived till December 1665.
See the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux, but the Dictionnaire des Précieuses of Somaize; Röderer's Mémoire pour servir à l'Histoire de la Société polie en France pendant le Dix-septième Siècle (1834); Victor Cousin's Jeunesse de Mme. de Longueville, Mme. de Sablé, &c.; Livet's Précieuse et Précieuses (1859); Brunetière's Nouvelles Études Critiques (2d ed. 1886).