Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, later known as Madame de La Fayette, was born in Paris on March 18, 1634.
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne was born in Paris on March 18, 1634, into a family of minor nobility with connections to the highest circles of French court society. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, was a military officer and governor, while her mother, Isabelle Pena, was linked to the household of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu's circle through remarriage.
She received an unusually rigorous education for a woman of her era, including instruction in Latin and Italian from the scholar Gilles Ménage, who would remain a lifelong friend and literary mentor. This intellectual formation, rare for aristocratic women in seventeenth-century France, laid the groundwork for her later emergence as one of the era's most sophisticated prose stylists.
Her early exposure to the salons of Paris, particularly through her mother's second marriage into the Aumale/Sévigné-adjacent social networks, positioned her from childhood within the world of précieuse culture and courtly letters that she would later immortalize and subtly critique in her fiction. This birth marks the beginning of a life that would produce what many literary historians consider the first true psychological novel in French literature, La Princesse de Clèves.
Images
