Death of Madame de La Fayette in Paris

Madame de La Fayette died in Paris on May 25, 1693, at the age of fifty-nine, after some years of declining health during which she had largely withdrawn from the salon society she had once helped shape. By the time of her death, she had outlived most of her closest literary companions, including the duc de La Rochefoucauld, with whom she had shared an intimate intellectual partnership for nearly two decades until his death in 1680.

Her passing marked the end of an era of French salon culture and classical prose that she had helped define. Though she published relatively little under her own name during her lifetime—much of her work appeared anonymously or was attributed to collaborators—her reputation as the author of La Princesse de Clèves and other works such as Zaïde and the posthumously published La Princesse de Montpensier secured her lasting place in literary history.

In the centuries following her death, literary scholars increasingly recognized her as a foundational figure in the development of the novel as a psychological art form, distinguishing her from the more sprawling heroic romances that preceded her. Her precise, analytical prose style and her unflinching exploration of female interiority and moral restraint influenced generations of novelists, and she is today regarded as one of the most important women writers of the French classical age.