Claudine guerin de tencin biography examples

Claudine Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin, Baroness of Saint-Martin-de-Ré (27 April 1682^[1] – 4 December 1749) was a French salonist and author. Charles-Joseph de la Fresnaye committed suicide in her house, and Mme. de Tencin spent some time in the Châtelet and then in the Bastille in consequence, but was soon liberated as the result of a declaration of her innocence by the Grand Consul.

From this time she devoted herself to political intrigue, especially for the preferment of her brother the abbé Tencin, who became archbishop of Embrun and received a cardinal's hat.

By the good sense with which she conducted what she called her menagerie, she almost succeeded in effacing the record of her early disgrace.

She was a novelist of considerable merit. Among her English guests were Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke and Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. Claudine was brought up at a convent near Grenoble and, at the wish of her parents, took the veil but broke her vows and succeeded, in 1712, in gaining formal permission from Pope Clement XI for her secularisation.

The nature of her relationship with her brother was a subject of much speculation, but although she never troubled to deny the rumours, there seems to be no evidence that their affection was more than fraternal.

She also was involved with King Louis XV's best friend, the Maréchal de Richelieu, over whom she allegedly exercised considerable control.

Before her are Horacio Quiroga, Colin Wilson, Erin Hunter, Janus Pannonius, Matthew Arnold, and Edward FitzGerald. She was the mother of Jean le Rond d'Alembert, who later became a prominent mathematician, philosophe and contributor to the Encyclopédie, though she left him on the steps of the Church of Saint-Jean-le-Rond on the north side of Notre Dame cathedral a few days after his birth in November 1717.

Among her English guests were Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke and Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield.

Novels

She was a novelist of considerable merit. Her novels have been highly praised for their simplicity and charm, the last qualities the circumstances of the writer's life would lead one to expect in her work.