Louise Marie Madeleine Fontaine

Louise Marie Madeleine Fontaine ( born October 28, 1706 Paris, † November 20, 1799 at Chenonceau Castle ) was celebrated as a married Madame Dupin because of her beauty and wit. She entertained in the Age of Enlightenment a famous salon in Paris and Château de Chenonceau.

Life and work

Louise was one of the three natural daughters of the banker Samuel Bernard and Marie -Anne- Armande Carton (1684-1740), a daughter of actor Florent Carton Dancourt. The husband of her mother, Jean -Louis -Guillaume Fontaine (1666-1714), Commissioner of the Navy in Flanders and Picardy, she acknowledged her as his daughter. On December 1, 1722 she married the twenty years older than Claude Dupin, later manager of the royal crown lands, which they gave in 1727 a son, Armand Jacques Dupin de Chenonceaux.

In 1732, the Dupin in 1733 bought the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, the Chenonceau castle. With the wealth of her husband and with their social talents succeeded Louise Dupin, to establish an influential and respected literary salon, where they knew how to gather the leading reconnaissance France, including Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Buffon. For the education of her son, she dedicated the early 1740s a young man, Jean -Jacques Rousseau, who was also at times her secretary later. 1767 died the son of Jacques Armand Réunion to yellow fever, after he had been deported in 1765 because of continued debt -making in the game there. Two years later, in 1769, her husband died at the age of 83 years Claude in Paris.

In 1782, Mme Dupin retreated all the way to Chenonceau, where she died in 1799 at the age of 93 years. It means they have with the population can maintain because of their friendly intercourse the castle during the revolution of looting and destruction. In his posthumously published Confessions Rousseau from 1782 Louise Dupin and her two sisters sat a monument; Louise he described as the most beautiful among them.