It must have been shortly after this that Marivaux returned to Paris to continue his studies, and possibly to prepare himself for the life of a literary dilettante.  His means were sufficient to enable him to indulge his taste in this way.  Here we find him admitted to the salon of Mme. de Lambert, held in her famous apartments, situated at the corner of the rue Richelieu and the rue Colbert, and now replaced by a portion of the Bibliotheque Nationale.  It was a rendezvous of select society on Wednesdays, and particularly of the literary set on Tuesdays, and among its habitues may be mentioned such men as Fontenelle, d’Argenson, Sainte-Aulaire, La Motte, and President Henault.  “It was,” says Fontenelle, “with few exceptions, the only house which had preserved itself from the epidemic disease of gambling, the only one in which one met to converse reasonably and even with esprit upon occasion."[18] Its influence was inestimable upon literary questions of the time, and it might be considered almost as the antechamber of the French Academy.  The envious dubbed it un bureau d’esprit, and its form of preciosite, lambertinage.

That Mme. de Lambert had a great influence in forming the mind of the young author no one can read his works and doubt.  A “precieuse in the most flattering and most exact acceptation"[19] of the term, she promoted a similar turn of mind in Marivaux.  His dislike for Moliere may have received its encouragement from her, as she was never quite willing to forgive that great genius for his attack upon les femmes savantes.  Marivaux, too, had, as Palissot expresses it, “un faible pour les precieuses,"[20] and for the author of those famous attacks, a contempt as unfeigned as absurd.  The high moral character of his writings and his ideas on marriage and children may readily have found their origin with Mme. de Lambert.

Mme. de Tencin, to whose salon of the rue Saint-Honore Marivaux was likewise welcomed, was as different a character from the kindly, serious, upright, and judicious Mme. de Lambert as can well be imagined, and it was only after the death of the latter, in 1733, that her salon was particularly brilliant.  Her youth had been most disorderly.  At an early age she had assumed the veil, but, through the efforts of her brother, the abbe de Tencin, and later cardinal, who, doubtless, saw in her a powerful factor for his own promotion, she obtained her secularization.  Coming to Paris a short time before the death of Louis XIV, she was ready to welcome the gross immorality of the Regency, and, for personal advancement, entered into a series of liaisons with Prior, the friend of Lord Bolingbroke, Rene d’Argenson, the Regent himself, Dubois, and the Chevalier Destouches.  The latter was the father of her son, whom she abandoned on the steps of the church Saint-Jean-le-Rond, and who, reared by a glazier’s wife, became the celebrated d’Alembert.