Mme. d’Epinay, in many respects, was a remarkable woman.  Amid all her social duties, with all her physical and mental troubles, she found time to help others and to manage her own business affairs and those of her children, took an active interest in art, music, and literature, raised, with the utmost care, her granddaughter, produced one of the best works of the time for children, made tapestry, and wrote innumerable letters.  Her fortune was lost through the reforms of Necker.

She was not a beautiful woman; but she was distinguished by a small, thin figure, an abundance of rich dark hair, which brought out in striking relief the peculiar whiteness of her skin, and large brown eyes.  Her five lovers she called her five bears:  Rousseau, Grimm, Desmoulin, Saint-Lambert, Gauffecourt.  An epistle to Grimm begins thus;

  “Moi, de cinq ours la souveraine,
  Qui leur donne et present des lois,
  Faut-il que je sois a la fois
  Et votre esclave et votre reine,
  O des tyrans le plus tyran?”

[I, sovereign over five bears, Who give and prescribe laws for them—­ Must I be your slave and queen at the same time, O among tyrants, the greatest?]

As far as the care of the education of her children is concerned, with its sacrifice and real application to duty, she was sometimes called—­and not unadvisedly—­the type of the ideal mother.  From 1757 on her ideas and thoughts ran to education.  Her friends were all of the philosophical trend, and intellectual labor was their chief pleasure.  After having passed through a career of excitement and love’s caprices, she longed for a peaceful, quiet existence; at that point, however, her health gave way, and she entered upon a new territory at Geneva.  There she conquered Voltaire, who was profuse with his compliments and kindnesses.  Upon her return she became the recognized leader or champion of the philosophic and foreign group and the Encyclopaedists, and was regarded as the central figure of the philosophical movement in general.

The ideas of the philosophers had been gaining ground, and were disseminated through all classes.  The mere love of pleasure and luxury at first found under Louis XV. gave way to more serious reflections when society was confronted with those all-important questions which finally culminated in the Revolution.  The salon of Mme. d’Epinay grew to be the most important and, intellectually, the most brilliant of the time.  Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, Duclos, Suard, the Abbes Galiani, Raynal, the Florentine physician Gatti, Comte de Schomberg, Chevalier de Chastellux, Saint-Lambert, Marquis de Croixmare, the different ambassadors, counts and princes, were frequent visitors In this brilliant circle her letters from Voltaire, read aloud, were always eagerly awaited.  Such dramas as Voltaire’s Tancred, Diderot’s Le Pere de Famille, were given under her patronage and discussed in her salon; after the performance she entertained all the friends at supper.