French novelist, born at Havre on the 15th of November 1607. She was very plain and had no fortune, but her abilities were great and she was very well educated. Establishing herself at Paris with her brother Georges, she was at once admitted to the Rambouillet coterie, afterwards established a salon of her own under the title of the Société du samedi, and for the last half of the 17th century, under the pseudonym of “Sapho” or her own name, was acknowledged as the first bluestocking of France and of the world. She formed with Pellisson a close friendship only terminated by his death in 1693. Her lengthy novels, such as Artaméne, ou le Grand Cyrus (10 vols., 1648–1653), Clélie (10 vols., 1654–1661), Ibrahim, ou l’illustre Bassa (4 vols., 1641), Almahide, ou l’esclave reine (8 vols., 1661–1663) were the delight of all Europe, including persons of the wit and sense of Madame de Sévigné. But neither in conception nor in execution will they bear criticism as wholes. With classical or Oriental personages for nominal heroes and heroines, the whole language and action are taken from the fashionable ideas of the time, and the personages can be identified either really or colourably with Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s contemporaries. In Clélie, Herminius represents Paul Pellisson; Scaurus and Lyriane were Paul Scarron and his wife (afterwards Mme. de Maintenon); and in the description of Sapho in vol. x. of Le Grand Cyrus the author paints herself. It is in Clélie that the famous Carte de Tendre appeared, a description of an Arcadia, where the river of Inclination waters the villages of Billet Doux, Petits Soins and so forth. The interminable length of the stories is made out by endless conversations and, as far as incidents go, chiefly by successive abductions of the heroines, conceived and related in the most decorous spirit, for Mademoiselle de Scudéry is nothing if not decorous. Nevertheless, although the books can hardly now be read through, it is still possible to perceive their attraction for a period which certainly did not lack wit. In that early day of the novel prolixity did not repel. “Sapho” had really studied mankind in her contemporaries and knew how to analyse and describe their characters with fidelity and point. Moreover her novels had the interest always attaching to the roman à clef. She was a real mistress of conversation, a thing quite new to the age as far as literature was concerned, and proportionately welcome. She had a distinct vocation as a pedagogue, and is compared by Sainte-Beuve to Mme. de Genlis. She could moralize—a favourite employment of the time—with sense and propriety. Though she was incapable of the exquisite prose of Mme. de Sévigné and some other of her contemporaries, her purely literary merits were considerable. Madeleine survived her brother more than thirty years, and in her later days published numerous volumes of conversations, to a great extent extracted from her novels, thus forming a kind of anthology of her work. She outlived her vogue to some extent, but retained a circle of friends to whom she was always the “incomparable Sapho.” She died in Paris on the 2nd of June 1701.
Her Life and Correspondence were published at Paris by MM. Rathery and Boutron in 1873. An amusing sketch of her is to be found in vol. iv. of Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du lundi. Georges de Scudéry is sketched by Théophile Gautier in his Grotesques. See also V. Cousin, La Société française au XVIIe siécle, vol. ii.
