Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/782

768 elegy, on the Duke of Sully, which stamped her fame as a writer. In all her works we meet with a pure diction, natural reflections, noble sentiments, pathetic, ingenious and void of all affectation.

She wrote many pieces for the theatre, which were well received; and many works which have contended for the prizes of the French academy. An eulogium on Descartes has been highly admired. She likewise wrote Les Amans sans le savoir, which is much esteemed. . a woman of excellent understanding, and having a strong desire to improve and cultivate it, she in 1704 formed a society for the sake of an agreeable and refined intercourse; an establishment which made her soon so universally known and admired, that the academy of Padua sent her letters patent, appointing her one of their members. In her letter of thanks to that learned body, she discovers an uncommon degree of solicitude for the honour of her own sex. She laments the want of that elegance of stile in her compositions, which some of her cotemporaries, and other female writers have possessed—but attributes it to a provincial education, and being deprived of the conversation of the beaux esprits of the court and capital, where alone, she says, the flowers of language and elegant turns of expression are to be gathered.

Madame de Saliez also formed a project of establishing a new sect of female philosophers; speaking of which, in a letter to the Marchioness de Montpellier, she says, "the end of this sect, is to live