Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/275

  her full powers, she surpassed all her theatrical contemporaries in exciting emotions of pity and of terror.

DUMONT, MADAME, born in Paris, in the eighteenth century. She was the daughter of M. Lutel, an officer in the household of the Duke of Orleans, then regent. She was celebrated for her poetical talents, and she published a collection of fugitive pieces, translations of Horace, fables, songs, etc.

DUPRE MARY. of a sister of des Marêts de St. Sorlin, of the French Academy, was born at Paris and educated by her uncle. Endowed with a happy genius and a retentive memory, she read the principal French, Italian, and Latin authors in the original, and understood Greek and Philosophy. She studied Descartes so thoroughly, that she obtained the surname of la Cartesienne; and she also wrote very agreeable verses, and corresponded with several of her learned contemporaries. The answers of Isis to Climene, in the select pieces of poetry published by Father Bouhors, are by this lady. She lived in the seventeenth century,

DURAND, CATHARINE. poetess, married a man by the name of Bedacien, and died in 1736. She kept the name of Durand because she had begun to write under it. She published several romances, comedies, in prose and verse, and some poetry. An "Ode a la Louange de Louis the Fourteenth," gained the prize for poetry at the French Academy, in 1701; its chief merit, that which obtained the prize, was doubtless the homage the author rendered the Grand Monarque.

DURAS, DUCHESS OF. French authoress, best known from her novel "Aurika." She was the daughter of a Captain in the navy. Count Corsain. During the French revolution, in 1793, she left France and came with her father to England. There she married the refugee Duke Duras, a firm royalist. In the year 1800, she returned with her husband to France, where she made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël, and commenced her labours in a literary circle, composed of the greatest minds of the country. When Louis the Eighteenth returned to France, he called her husband to his court, and gave him a place near his person. The duchess, although now a great favourite at court, devoted much of her time to a school which she established, and in superintending several benevolent societies of which she was an active member. Her novel "Aurika," in which she attacks, in a firm but gentle way, the prejudices of the nobility of birth, made quite a sensation, and was translated in several countries. Her next work "Edward," was not quite equal to the first. She died in the year 1828.

DUYN, MARGUERITE DE, of the convent of La Chartreuse de Poletin, on the confines of Dauphiny and Savoy, lived at the close of the thirteenth