Graffigny papers

Born in Nancy on February 11, 1695, Françoise d'Issembourg d'Happoncourt (or Apponcourt) was the daughter of a prosperous military officer at the court of Duke Leopold of Lorraine. Her father claimed family connections with several German princely families, while her mother was related to the celebrated engraver Jacques Callot. In January 1712, Françoise d'Happoncourt married François Huguet de Graffigny, Chambellan to the Duke of Lorraine. The marriage was unhappy from the beginning and none of the three children it produced survived. The Graffignys separated in 1718; five years later, Mme de Graffigny applied for a formal separation on grounds of the brutal treatments received from her husband. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1725.

An independent woman with a reputation for her wit, Graffigny was soon at the center of the literary, artistic, and scientific circles of the Duchy. It was in that context that she met François-Antoine Devaux, who remained her confidant of choice for the remaining 25 years of her life. In the early 1730s, she fell in love with Léopold Desmarets, son of the composer Henry Desmarets. Their liaison lasted until 1743.

Graffigny's situation at the old court of Lorraine came to an end with the Treaty of Vienna in 1736, which gave the Duchy to the deposed King of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski, father-in-law of Louis XV. In 1738, she left Lunéville and spent two months at Cirey with Voltaire and his friend Mme du Châtelet, whom she had met when they visited Lunéville in 1735. Her well-documented stay ended with a serious rift between Graffigny and her hosts.

In February 1739, Graffigny settled in Paris. Among her new relations was Mlle Quinault, the actress and co-founder of the "Société du bout du banc," which Graffigny was invited to join in 1745. With the assistance of her young cousin Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, she opened her own literary salon. It became one of the most distinguished of its day and was frequented by Rousseau, Turgot, D'Argenson, and Helvétius--who subsequently married Anne-Catherine.

In 1747, the publication of the epistolary novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne made Graffigny famous throughout Europe, a fame confirmed three years later when her play Cénie triumphed at the Comédie-Française. In April 1758, however, La fille d'Aristide was a failure in the same theater. Graffigny died on December 12, 1758.

François-Antoine Devaux, Mme de Graffigny's principal correspondent, whom she addresses as "Panpan," was born in Lunéville, in the Duchy of Lorraine, on September 16, 1712. His father was a surgeon at the court of Duke Leopold. Devaux graduated from the University of Pont-à-Mousson in 1732. After working as a lawyer in the Nancy Parliament, then as the secretary of his cousin and fellow lawyer Jean-Baptiste Michel, he purchased the office of "receveur particulier des finances" (tax collector) in 1741, a charge he resigned in 1752. Reader to King Stanislas of Poland, he was elected in 1752 to the Société des sciences et belles-lettres of Nancy. A minor poet, Devaux was also the author of a one-act prose comedy, Les engagements indiscrets, which was performed in Paris in 1752 thanks to the protection of Mme de Graffigny. In addition to Graffigny, Devaux's circle of friends included the Marquise de Boufflers and her unhappy suitor the Comte de Tressan, the Prince de Bauffremont, and the Comte de Croix. He remained in Lunéville after the death of Stanislas in 1766, living off a pension the king had granted to him, and died there on April 11, 1796.