Background
Claudine was born in Grenoble, France where her father, Antoine Guérin, sieur de Tencin, was president of the parliament.
Claudine was born in Grenoble, France where her father, Antoine Guérin, sieur de Tencin, was president of the parliament.
She was the mother of Jean le Rond d"Alembert, philosophe and contributor to the Encyclopédie, though she left him on the steps of the Saint-Jean-le-Rond de Paris church a few days after his birth. She is reputed to have had a liaison, while still formally a nun, with the Irish exile soldier Arthur Dillon. Among her numerous lovers and benefactors was the Chevalier Louis-Camus Destouches, by whom she had an illegitimate son, Jean le Rond d"Alembert.
Guillaume Dubois, the future First Minister was reportedly another of her lovers, even after he became Archbishop of Cambrai.
But the affair, if it existed, was conducted with discretion. One of her liaisons did have a tragic ending.
Charles-Joseph de la Fresnaye committed suicide in her house, and Madame de Tencin spent some time in the Châtelet and then in the Bastille in consequence, but was soon liberated as the result of a declaration of her innocence by the Grand Consul. She, however, was believed to have had little involvement in Richelieu"s behind-the-scenes intrigues at Louis XV"s court at Versailles.
Eventually she formed a literary salon, which had among its habitués Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Pierre de Marivaux, Alexis Piron and others
Hers was the first of the Parisian literary salons which admitted distinguished foreigners. Among her English guests were Henry Street John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke and Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. By the good sense with which she conducted what she called her menagerie, she almost succeeded in effacing the record of her early disgrace.
