Background
She was the daughter of Melchior du Ligier, sieur de la Garde, maitre d"hôtel to the queens Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria.
She was the daughter of Melchior du Ligier, sieur de la Garde, maitre d"hôtel to the queens Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria.
She received a careful and very complete education, acquiring a knowledge of Latin, Spanish and Italian, and studying prosody under the direction of the poet Jean Hesnault. Having made herself obnoxious to the government by her urgent demand for the arrears of her husband"s pay, she was imprisoned in the château of Wilworden. An amnesty having been proclaimed, they returned to France, where Madame Deshoulières soon became a conspicuous personage at the court of Louis XIV and in literary society.
Her poems were very numerous, and included representatives of nearly all the minor forms of poetry: odes, eclogues, idylls, elegies, chansons, ballads, madrigals, and others
Of these, the idylls alone, and only some of them, have stood the test of time, the others being entirely forgotten. She wrote several dramatic works, the best of which did not rise to mediocrity.
Her friendship for Corneille made her take sides for the Phedre of Pradon against that of Racine. In 1688, a pension of 2000 livres was bestowed upon her by the king, and she was thus relieved from the poverty in which she had long lived.
She died in Paris on February 17, 1694.
Voltaire pronounced her the best of women French poets. And her reputation with her contemporaries is indicated by her election as a member of the Academy of the Ricovrati of Padua and of the Academy of Aries.