Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières

DESHOULIÈRES, Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde (1634-1694), a French poetess, born at Paris, was the daughter of the Chevalier de la Garde, maitre d hotel to the queens Mary de Medici and Anne of Austria. She received a careful and very complete education, acquiring while still young a knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and studying prosody under the direction of the poet Hesnaut. At the age of eighteen she married the Seigneur Deshoulieres, who had soon afterwards to go abroad along with the prince of Conde on account of his complicity in the Fronde. Madame Deshoulieres returned for a time to the house of her parents, where she gave herself to writing poetry and studying the philosophy of Gassendi. She rejoined her husband at Rocroi, near Brussels, where, being distinguished for her personal beauty, she became the object of embarrassing attentions on the part of the prince of Conde, against which, how ever, she knew how to protect herself. Having made herself obnoxious to the Government by her urgent demand for the arrears of her husband s pay, she was imprisoned in the chateau of Wilworden, the hardships being increased by the refusal of all books except the Bible and some volumes of the fathers. After a few months she was freed by her husband, who attacked the chateau at the head of a small band of soldiers. A,n amnesty having been proclaimed, they returned to France, where Madame Deshoulieres soon became a conspicuous personage at the court of Louis XIV. and in literary society. She won the friendship and admiration of the most eminent literary men of the age some of her more zealous flatterers even going so far as to style her the tenth muse, and the French Calliope. Her poems were very numerous, and included specimens of nearly all the minor forms, odes, eclogues, idylls, elegies, chansons, ballads, madrigals, &c. 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 do not rise to mediocrity, and the worst of which are worthy of the taste that could prefer the Phedre of Pradon to that of Racine. Voltaire pronounced her, nevertheless, the most successful of the female poets of France ; 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. In 1688 a pension of 2000 livres was bestowed upon her by the king, and she was thus raised from the poverty in which she had long lived. She died at Paris on the 17th February 1694. Complete editions of her works were published at Paris in 1797 and 1799. These include a few poems by her daughter Antoinette Therese Deshoulieres (1662-1718), who in herited her talent.