Marie of Vichy-Chamrond, marchioness of Deffand. Originating in the Lyonese, it was high in a convent Benedictine in Paris. In 1718, she married the marquis of Deffand, which she hardly estimated. Also it was detached quickly from her husband and knew many connections, of which most famous was that it had with president Hénault. This one introduced it in the duchess of Maine where it met many personalities of the literary world, sciences and arts.
With the death of her husband, it settled with the convent of Saint-Joseph, street Saint-Dominique, in the apartments formerly occupied by Mrs. de Montespan, where, as from 1749, it held a living room which shone of the sharpest glare: cultivated philosophers, artists, writers and aristocrats met there and, if Voltaire and D' Alembert were his more intimate guests, one also met at it writers as famous as Fontenelle, Marivaux or Sedaine, philosophers like Helvétius, of the sculptors like Falconet, the architects like Soufflot or the painters like Van Loo or Vernet. Become blind in 1752, it took for reader Miss de Lespinasse, who left it with glare in 1763 to open her own living room.
Its Correspondence with, inter alia, Voltaire and Horace Walpole, with which it fell in love to nearly seventy years, reveals his independent spirit but skeptical, and constitutes an interesting document on the history of the company of the XVIII E century.