and religious philosophy in 17th century France. Her ethical theory
implies that the natural moral virtues are disguised vices and that
only the theological virtues can sustain an authentic moral life. Her
moral rigorism appears in the severity with which she treats questions
of moral agency and responsibility. In her treatment of religious
knowledge, she focuses on the spiritual conditions necessary for a
proper grasp of God's attributes. Self-abandonment, marked by
detachment from the faculties of imagination and intellect, is the
necessary condition for an apophatic (or negative theological)
recognition of God's essence.Madame de la Sablière has long occupied a
modest niche in literary, religious, and scientific history. French
literature textbooks cite her as the hostess of a prominent literary
salon and as the patron of La Fontaine. French Catholic devotional
tracts celebrate her as the model convert, the savante who abandoned
the skepticism and sexual license of the salon to become a pious
servant of the incurably ill. Several histories of science present her
as one of the first woman astronomers, due to her research undertaken
at the Observatory of Paris. Only in the late 20th century has La
Sablière the philosopher emerged into view.
1. BiographyIn 1640 Marguerite Hessein was born into the Huguenot
elite of Paris. Like other members of the Protestant high bourgeoisie,
Hessein belonged to a family prominent in the field of finance. Her
father Gilbert Hessein acquired a substantial fortune through the bank
he had founded. Her mother Marguerite Menjot Hessein was the daughter
of a high-ranking official in the treasury. The spiritual and social
life of the family focused on the Huguenot church at Charenton, a
Paris suburb where public Protestant worship was permitted. Marguerite
was baptized at the church on March 18, 1640.
After the death of her mother in 1649, Marguerite Hessein's education
was placed under the care of her maternal uncle Antoine Menjot and her
cousin Madeleine Gaudon de la Raillière. A medical doctor and
Protestant apologist, Menjot devised a sophisticated curriculum to be
taught by a series of specialized tutors. The study of the classics
was so successful that the pupil would later be renowned for her
mastery of both Latin and Greek, an unusual accomplishment for a woman
of the period. The rigorous instruction in mathematics initiated her
lifelong love for science and her avid participation, also unusual for
a woman of the period, in the scientific circles of Paris. Menjot
personally instructed his niece in the theological principles of
Calvinism and introduced her to philosophy. This early formation in
philosophy stressed contemporary philosophy, with particular emphasis
on the schools of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.
An arranged marriage between Marguerite Hessein and Antonie de
Rambouillet de la Sablière was held on March 15, 1654. Like his wife,
Monsieur de la Sablière descended from an affluent Huguenot family
prominent in finance. In addition to wealth, he brought artistic
distinction to the marriage. Fluent in Italian, he had already
established himself as a leading poet through the publication of his
madrigals. Despite the economic, religious, and cultural affinities of
the spouses, the marriage unraveled in its second decade. The
infidelities of the husband and the physical and emotional violence he
directed toward his wife became increasingly more pronounced. After
failed efforts at reconciliation, Madame de la Sablière obtained a
legal separation of goods and persons in 1668. Recognizing the wife as
the innocent partner in the failed marriage, the court required the
delinquent husband to return her dowry to her and to pay her
substantial alimony. It was Monsieur de la Sablière, however, who
maintained custody of the three children from their marriage.
In 1669 a newly independent Madame de la Sablière started a literary
salon in her home on the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs in Paris. The
salon quickly established itself as one of the capital's cultural
centers. Prominent writers habituating the salon included Molière,
Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. Several salon members were prominent in
the philosophical debates of the era: Fontenelle, Huet, and Queen
Christina of Sweden. During this period, La Sablière also deepened her
knowledge of scientific and philosophical culture. A series of tutors
instructed her on the latest scientific developments: Roberval on
calculus, Sauveur on geometry, and Barthélemy d'Herbelot on anatomy.
She attended the public lectures of D'Alencé on physics, Verney on
anatomy, and Cassini on astronomy. Actively involved in the practical
experiments at Cassini's observatory, La Sablière distinguished
herself by her astronomical research.
Her principal tutor François Bernier focused on philosophy. An
opponent of Descartes, he explained to her the contemporary
controversies concerning Cartesian physics and metaphysics. He
composed his Summary of the Philosophy of Gassendi for her use and
dedicated his Pyrrhonic treatise Doubts to her. The personal
philosophical opinions of La Sablière during her career as a
salonnière remain uncertain. Although some chroniclers classify her as
a salon Cartesian, her old mentor Antoine Menjot describes her mature
philosophical position as a synthesis between Pyrrhonic skepticism and
Epicureanism.
One salon member quickly became an intimate friend and protégé of La
Sablière; Jean de la Fontaine. The celebrated author of Fables, La
Fontaine joined La Sablière's circle in 1670 and became her permanent
houseguest in 1673. The impoverished poet frequently praised his
benefactress in public. His Discourse for Madame de la Sablière
attacked the philosophy of Descartes, in particular the Cartesian
mechanistic theory of animal nature. During his inaugural speech as a
newly elected member of the Académie française in 1684, La Fontaine
praised his patron under the pseudonymn of Iris.
At the end of the 1670s La Sablière underwent a personal crisis. An
affair with a military officer, Charles de la Fare, turned sour when
the multiple affairs of La Fare become public knowledge in salon
gossip. The death of her estranged husband in 1679 left her without
the financial resources he had provided through alimony support.
Finances forced her in 1680 to abandon her home for a more modest
apartment on the Rue Saint-Honoré. The psychological crisis became a
spiritual one, culminating in her conversion to Catholicism.
In the early 1680s La Sablière began a new life as a penitent and
contemplative. La Sablière devoted herself to meditation and
theological study under the spiritual direction of the Jesuit priest
Rapin until 1687, and then under the Trappist abbot Rancé until her
death. She also began to work as a volunteer at the Hospice des
Incurables, a dangerous and unfashionable apostolate since it involved
ministry to patients suffering from contagious diseases, including
venereal diseases. Devoted to this new life of prayer and charity, La
Sablière rented a small apartment on the grounds of the hospital and
spent an increasing amount of time in this secluded cell rather than
in her official residence. Old salon acquaintances, notably La
Fontaine, lamented her reclusiveness and her growing attraction to
monastic life.
During these years she maintained an extensive correspondence on
theological matters with Rancé and composed the reflections on the
moral virtues and passions that constitute her extant philosophical
works. The austere life of prayer and service at the Incurables did
not end La Sablière's philosophical and scientific interests. Her
well-thumbed personal library, inventoried at the time of her death,
contained volumes by Descartes, Malebranche, Marcus Aurelius,
Epictetus, and Saint Augustine. Despite the entreaties of her
spiritual directors, La Sablière refused to abandon her beloved
telescope. Until the last weeks of her life, she continued to observe
the movements of the stars and the planets from her apartment and to
confide her observations in a notebook.
Madame de la Sablière died on January 6, 1693.
2. Works
The three surviving works of Madame de la Sablière date from the last
decade of her life, when she led a contemplative existence as a lay
volunteer at the Hospice des Incurables. Christian Maxims is a
collection of observations on the moral life, focused on the virtues,
the vices, and the passions. A popular literary genre in the salons of
the period, the maxime was an epigram that dissected the contradictory
currents of the human heart. Sablière transformed the genre by giving
it a theological armature. Her maxims repeatedly use Scripture, the
sacraments, and church tradition to demonstrate her theses on the
illusions of natural moral virtue. A brief spiritual treatise,
Christian Thoughts explores the spirituality of total abandonment of
the human soul to the will of a hidden God. This collection of
spiritual counsels argues that authentic knowledge of God requires the
quieting of human intellectual, volitional, and imaginative powers.
Her surviving correspondence, addressed primarily to her spiritual
director Jean-Armand le Bouthillier de Rancé, abbot of La Trappe,
concerns the spiritual difficulties encountered by La Sablière in her
effort to renounce the worldliness of her earlier life as a salonnière
and to lead an ascetical life of contemplation, penance, and service
amid the terminally ill. It also reflects her substantial theological
culture as she comments on the works of patristic authors who analyzed
the virtue of humility. Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Dorotheus, and
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux are the most frequently cited.
The history of the survival of the works of La Sablière indicates how
easily the work of women philosophers in the early modern period can
be lost and forgotten.
Christian Maxims was first published anonymously in 1705 in an edition
of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The title was simply Les Maximes
Chrétiennes de M*****. A subsequent edition of La Rochefoucauld in
1736 reprinted La Sablière's work anonymously. Only in 1743 did a new
edition of La Rochefoucald attribute the Maximes Chrétiennes to Madame
de la Sablière. The attribution cited a 1736 royal permission to
publish the work granted to the publisher Étienne Ganeau as the
authority for the attribution. A subsequent 1777 edition reaffirmed La
Sablière as the rightful author of the work. The close match between
the style and concerns of the work to her correspondence with Rancé
confirmed the attribution of authorship to La Sablière. The convoluted
itinerary of Christian Maxims as an anonymous work, occasionally
misconstrued as the work of La Rochefoucauld, demonstrates how
anonymous and pseudonymous authorship, often employed by women of
aristocratic rank during this period, could lead to the loss of the
works by women authors.
La Sablière's correspondence and Christian Thoughts followed a more
tortuous itinerary. In the late nineteenth century Menjot d'Elbenne,
the erudite biographer of La Sablière, investigated a manuscript
collection of letters housed at the Chateau of Chantilly. Labeled
Letters of Madame de Sablé, the letters were addressed to Abbé de
Rancé and discussed spiritual concerns related to service at the
Hospice des Incurables and to the three adult children of La Sablière.
Menjot d'Elbenne immediately recognized that it was La Sablière, not
Sablé, who had composed the letters. An ambiguous reference to
"M.D.L.S." as the author of the collection had apparently misled an
earlier manuscript editor. Fragmentary transcriptions of La Sablière's
letters by Mademoiselle de la Jonchapt, the secretary to Madame de
Maintenon, provided external confirmation of the attribution to La
Sablière. Pensées Chrétiennes de D.M.D.L.S., a small spiritual
treatise contained in the Chantilly manuscript collection, was also
clearly identified as the work of La Sablière due to external and
internal evidence.
Only in Menjot d'Elbenne's critical edition of her writings (1923)
were the three extant works of La Sablière finally available to the
public. Her skill as a moraliste in Christian Maxims, Christian
Thoughts, and in her correspondence with Rancé was now apparent.
3. Philosophical Themes
The philosophical reflection of La Sablière focuses primarily on moral
and religious questions. In the field of ethics, she dwells on the
question of virtue. She critiques natural moral virtues as masks of
vice, in particular as outcroppings of pride. Conversely, she exalts
the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity as the necessary
foundation for the conduct of a moral life. Like the moral virtues,
the passions are treated with skepticism. It is the will, and not the
emotions, that must ground the moral agent in the practice of
authentic virtue. In her religious philosophy, she stresses the
ascetical and mystical conditions necessary for a proper knowledge of
the godhead shrouded in obscurity.
a. Critique of Virtue
In Christian Maxims, La Sablière analyzes the moral life in terms of
its characteristics of virtue and vice. On the surface, the moral life
is a civil war between the paramount virtue of humility and the
cardinal vice of pride. Beneath the surface, however, the moral
virtues are often nothing more than disguised expressions of vice.
Without the redemptive power of grace, the moral virtues are only
frail counterfeits of authentic virtue and incapable of sustaining an
ethical life.
On a superficial level, the moral life is a transparent struggle
between the opposed forces of virtue and vice. For La Sablière, this
struggle is ultimately a conflict between the virtue of humility and
the vice of pride. Humility is the central moral virtue for the
upright moral agent. "The true glory of a Christian does not consist
in elevating oneself above others but in humbling oneself [CM no.59]."
Pride is the vice corrupting much of human moral conduct. "Pride is
the source of all our commotions and all our disturbances [CM no.75]."
External moral conflict is the expression of this often hidden
psychological conflict between pride and humility in the soul of the
moral agent.
At a deeper level, the moral constitution of vice and virtue is more
ambiguous. La Sablière argues that virtue is often scarcely masked
vice. Many public displays of rigorous virtuous action are secretly
fueled by the vice of pride. "We often lay down severe principles of
conduct out of arrogance. We like to decorate ourselves with the
appearance of virtue and it costs us nothing to give others an
unsupportable yoke we would never give ourselves [CM no.23]." Even
apparently humble actions are often vitiated by vice. "The sentiments
of humility apparent in our words are insincere if at the same time we
are angrily trying to convince others to accept what we say about
ourselves [CM no.24]." Like the other virtues, humility in word and
action often serves strategies of conquest rooted in self-interest.
La Sablière's deflation of natural moral virtue does not spare the
cardinal virtues. Prudence, a central cardinal virtue in the
neo-Aristotelian ethics of the period, is dismissed as a species of
self-interested risk management. "Prudence is cowardly and timid if it
is not animated by the virtue of charity [CM no.72]." This hallowed
virtue is only the disguised vice of cowardice. Similarly, La Sablière
contests the humanist esteem of the alleged virtues of the pagan
heroes of classical antiquity. Their vaunted courage has nothing to do
with authentic virtue. "The virtue of the pagans occasionally induced
them to scorn the world but only Christian virtue can make being
scorned by the world something desirable [CM no.48]." The pagan
contempt of the world, motivated by pride and the desire to manifest
one's superiority, has nothing in common with the saint's contempt of
the world, motivated by the love of God.
The enlightened moral agent should shun the cultivation of the natural
moral virtues, given his fragility and proneness to hide substantial
destructive vices. "If one recognized that virtues acquired with so
much effort can quickly disappear in the commotion of the world, one
would not seek his or her happiness in them. On the contrary, one
would flee them as an enemy who only thinks about stealing our most
precious treasures [CM no.51]." From La Sablière's perspective,
efforts to cultivate the moral virtues independently of the treasures
of faith and grace can only produce disguised vices that will provide
the moral agent with neither temporal nor eternal happiness. The good
pagan, made virtuous through the self-disciplined exercise of freedom,
is illusory in a human race ravaged by sin and concupiscence.
b. Theological Virtues
Christian Maxims argues that the possession of theological virtues is
necessary for a proper perception of the moral order and for a
personal capacity to adhere to the goods of that order. As gifts of
God's grace, these infused habits of the soul free their moral agent
to abandon moral illusions (which are fabricated by a darkened
intellect) and overcome the inconstancy of a will corrupted by sin. In
her exaltation of the theological virtues as the foundations of an
authentic moral life, La Sablière focuses on the principal theological
virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
Faith gives its believers a veridical vision of the moral order, she
says, for it is an assent of the mind to truths revealed by God. It is
only through faith, and not through the work of an intellect weakened
by sin, that the moral agent can properly perceive the moral order and
its demands. "Faith makes us regard as goods what the world regards as
evils and as evils what the world regards as goods. And it is from the
difference between these ideas that is born the different conduct of
the just and of the sinful [CM no.11]." Rather than deepening the
moral vision of the human intellect operating in the state of
concupiscent weakness, faith initiates a perception of the moral order
that contradicts the moral vision of fallen humanity. Rather than
complementing it, faith squarely opposes the interpretation of
morality proposed by the world in its confusion. Only in the light of
faith, can the contours of the authentic moral order appear.
The theological virtue of hope is essential for endurance by the moral
agent in the combat to be faithful to the demands of the moral order.
Only hope for eternal union with God can sustain the moral agent in a
spiritual warfare that contains many opportunities for despair. "If
the hopes that we develop for our salvation are not rounded in God's
Word, they are false and misleading. In vain do we promise ourselves
what God does not promise [CM no.80]." The hope here is none other
than the hope of eternal life with God, rooted in the resurrection of
Christ proclaimed by the Scriptures. The earthly hopes of
self-improvement or social success are only counterfeits of authentic
hope and incapable of sustaining the moral agent in the combat to
adhere to the moral order.
The theological virtue of charity enjoys the primacy of the virtues
grounding a proper moral life. La Sablière insists that charity is a
matter of the will and not of the emotions. "The love that God demands
of us is not a sensate love, but a preferential love, which commits us
to sacrifice everything rather than displease Him [CM no.11]." The
moral life is ultimately theocentric. For the mature moral agent, the
deepest motivation for moral conduct is a love and fear of God that
issues in sacrificial service.
For La Sablière, the theological virtues do not crown the natural
moral virtues already operating in the moral agent. Without the
theological virtues, the alleged moral virtues of the unredeemed moral
agent are only the expressions of masked vice. Without faith, the
perception of the moral order is illusory. Without hope, the moral
combat against the world's allures cannot be maintained. Without
charity as the motive of ethical conduct, self-interest inevitably
corrupts the will of the moral agent.
c. Moral Passions
Like the moral virtues, the moral passions receive a critical
assessment in Christian Maxims. For La Sablière, the emotions
accompanying the moral and religious activity of the upright moral
agent can easily mislead. It is the posture of the will, and not the
vacillating passions accompanying the will, that determines the moral
constitution of the agent. The confusion between the order of the will
and the order of the passions often permits the moral and religious
life to deteriorate into sentimentality.
Passions constitute a major obstacle to the work of moral reformation
inspired by grace. Resolutions to pursue moral conduct requiring
self-change are easily countered by the emotions of the moral agent.
"Generally, we easily embrace the resolution to reform ourselves. We
gladly toy with the idea of virtue. But as soon as we might fight some
passion, the resolution weakens. We no longer feel capable of
executing an intention we had formed without difficulty but that we
cannot execute without doing violence to ourselves [CM no.254]." For
La Sablière, the passions are simply the enemy of the will, especially
in the painful work of moral reformation. Whereas other moralists of
the period distinguished between beneficent and malevolent passions,
La Sablière condemns the ensemble of emotions as a lethal threat to
the moral life. "The desires inspired by the passions are the wishes
of the sick. We cannot satisfy them without destroying ourselves and
making ourselves miserable [CM no.84.]." La Sablière's thoroughgoing
critique of the passions reflects the voluntarism of her ethical
theory. It is the will alone that is central in determining the
character of the moral life. It also expresses her radical Augustinian
view of concupiscent humanity, however. Even the emotions of the
redeemed bear the distortions of sin; reliance on the emotions for
moral guidance easily leads to error and moral decline.
In her critique of the passions, La Sablière devotes particular
attention to the emotions surrounding the virtue of repentance.
Authentic repentance resides in sorrow for past transgressions,
restitution for the damage caused by the transgressions, and a firm
resolution to avoid committing similar transgressions in the future.
Sorrowful feelings that appear penitential, such as remorse and
regret, are not necessarily the expression of virtue. "Only the
sadness of penance is a reasonable sadness. All the others are marks
of weakness or of the corruption of nature [CM no.54]." It is the
will's decisions, not vague feelings of sorrow, that indicate whether
the moral agent has truly embraced the path of repentance central to
authentic moral reformation.
Only in prayer can the soul successfully resist the empire of the
passions. This combative prayer requires a certain amount of solitude.
"We must separate ourselves from the world and in a certain way from
ourselves in order to hear God in retreat. The tumult of the world and
of the passions often prevents us from hearing Him [CM no.76]." For La
Sablière, ethics is ultimately a question of ascetical and mystical
theology. The resources to sustain a moral life grounded in the
theological virtues and undimmed by the sentimentality of the passions
can only emerge in a life of disciplined religious meditation.
Contemplative attentiveness to God's spirit is the pathway to the
union with God's will that is the wellspring of authentic moral
conduct.
d. Religious Epistemology
The faith-centered struggle to live a moral life free of illusory
virtues and distorting passions reaches its culmination in the union
of the human will with the divine will. Christian Thoughts [CT]
describes the abandonment of the soul to God that seals the efforts of
the upright moral agent to conduct a life grounded on the theological
virtues. This account of mystical union as a species of psychological
abandonment is also an exercise in religious epistemology. The fullest
knowledge of God possible for the human person is a negative one: a
grasp of God's essence through the immediate presence of God and not
through the path of images or concepts referring to God. This
apophatic knowledge of God requires an abolition of the work of the
imagination and of the intellect.
The essential spiritual condition for this union with and knowledge of
God is complete detachment. Renunciation of the world is psychic as
well as moral. "Consider everything created as if it did not exist and
as if it had already returned to the nothingness toward which it runs
[CT no.6]." Detachment from self is even more demanding than
detachment from the world. The memory requires purification. "Forget
everything that the memory has retained. Use it only for God and for
our state in life [CT no.4]." Similarly, the intellect must be freed
from worldly concerns. "Empty our understanding. Use its operations
only for God and for the state where he has placed us [CT no.3]." The
will should avoid dissipation and should focus its affections on God
alone. "We must keep our mind for considering God alone and our heart
for loving God alone [CT no.15]." This insistence on a severe
asceticism of the human faculties of memory, intellect, and will
reflects the radical theocentrism of La Sablière's ethics. Only a
complete absorption within God can permit the moral agent to conduct
an authentic moral life. But it also reflects the apophatic cast of La
Sablière's theory of religious knowledge. The quieting of the
faculties of memory, intellect, and will is essential for the
immediate recognition of God's being that emerges in mystical union.
Christian Thoughts evokes the union with God that is the ultimate goal
of the ascetical and mystical itinerary of the moral agent. The
immediate grasp of God abolishes the need for discursive reflection.
"Only consider God working in our soul. We should not add any of our
own reflections [CT no.10]." Using the rhetoric of the via negativa
(or negative way), La Sablière describes this mature knowledge of God
as a species of forgetting. "We should hold our state of being lost in
God, considering only Him as our only principle [CT no.11]." Repeated
references to the void, nothingness, and sense of loss typifying this
state of union reinforce the apophatic nature of mature religious
knowledge according to Christian Thoughts.
This account of the knowledge of and union with God affected through
self-abandonment reflects the austerity of the spirituality defended
by La Sablière's spiritual director Rancé and the longstanding
tradition of apophatic mysticism within Catholicism. It also echoes
the spirituality of Quietism, the dissident movement in early modern
Catholicism that reached its apogee of influence in the 1690s. For the
Quietists, authentic union with God required the abandonment of
meditation, which they based on imaginative projection and discursive
reflection in favor of meditation conceived as simple self-abandonment
to the will of God. For La Sablière, the most mature knowledge of God
emerges in the immediate recognition of Him by a human will abandoned
to Him. It is this mystical union, veiled in obscurity, that points to
God more accurately than can discursive reflection on the divine
attributes. Like ethics, religious epistemology ultimately flowers in
mystical theology.
4. Reception and Relevance
Until recently, the canon of La Sablière has received only cursory
philosophical attention. Several facts explain this eclipse of an
author celebrated as a savante and as a moraliste during her lifetime.
The misattribution of the works of La Sablière during the two
centuries following her death primarily contributed to her name
becoming obscured. Only the scholarly work of Menjot d'Elbenne in the
early twentieth century permitted the reconstitution of the canon of
her works. Her presence in intellectual history as the patron of La
Fontaine also obscured her own philosophical contributions.
Philosophical chronicles occasionally characterized her as a salon
Cartesian (though there are few traces of Descartes in her actual
writings) and as the protector of the anti-Cartesian La Fontaine, but
her own philosophical and theological views disappeared from view.
Like other salonnières of the period, La Sablière suffered from the
ridicule with which the culture of the salon was treated by leading
male authors of the era. In Book X of his influential Satires, the
literary critic Boileau mocked La Sablière as an amateurish pedant who
possessed only the veneer of literary and scientific culture. Her
telescope (compared to inverted drinking glasses) and her Latin
phrases (allegedly full of grammatical errors) are dismissed as a
caricature of true intellectual distinction. Unsurprisingly, such
misogynist stereotypes of the salonnière stamped La Sablière's work as
devoid of philosophical interest.
Recent commentaries on La Sablière's writings have restored her status
as a moraliste. Her contributions to virtue theory and to moral
psychology are more evident. The theological framework in which she
develops her ethical arguments, however, is still obscured. Part of
the contemporary interest in the moral philosophy of La Sablière is
her construction of a distinctively theological, indeed mystical,
account of the mature moral life. The theological virtues emerge as
the source of, and not the complement to, a life of authentic moral
virtue. Sacramental practice and personal meditation are the necessary
conditions for the creation and maintenance of a human will truly
devoted to the moral good. Like certain contemporary Christian
ethicists, La Sablière contests the value of a natural-law ethics
because the "nature" on which such an ethics is based is a nature
corrupted by sin and indentured to the vices of the world. Her
neo-Augustinian moral philosophy is a defense of an ethical code
explicitly rooted in grace, the theological virtues, and divine
illumination.
5. References and Further Reading
All French to English translations above are by the author of this article.
a. Primary Sources
La Sablière, Marguerite Hessein de. Maximes Chrétiennes, Pensées
Chrétiennes, and Lettres, in Menjot d'Elbenne, Samuel, vicomte, Madame
de la Sablière; Ses Pensées Chrétiennes et ses Lettres à l'Abbé de
Rancé (Paris: Plon, 1923). [A critical edition of the three extant
works of La Sablière.]
b. Secondary Sources
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. Oeuvres complètes, ed. Françoise Escal
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966). [In Book X of his Satires, Boileau mocks La
Sablière as a superficial pedant.]
Conley, John J. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in
Neoclassical France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 2002):
75-96. [An exposition and critique of La Sablière's theological
ethics.]
Ganim, Russell. "Scientific Verses: Subversion of Cartesian Theory and
Practice in the 'Discours à Madame de la Sablière,'" in Refiguring La
Fontaine: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Anne Birberick (Charlottesville,
VA: Rookwood, 1996): 101-125. [A detailed analysis of the
anti-Cartesian theories in La Sablière's entourage.]
Menjot d'Elbenne, Samuel, vicomte. Madame de la Sablière; Ses Pensées
Chrètiennes et ses Lettres à l'Abbé de Rancé (Paris: Plon, 1923).
[Erudite and definitive biography of La Sablière.]
Ogilvie-Bailey, Marilyn. "La Sablière, Marguerite Hessein de la," in
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1986): 118-119. [Informative sketch of La Sablière's
scientific achievements and reputation.]
Wall, Glenda. "La Sablière, Marguerite Hessein de la," in An
Encyclopedia of Continental Women Philosophers, ed. K. Wilson (New
York: Garland, 1991): 2: 1086-1087. [Literary sketch of La Sablière's
biography and bibliography.]
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