Sophie D'Houdetot - Later Life

Later Life

Saint-Lambert had become Mme d'Houdetot's lover around 1752. Her husband tolerated and perhaps even welcomed the situation; she had fulfilled her conjugal obligations by providing him with a son, and her lover was a presentable man. It was not uncommon in the Old Régime for partners in a marriage of convenience to accept this kind of infidelity in a Ménage à trois; Émilie du Châtelet, her husband and Voltaire are another example. Saint-Lambert and Sophie d'Houdetot remained together until the poet's death in 1803. Sophie took an interest in the newly independent American colonies, and corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, received Benjamin Franklin into her home, and became friends with Saint-John de Crèvecœur.

After the French Revolution, the Houdetots and Saint-Lambert moved to Sannois, where they created a society of men of letters from the pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment, like La Harpe, abbé Morellet, and Suard - and some rising stars like Chateaubriand, who wrote in his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (Memoirs from beyond the grave) that Saint-Lambert and Sophie d'Houdetot "both represented the opinions and the freedoms of a by-gone age, carefully stuffed and preserved: it was the eighteenth century expired and married in its manner. It was sufficient to remain steadfast in one's life for illegitimacies to become legitimacies." Rather than an attack on the aged countess and her lover, one should understand these words as the voice of a new Romantic generation condemning the ways of a discredited past.