This is the first critical edition of the poems of Henriette de Coligny, comtesse de La Suze, to appear since their publication in various collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Celebrated in salon circles and at the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV (the Sun King), Henriette de Coligny’s rhetorical prowess in pushing boundaries make her unusual, even for her times.

The daughter of Gaspard III de Coligny, maréchal de Châtillon, and Anne de Polignac, she came from an illustrious family network related to both the French Crown and the Dutch house of Orange-Nassau. The great-granddaughter of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519–72), she was born at Châtillon in 1623 (and not in Paris in 1618, as all biographies state) and raised in one of the most prominent Reformed families in France. In 1643 she married for love the Scotsman Thomas Hamilton, Third Earl of Haddington, who died eighteen months later. On returning to Paris, she frequented the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria whom she had met in England; the queen, it would appear, attempted to convert her to Catholicism, to which Henriette’s mother put an abrupt stop by marrying her against her will to Gaspard de Champagne, comte de La Suze, a distant cousin, one-eyed and alcoholic. Their communal life lasted five years, from 1647 to 1652, during which Gaspard allied himself with Condé against the Crown in the civil war of the Fronde, and Henriette remained on their lands at Belfort in western France. Then, in 1653, two years after the death of her mother, she converted to Catholicism, leading Christina of Sweden during a visit to Paris in 1656 to supposedly quip that Henriette had converted “so as not to ever see [her] husband again in this world or the next” (43). Henriette was converted through the combined efforts of Queen Anne of Austria, several bishops, the convert Brachet de La Milletière, and “many Lords and Ladies,” according to her primary convertisseur Father Léon de Saint-Jean (47). The entire court attended the ceremony at which the papal nuncio officiated. She then began divorce proceedings against her husband on grounds of impotence in a highly sensationalized case that resulted in her favor in 1661. Refusing to marry again, she led a free life marked by a number of affairs and her flourishing poetic fame. She died in 1673 at age fifty.

Known under her pen name “Comtesse de La Suze,” Henriette became the most anthologized woman writer of her time. Manuscript copies of her poems circulated widely until several were included in a volume in 1653—she was then thirty—by the Parisian bookseller Charles de Sercy; Sercy then reedited the anthology another four times, including a few more of her poems each time. Her name appeared alongside that of Paul Pellisson, Madeleine de Scudéry’s devoted salon partner, on the title page of a collective volume in 1664 by the bookseller Gabriel Quinet, who brought out further editions the following two decades. In 1666, Sercy published an independent collection solely under her name, consisting of her elegies, chansons (many set to music), odes, madrigals, and epigrams, all in French, to which he added several poems by others. Even though the volume is not entirely hers, it represents a “recueil personnel” (“solo collection,” 61); only three other female poets of the period, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, Mlle Certain, and Antoinette Deshoulières, had solo-authored volumes. None of this, though, makes of La Suze a professional author. She allowed publishers to gather her poems and use her name on the covers of anthologies. She made no effort to garner a collection of her verses, or even to sign them all, making attributions subject to caution.

La Suze’s extant output is slim, but telling. Her elegies were especially popular, alternating masculine and feminine voices on love in the pastoral mode of L’Astrée. The current edition contains eleven elegies, twenty-nine chansons, four odes, six madrigals, and several responses and epigrams. The extensive introduction contains fascinating new archival information, and retrieves from a complex editorial history poems that can safely be attributed to her. This is no small feat.