Constance de Salm (1767–1845)

Constance de Salm was born Constance-Marie de Théis in Nantes, France, and was highly educated. She published her first poems at age 18. She then wrote the libretto for a highly successful tragic opera called Sappho, set to music by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini and performed in 1794. In 1789, she married a wealthy surgeon named Jean-Baptiste Pipelet, with whom she had a daughter, but the couple divorced 10 years later. She later remarried to Joseph, comte (later prince) de Salm-Dyck and moved with him into the Hôtel de Ségur on the rue de Bac in Paris, where she created a brilliant literary salon that attracted lumaries of the day such as Alexandre Dumas, the actor Talma, and Alexander von Humboldt, among others. The writer Marie-Joseph Chénier dubbed her "the Muse of Reason." Among her other works were the novel Vingt-quatre heures d'une femme sensible (Twenty-Four Hours of a Sensitive Woman, 1824), and an autobiography, Mes Soixante ans (My Sixty Years, 1833).