Françoise-Louise de Warens

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Françoise-Louise de Warens, also called Madame de Warens (1699 in Vevey -1768 in Chambéry), was the benefactor and mistress of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

She was born into a Swiss Protestant family who had immigrated to Annecy, but became a Catholic in 1726 to receive a church pension which had been instated to increase the spread of Catholicsm near Geneva, then a bastion of Protestantism.

Without doubt, she was a very controversial woman, leading a liberal life for a woman of her epoque. She annulled her marriage to M. de Warens in 1726 after failing in a clothing business that she was putting together. Rousseau met her on Palm Sunday 1728, forever changing both their lives. It was said that she was a spy and a converter for Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. She gave Rousseau the education he lacked and fulfiled his hungry spirit, his need for love. Rousseau never forgot her. When he returned from England in 1767 and was wandering through France and Switzerland, he found out in August of 1768 that his maman, as he called her, had died in poverty in March of that year.