Françoise-Louise de Warens

Françoise-Louise de Warens

The house where Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived with Mme de Warens in 1735-6. Now a museum dedicated to Rousseau.

Françoise-Louise de Warens, born Louise Éléonore de la Tour du Pil, also called Madame de Warens (31 March 1699^[1] – 29 July 1762^[2]), was the benefactress and mistress of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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

Without doubt, she was a very controversial woman, leading a liberal life for a woman of her time. 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 fulfilled his hungry spirit and his need for love. Rousseau never forgot her after she openly initiated him in the matters of love and "intimacy." 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 six years before, in Chambéry. Rousseau describes thoroughly his relationship with her in his "Confessions."

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