#baffling stuff

This fandom was drama central, damn 🫣

Marie Therese Geoffrin was an eminent salon hostess that rose to French high society following her marriage to the 21 year old Philippe Charles d'Estampes, Marquise de la Ferte-Imbault. He would die only a few years after their marriage and seven months after the birth of their daughter, and Marie Therese would return to her family home and her mother, Mme. Geoffrin. Though not a family of intellectuals, Marie's own natural curiosity and her title soon brought her into contact with many notable writers and thinkers of the day: Montesquieu, Fontenelle, and La Motte Houtard. Eventually her own salon would expand to include such names as Voltaire, Walpole, Diderot and the future King of Poland, Stanislaus Augustus. Even though they resided in the same house, the elder Mme. Geoffrin and Marie Therese would run competing salons, her mother meeting with religiously motivated oppontents to the enlightened ideas of Marie Therese's circle, called the 'Order of Lanturelus'. The portrait can be seen as a kind of preparatory study - though due to its finish, the Wrightsman collection portrait is considered a finished piece in its own right - for a much larger work, currently in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum (not to be confused with this portrait, also in the same museum).