SCUDÉRI, Madeleine de, sister to Georges de Scudéri, was born at Havre on the 15th of June 1607. Few names in literature have afforded a subject for more frequent epigram than that of Mademoiselle de Scudéri, and few works are now less read than hers. Having gone to Paris shortly after she had finished her education, she became connected with the Hotel de Rambouillet, where she met with many persons of the first reputation. Mademoiselle de Scudéri had not resided long among this distinguished circle, when she began to use her pen, to correct, if possible, the wrongs which fortune had done her. Her principal romances are:—Ibrahim, 4 vols., Paris, 1641; Artamène, 10 vols., Paris, 1650; Clélie, 10 vols., 1656; Almahide, 8 vols., 1660. She likewise wrote a great many volumes of Conversations, besides some fables in verse. She at once met with a great success. Not that this prosperity arose from any very remarkable method which the fair writer had adopted in the construction of her tales; on the contrary, they were about as full of rhodomontade as could well be conceived; but then they were love all over. No doubt she has given us tolerably exact portraits, so far as they go, of the chief habitants of the Hotel de Rambouillet; but the attention of the reader is constantly confounded by the unceasing interruption of episodes, anecdotes, and frivolities, and his patience is quite exhausted by the elaborate exquisiteness with which everything is gone about, from the fastening of a shoe-buckle to the decorating of the person of a hero with his coat of mail. No doubt, all this was infinitely admired by the elegant beauties among the Parisian bluestockings; and there were numbers of the other sex down upon their knees before the writer, who was by no means a miracle of beauty. This method of writing was the rage of the day; and there was just one man then living who had the audacity to hold up the whole tribe to the unmitigated laughter of the citizens of Paris. The Précieuses Ridicules of Molière sent a shaft through the heart of these absurd coterie, from which they never afterwards recovered. Mademoiselle Scudéri was held in the highest honour by these "Précieuses" till her death, which occurred on the 2d of June 1701, in her ninety-fourth year.