Mme d'Épinay interested herself in literature and the welfare of men of letters after the breakdown of her marriage to Denis-Joseph de La Live d'Épinay, a financier. She set up a congenial salon in her country house at La Chevrette, near Montmorency, and offered hospitality to the Philosophes, the leading intellectual figures of the period immediately prior to the French Revolution. Her friendship with Grimm (Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Freiherr von) was long and untroubled, and Mme d'Épinay collaborated with him on his famous correspondence. Her association with Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques), on the other hand, was brief and stormy: in 1756 he accepted her offer of accommodation in the “Hermitage,” a small dwelling near her country house, and wrote his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse there. But then he quarreled with his hostess, and the two became implacable foes. Mme d'Épinay was the author of several novels and works on education, but her writings are of interest now chiefly for their autobiographical revelations.