Rambouillet, Marquise de, a lady of wealth and a lover of literature and art, born in Rome, who settled in Paris, and conceiving the idea of forming a society of her own, gathered together into her salon a select circle of intellectual people, which, degenerating into pedantry, became an object of general ridicule, and was dissolved at her death (1588‒1665).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Rambler * Rameau, Jean Philippe