, countess de la Suze, a French poetess, whose works have been printed
, countess de la Suze, a French
poetess, whose works have been printed with those of Pellison and others in 1695, and 1725 in 2 volumes 12mo, was
the daughter of Gaspar de Coligni, the third of that name,
marshal of France, and colonel-general of infantry. She
was very early married, in 1643, when she could not be
more than seventeen, to Thomas Hamilton, earl of Haddington, according to Moreri, but we find no mention of
this in the Scotch peerage. After his death she espoused
the count de la Suze, of an illustrious house in Champaigne.
But this second match proved unfortunate, owing to the
furious jealousy of the count her husband, whose severities
towards her made her abjure protestantism, and profess the
catholic faith, which occasioned queen Christina of Sweden
to say, “that she had changed her religion, that she might not
see her husband, neither in this world nor the next.
” Their
antipathy became so great that the countess at last disannulled the marriage; and to induce the count to accede
to it, she offered 25,000 crowns, which he accepted. She
then gave herself up to the study of poetry, and became
much admired by the geniuses of her time, who made her
the subject of their eulogiums. Her fort lay in the elegiac strain, and those works of hers which have come down
to us have at least a delicate turn of sentiment. Her other
poems are songs, madrigals, and odes. The wits of her
time gave her the majesty of Juno with Minerva’s wit and
Venus’s beauty in some verses, attributed to Bouhours:
but her character in other respects appears not to have
been of the most correct kind. She died at Paris, March
10, 1673.