Anne-Marguerite Petit, dame Du Noyer (1663–1719)

Anne-Marguerite Du Noyer, née Petit, was born in Nîmes, France, into a bourgeois Protestant family. Her mother Catherine Cotton died in childbirth, and she was raised by a maternal aunt. In 1686, during the persecution of Huguenots that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, she fled France disguised as a boy and took refuge with a paternal uncle in Holland. Later that year, at the insistence of her family, she returned to France, converted to the Roman Catholic faith, and married Guillaume Du Noyer in Paris in 1688. In 1701, unhappy in her marriage, she went back to Protestantism and had to leave France again. With her two daughters, but leaving her son behind, she went first to Geneva, Switzerland, then to the village of Voorburg near The Hague. One of her visitors there was Voltaire. She supported herself and her children in exile by journalism and writing pamphlets. She became the editor-in-chief of the newsletter La Quintessence des Nouvelles in 1710, a post she held until her death. She became famous with her periodical Lettres historiques et galantes, in which she chronicled the major events of the last years of the reign of King Louis XIV of France in the form of letters between two female friends. She also had success with her Mémoires de Madame Du N*** écrits par elle-même, published in 1709-1710.