Delphine de Girardin pen name Vicomte Delaunay, was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 author.

She was born at Aachen, and christened Delphine Gay. Her mother, the well-known Madame Sophie Gay

Marie Françoise Sophie Gay

Marie Françoise Sophie Gay , was a French author, born in Paris.Madame Gay was the daughter of M. Nichault de la Valette and of Francesca Peretti, an Italian lady. In 1793 she was married to M. Liottier, an exchange broker, but she was divorced from him in 1799, and shortly afterwards was married...

, brought her up in the midst of a brilliant literary society. She published two volumes of miscellanea, Essais poetiques (1824) and Nouveaux Essais poétiques (1825). A visit to Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 in 1827, during which she was enthusiastically welcomed by the literati of Rome and even crowned in the capitol, produced various poems, of which the most ambitious was Napoline (1833).

Delphine's marriage in 1831 to Émile de Girardin

Émile de Girardin

Émile de Girardin , was a French journalist, publicist, and politician. He was born in Paris in 1802, the son of General Alexandre de Girardin and of Madame Dupuy , wife of a Parisian advocate....

 opened up a new literary career. The contemporary sketches which she contributed from 1836 to 1839 to the La Presse, under the nom de plume of Charles de Launay, were collected under the title of Lettres parisiennes (1843), and obtained a brilliant success. Contes d'une vieille fille a ses neveux (1832), La Canne de Monsieur de Balzac (1836) and Il ne faut pas jouer avec la douleur (1853) are among the best-known of her romances; and her dramatic pieces in prose and verse include L'École des journalistes (1840), Judith (1843), Cléopâtre (1847), Lady Tartufe (1853), and the one-act comedies, C'est la faute du mari (1851), La Joie fait peur (1854), Le Chapeau d'un horloger (1854) and Une Femme qui deteste son mari, which did not appear till after the author's death.

Madame Girardin exercised considerable personal influence in contemporary literary society, and in her drawing-room were often to be found Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....

, Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

, Alfred de Musset

Alfred de Musset

Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...

 and Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

. Her collected works were published in six volumes (1860-1861).