SAINT-LAMBERT, Jean François de (1716-1803), French poet, was born at Nancy in 1716, and died at Paris in 1803. During great part of his long life he held various employments at the court of Stanislaus of Poland, when that prince was established in Lorraine. He also served in the French army, and then betook himself to literature, producing among other things a volume of descriptive verse, Les Saisons (wildly overpraised at the time, and now never read), many articles for the Encyclopédie, and some miscellaneous works in verse and prose. Saint-Lambert’s chief fame, however, comes from the strange fate which made him the successful rival in love of the two most famous men of letters in France, not to say in Europe, during the 18th century. The infatuation of the marquise du Châtelet for him and its fatal termination are known to all readers of the life of Voltaire. His subsequent courtship of Madame d’Houdetot, Rousseau’s Sophie, though hardly less disastrous to his rival, was less disastrous to the lady, and continued for the whole lives of himself and his mistress. They survived till the present century as a kind of irregular Baucis and Philemon, illustrating the manners of the vanished régime, which had been not unjustly celebrated, and vindicating its constancy from a very general opinion.