Mme de Tencin was part of the intellectual avant-garde before her time, and her salon was one of the first centres of literary sociability. Yet, although she writes with a view to achieving the status of writer, she resorts to anonymity in order to preserve her status as a woman of condition. In her novelMemoirs of the Count of Comminge, she uses the mask of a masculine writing so as to express what she claims for herself: the right, as an individual, to determine her own fate.