Mademoiselle Aïssé

Charlotte Aïssé (a corruption of Haïdé; – 13 March 1733) was a French letter-writer and the daughter of a Circassian prince.

Life

Her father's palace was pillaged by the Turks, and as a child of four years old she was sold to the comte Charles de Ferriol, the French ambassador at Constantinople (see Crimean slave trade). She was brought up in Paris by Ferriol's sister-in-law, Marie-Angélique de Tencin, with her own sons, (1697–1774) and d'Argental (1700–1788). Her great beauty and romantic history made her the fashion, and she attracted the notice of the regent, Philip II, Duke of Orléans, whose offers she had the strength of mind to refuse. She formed a deep and lasting attachment to Blaise-Marie d'Aydie (1692–1761), a knight of Malta, by whom she had a daughter. She died in Paris.

Lettres de Mademoiselle Aïssé à Madame C… Portrait engraved by F. Wexelberg. It served as the frontispiece of the second edition of the Lettres de Mademoiselle Aïssé (Lausanne, 1788). Her letters to her friend Julie Calandrini (; 1668–1754), were first published with notes attributed to Voltaire (1787). They were republished the following year and throughout the 19th century. Their recipient was not correctly identified until the 1806 edition.

Letter VII, dated Paris, 1727, was adapted by Leonora Blanche Alleyne as The Man in White and illustrated by Henry Justice Ford in The Red True Story Book (1895).

It has been argued that the letters were heavily rewritten before their posthumous publication, based on stylistic differences with rare surviving manuscripts.

Mlle Aïssé in fiction Mlle Aïssé may have inspired Abbé Prévost's (1740) and Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823).

She was the subject of three plays: