ABSTRACT
Puisieux's Conseils à une amie elicited fewer reactions than Lambert's Avis in contemporary periodicals. If the intervention of a man as brilliant as Diderot had not saved the Conseils, no hope was left for Puisieux's literary ambitions, reasoned Raynal. The social parameters that Raynal used in order to denigrate Puisieux's book showed the limits of the belief, dear to progressive thinkers of his ilk, that personal merit had to be divorced from social status. A few years after Raynal, Grimm reported on Puisieux's fictional and moralist writings in a couple of succinct passages scattered throughout his Correspondance littéraire. The most extensive commentaries on Puisieux's Réflexions et avis appeared in Le Journal des dames, in which her book was the object of two reviews. The enthusiasm of the first reviewer, la Louptière, in May 1761, was not quite matched by Madame de Beaumer's own review a few months later, which expressed her support for Puisieux's book in a more reserved manner.
