From a funeral oration delivered in 1711 by Monsieur de Fermel’huis at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture following Chéron’s death, and published in the following year, we learn that Joseph de Soleras had been her “maître de Luth.” Little is known of Soleras, but his name has turned up in association with a mascarade performed before several members of the royal family at Blois in 1658, an appearance that may have led to his later position as lutenist to Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans (1644-1670). Chéron thus received lute instruction from a well-placed musician; to date, no other source illuminates whether she formally studied the other instruments in her collection. One of her contemporaries, Dézallier d’Argentville, however, wrote that it was in her salon that she and her engraving apprentices played music in the evenings after work, following discussions about art and art theory with some of the leading intellectuals of the day:

One could often hear in this salon the brother [Louis Chéron], the sister [Élisabeth-Sophie], the illustrious [Roger] de Piles and several savants of the highest order discussing the most interesting points about painting and the fine arts. Music followed these excellent discourses; at the end of the day when she and her two nieces [Ursule and Jeanne de la Croix] left their palettes they made music, giving new proof of their melodious skill on several instruments.

The instruments in her collection, then, perhaps served her students, family, and friends as well as herself. The household inventory also reveals that she owned cases for several of her instruments: guitar, angélique, theorbo, and treble viol. Although these may have been intended for storage purposes in her home, they also may have been used to take the instruments out for music making or performances elsewhere. In any case, the instruments’ inventory presents strong evidence that her salon was a place for musical activity, for she had so many on hand. This salon must have been an exquisite spot, splendidly befitting the multi-talented artist. Her brother, Louis (1660-1713), had made several tableaux that hung on its walls: The Apotheosis of Hercules, Moses Strewing Water on the Fields, and Angelique and Médor.

Chéron’s name appears in a compendium of letters and poetry written by and about outstanding women that was assembled by the royal historiographer Claude-Charles de Vertron on the eve of the eighteenth century: La Nouvelle Pandore ou Les Femmes illustres du siècle de Louis le Grand. Here we see that she played a vital role in the circles of learned women who gathered throughout most of the previous century, and that her musical salon followed in the wake of the famed gathering places of the groups of précieuses and of femmes savantes. Indeed, the now little-known angélique may have been named after Angélique Paulet, one of the early précieuses who presided over some of the first gatherings of women in the salons and who was a masterful lutenist. The angélique is a double-necked instrument with strings that are tuned to a series of diatonic pitches, much like a harp, with ten frets and a range of just over two octaves. Chéron had more than a casual acquaintance with the salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry; she drew the writer’s portrait, which was later used as the basis for an engraving by another artist. Scudéry holds pride of place as the first French woman to have been named to the Ricovrati, known there by her pre-existent sobriquet “Sapho” (making an exception to the later rule of naming all female members after the muses).The nineteenth-century writer G. de Leris claimed that Chéron also composed music and that she set some of her own psalms. Even if we consider her as a true “Renaissance woman,” there appears to be no basis for asserting that her musical skills extended beyond performance. The confusion may have been brought about by a misinterpretation of the following quatrain that Vertron wrote about Chéron’s psalm paraphrases in La Nouvelle Pandore:

CHERON par ses hauts Chants
surpasse les Neufs Sœurs,
Ses Sujets sont Divins, & Sa Voix est
touchante:
En marquant les Regrets d’une Ame
Pénitente,
Elle instruit les Esprits & convertit
les Cœurs.

[CHERON with her lofty songs
surpasses the nine sisters,
Her subjects are divine and her voice
most touching,
She notes the regrets of a penitent soul,
She gives spiritual instruction and
converts hearts.]

As “Erato,” Chéron had mastered the art of writing lyric poetry. We know from Titon du Tillet that the great success of her Essay de pseaumes et cantiques was partially due to the fact that she had studied Hebrew so as to get as close as possible to understanding the fine points of the text. Her brother Louis made the engravings that accompany each of the paraphrases, even if not all editions included them. Libraries in Europe and the United States today preserve dozens of copies of this work, both from in its 1694 printing as well as the reprints issued posthumously in 1715.

Even if Chéron did not actually compose music, her psalm paraphrases provided the texts for compositions penned by at least two composers. The musicologist Thierry Favier recently matched a setting of Psalm 68 by Jean-Baptiste Drouart de Bousset (1662-1725) with Chéron’s paraphrased verse. Bousset set the psalm as an air spirituel for treble voice and basso continuo and had it published by the Ballard printers in 1701. The second composer, Antonia Bembo (c. 1640-c. 1720)—a Venetian noblewoman who had been living in France since the mid-1670s [see Goldberg 6]—set all seven “Pseaumes de la Pénitence,” which had been grouped together in one section of the Essay. In the 1930s Yvonne Rokseth discovered that Chéron’s texts matched Bembo’s work, entitled Les sept Pseaumes de David. Unlike Bousset’s, Bembo’s music was never published, but the set of seven penitential psalms is preserved in a bound manuscript volume at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It seems quite possible that Bembo and Chéron could have been acquainted, given that both were on the king’s pension rolls, both were Parisian residents involved in music-making, and that Chéron had become a member of an academy based in Bembo’s homeland, the Veneto. Bembo’s complete penitential psalm settings-for 1-4 voices, all with the accompaniment of two obbligato treble parts with basso continuo-may represent something of a collaborative effort and could conceivably have been performed in Chéron’s salon.