Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius Madame Helvétius is mentioned briefly in the Robert Lawson children's book "Ben and Me" (1939) as having many important people at her dinners, and also having cats (distressing to the protagonist, who is a mouse) and a particularly disagreeable dog. Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius (23 July 1722 – 12 August 1800), also Anne-Catherine de Ligniville d'Autricourt, nicknamed "Minette", maintained a renowned salon in France in the eighteenth century. One of the twenty-one children of Jean-Jacques de Ligniville and his wife Charlotte de Saureau, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, the niece of Madame de Graffigny, married the
Anne Hathaway (poem) of my widow's head/ as he held me upon that next best bed". In "The Second Best Bed and the Legacy of Anne Hathaway", Katherine Scheil describes it as "… [centering] on an intimate relationship between the Shakespeares and the second best bed: 'The bed we loved in was a spinning world / of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas / where he would dive for pearls' while 'In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, / dribbling their prose'". She sees Duffy's poem as belonging to a category of recent takes on Anne Hathaway that "… have used