Mother of the Church

Sofia Petrovna Svechina (1782–1857), better known as Madame Sophie Swetchine, was the hostess of a famous nineteenth-century Parisian salon. A Russian émigré, Svechina moved to France with her husband in 1816. She had recently converted to Roman Catholicism, and the salon she opened acquired a distinctly religious character. It quickly became one of the most popular salons in Paris and was a meeting place for the French intellectual Catholic elite and members of the Liberal Catholic movement. As