Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker was born on 11. Oct. 1771 at Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York. Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker was born on 11. Oct. 1771 at New York City, New York County, New York. She was the daughter of
Johannes Jacob Bleecker and
Ann Eliza Schuyler. Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker married
Dr. Pierre Faugeres, son of
Dr. Louis Faugeres and
Eva Remsen, on 14. Jul. 1792 at New York City, New York County, New York. Margaretta Van Wyck Bleecker died on 9. Jan. 1801 at New York City, New York County, New York, at age 29. She was buried on 10. Jan. 1801 at Bowery Methodist Church, New York City, New York County, New York. Margaretta Bleecker Faugères
(1771-1801)
Daughter of Ann Eliza Bleecker, Margaretta Bleecker grew up in the shadow of her mother’s depression and early death. Her father gave her a superior education, but she rejected his aristocratic pretensions, marrying a French physician, Peter Faugères, on Bastille Day, 1791. Faugères published occasional verse in magazines under the pen name Ella, and many of her poems uncannily prefigure the tone and themes of early Freneau and Edgar Allan Poe. She also collected her mother’s extant poetry and prose and published them, along with her own poetry and essays on democratic themes, in 1793. Abusive and profligate, her husband squandered most of Faugères’s inheritance and left her and their daughter destitute when he died in 1798. To support herself, Faugères taught school but quickly declined and died early, like her mother, at age thirty.