Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Marie Leprince de Beaumont was a French author who wrote the best known version of Beauty and the Beast. She had a relationship with the spy for the British Thomas Pichon .
She was born in Rouen 1711 as the daughter of JeanBaptiste Le Prince and died in 1780. She lost her mother MarieBarbe Plantart when she was only eleven but wrote that she did not mourn her death. The family was very poor and several of her siblings had to be sent away for adoption. She wrote that her mother had suffered terribly at not being able to maintain contact with her children or to establish what had become of them. She therefore felt intuitively that her mothers death was a blessing.
Source: Wikipedia