In Alain-René Lesage, Jacques-Philippe d’Orneval, and Louis Fuzelier's Les Amours déguisez (Cupids in Disguise, 1726), Venus wants to conduct a survey of the state of lovers. The following scenes parade before the audience ridiculous figures from a bookish prude to a drunk Swiss man. In scene 8, we meet the rich widow Madame Doucet. She seems to play the ideal role for the widow: she has retired from public life, has no plans to remarry, and devotes herself to charity. Arlequin, whom Venus put in charge of observing lovers, finds out, however, that her charity work involves taking in a young, impoverished gentleman named Damis as the steward to her estate. The situation is clear: the young man provides sexual favors out of wedlock in exchange for a comfortable living arrangement.

Such a scene reveals some of the threats that widows were thought to pose. A widow might not remarry (and indeed moralists recommended this option), but contemporaries feared what she might do as a result of her sexual experience. Marriage was considered a second-best option. Instead of channeling her physical desires into another marriage, Madame Doucet chooses to retain her autonomy, continuing to embrace her sexuality without its containment by a husband's authority. Threatening social and financial autonomy coupled with carnal knowledge, however, were just two of the typical features of widows on the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury stage.

Eighteenth-century comic repertoire, regardless of its genre and intended audience, ridicules widows for a common set of characteristics. In general, dramatists mock widows for their age, vanity, sexual experience, and schemes to find love and companionship. Widows also inspired fear because of their independence from parental or spousal authority. Librettists, furthermore, often portray widows as greedy, suggesting that their thirst for money is not simply their very real precarious financial situations, but part of broader picture of immorality. These stories claim that widows are miserly because they wish to maintain the social freedoms afforded them upon the death of their spouses, rather than being forced financially back into the care of a male family member.