Tallemant des Réaux includes the following anecdote in his historiette about the poet Boisrobert: the jolly abbé was told to gather up some actors, actresses, and playwrights to give their opinion of a rehearsal of Mirame, Richelieu's choice for the opening of his grand new theatre at the Palais-Cardinal in 1641. Boisrobert permitted a woman Tallemant calls “la petite Saint-Amour Frerelot” to attend. The furious cardinal accused him of allowing a whore to contaminate his theatre. Boisrobert defended himself, saying:

Boisrobert's certainty that all seventeenth-century actresses are whores was founded on a long history of similar assumptions about women on the stage, beginning in classical times and gathering momentum in the early Christian era. Women who adopted the theatre as a profession in early modern France faced not only the usual antitheatrical biases, based on Roman law and patristic writings, but a special set of presumptions tied to their gender. As far back as Xenophon in the fourth century bce, women who performed for money, publicly or privately, faced the condescension and contempt of their societies.