 During her lifetime, Scudéry acquired a reputation as an amateur botanist and zoologist. Her celebrated garden contained many exotic trees and flowers considered difficult to cultivate in the Parisian climate. Like other pet lovers, she rejected Descartes’s theory of the animal as a soulless machine. Her dialogue History of Two Chameleons indicates her rejection of Descartes’s mechanistic theory of nature in favor of a vitalist account of nature which attributes emotions and even moral qualities to non-human animals. The dialogue reflects Scudéry’s own experimentation on two chameleons imported from Alexandria and entrusted to her care.