ABSTRACT
Science and the literary salon, as they emerged from the reign of Louis XIII in the late 1640s, constituted antagonistic if minor social forms. Polite culture in Mazarin's France revolved around literature, from poetic theory to the lightest of prose. Moliere's farcical portrayal represented a sort of affectionate if condescending acceptance of the precieuses in the newly dominant literary elite. Natural philosophy neither provided nor required any new terms in the Dictionnaire, despite the work's exhaustive collection of neologisms. During the winter of 1660-1661, the first social season after the Dictionnaire appeared, Christiaan Huygens, a young natural philosopher officially if tenuously connected with a Dutch diplomatic mission, visited Paris. Rohault's was the most overtly entertaining and the least analytic or the Parisian scientific circles Huygens visited. In matters of natural history and philosophy, however, the Journal was frequently more original.
