ABSTRACT
Just as there is a specific social context for the sermon or the funeral oration, so too with conversation: it requires a context that is both historically and socially specific, thereby ordering a social space which can become its own.1 In seventeenth-century France, the salon2 was that space. Around the ruelle in an aristocratic lady’s ‘bedroom’3 gathered not only aristocratic men but also men of letters from a variety of other backgrounds, such as Voiture, or Corneille.4
