ABSTRACT
In 1882, Ernest Renan posed a central question that continues to inspire and haunt scholars today, perhaps even more so than in the philosopher's own lifetime. Renan's remarks are particularly applicable to the case of seventeenth-century France. Women's participation in the literary field of this formative and formidable period was "forgotten" or revised in order to advance a particular "spiritual principle" of the French nation. Renan's observations of over one hundred years ago were not only applicable to his own time period, but even more surprising, especially prescient of what would happen in the succeeding century. History has found it easier to associate any salon influence with the inheritors of the seventeenth-century salon tradition. The history of one genre in particular illustrates to an exceptional degree the effect a reevaluation of the salons and their influence on the classical literary field can have.
