ABSTRACT
In 1981, when Marguerite Yourcenar was admitted as the first woman to the French Academy, she faced a challenge that none of her male predecessors of the previous three hundred and fifty years had had to confront. According to Yourcenar's explanation, which confirms the role attributed to women in traditional depictions of French literary culture, women were content to remain on the sidelines. In subtly drawing a parallel between the arenas of the salon and the Academy, Yourcenar invites a re-examination of this sphere of female influence and its relationship to mainstream French literary culture. The salons and their central figures are a rich terrain for the study of the fabrication of France's cultural memory. This chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century salon for a number of reasons. It draws upon the body of research and commentaries by historians and literary critics over the past three hundred and fifty years devoted to the salons and to the phenomena associated with them.
