ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Paris in the generations immediately following the Wars of Religion, a pronounced movement on the part of elites and gens de lettres alike into essentially private forms of association and sociability that transformed the cityscape and defined the cultural history of the period was found. These Parisian gens de lettres inhabited a hothouse of cross-cutting and overlapping relationships that defined them as a generational cohort of friends of friends. In short, never before, and certainly not again until the Enlightenment, was Parisian intellectual and cultural sociability so rich and varied. The late sixteenth century witnessed a turn away from Aristotle's model of perfect friendship as the basis for citizenship. In a letter published in the Recueil of 1627, Jean de Silhon, an apologist for Cardinal Richelieu and a devout enemy of philosophical skepticism, consoled a noble friend for his lack of success at court in terms that echo contemporary impatience with the Aristotelian conception of friendship.
