Shelley Winters

spoke in prefaces of ‘le peuple’, an ambiguous term which designated a non-noble public which excluded the populace who, at best, were restricted to the wares of the Bibliothèque bleue and the theatrical entertainments of the Foire Saint-Laurent in winter and the Foire Saint-Germain in summer. The Pléiade’s learned audience disappeared with the decline of readers bilingual in French and Latin and in the 1660s authors complained of the court’s hostility to learning, which it dismissed as ‘pedantry’