Cicero, Paris, 1641
Richelieu was the patron for this volume of Cicero’s letters published under the auspices of the Académie Française. It was dedicated to Honoré Courtin, a royal councillor.
The editor and translator of the work, Antoine Du Breton, praised the usefulness of Cicero’s orations as exemplars of prose style, drawing a parallel between the Roman politician and the ‘only rival that Cicero may have in this century’, the French author Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. Balzac was regarded in his lifetime as the master of French prose, his work a union of urbane, witty expression and cogent analysis of salient moral and political concern. 1
- See Emmanuel Bury, ‘Savoir vivre ou savoir parlet: Les ambiguïtés du modèle cicéronien de l’honnêteté’, ed. Alain Montandon, L’ Honnête Homme et le dandy (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), 19-34, on p. 26. ↩