Benedetta Craveri offers in this book, as rigorous and suggestive as it is entertaining and erudite, an exciting literary journey in which she gives voice to emblematic female figures who made possible a culture based on the power of the word, the germ of modern civil society and Public opinion.

Before the Revolution of 1789, France experienced two troubled centuries. This long period of transformations has as its common thread the literary room, where women are the central figure and conversation the civilizing axis.

The art of conversation, which in principle was a game destined to pleasure and distraction, was nourished by literature to give way to introspection, to history, to scientific, philosophical and political reflection. In that strictly secular environment, the women of the time, lacking civil and legal rights, established the rules of the game: they rejected the interference of power in private life to create and thus promote a space of freedom that was denied them abroad.

Through anecdotes, memorable sayings, portraits, descriptions of environments and places, the author reconstructs a world in which terms such as sociability, ingenuity or grace express an ideal of civilization that seeks to express itself through the word, a word that Benedetta Craveri analyzes and recreates in a masterful way.