Abstract
Seventeenth-centuryauthors say almost nothing about their own writing practice or their conception of their work, even though it was during this period that the advent of theauthor took place. This is because writing is linked to the intimate, and put on the same level as cooking or the common cold. What's more, publishing practices at the time created a strong disjunction between author and work. The ideal of thehonest man and the refusal to submit to the injunctions of the negotium led to a reluctance to " play " the author, all the more so as the work of writing was often carried out by several hands, in accordance with the traditional division of rhetoric between different writing periods.
The Lettres de Tristan L'Hermite ( Letters from Tristan L'Hermite) give a melancholy image of writing: it appears as a lethargy that provokes a guilty conscience. In the seventeenth century, there are no portraits of contemporary writers writing. The imagination of writing is entirely represented by sacred figures such as Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and Saint Bernard. This is why writing in the seventeenth century is contradictory and painful : it lies between the desire for success and the aspiration to the sacred.
