 His own definition of taste depends on what he calls “rapports”, or connections between various aspects of a work. An artist creates these rapports and the most refined, the most erudite, and the most sensitive viewer is the one who can discern the largest number of them. His prime example is a line from Horace, a 1640 tragedy by Corneille: “qu’il mourût” or “that he had died”. Diderot explains that these words in isolation are neither beautiful nor ugly. But if one knows the context within the plot of the play, that this is the answer that a father gives when asked what he would have his son do in battle, the listener finds more interest in the line. Diderot adds several other circumstances from the play, for instance, that this is the only surviving son, that he is alone against three enemies, and that he is fighting for the honor of his country, that create more rapports in the mind of the listener, until this ultra-concise line becomes an object of sublime beauty. The rapports described here involve understanding more and more of the plot and of the human relationships depicted, which add layers of meaning to certain lines. In his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, translated as Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751b), Diderot explains something similar, using the term “hieroglyphics” rather than “rapports”. He gives the example of a poem in which men of taste can see a much larger number of “hieroglyphs” or elements of prosody, than ordinary people; in other words, they can do what literary scholars call a close reading. What is not clear, however, is how people can reach the stage of refinement where they are able to discern more rapports or “hieroglyphs”.