 An early influential thinker was Dominique Bouhours, a Jesuit and frequent guest at salons who wrote Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, a series of dialogues about good taste. In this work, he deals with the arts, particularly eloquence, but also manners. Bouhours is best known for coining the term je ne sais quoi or “I don’t know what”—a special, undefinable quality that transcends any rules. His interlocutors evoke the possibility that a work of art could follow all the rules yet fail to please, if it lacks that special something. They compare the je ne sais quoi in the arts to the ineffable in the contemplation of nature or in Catholic theology. In another part of his Entretiens, Bouhours denounces exaggeration or excessive ornamentation in language: a common trope in works about rhetoric since Antiquity. His interlocutors apply this idea to seventeenth-century Europe when they agree that, with its simplicity and modesty, the French language is superior to bombastic Spanish and effeminate Italian. These linguistic prejudices indicate to us that Bouhours was trying to establish the status of France as the cultural heir to the Roman empire, in opposition to the two most dominant cultures in Europe in his era.