with people of refinement, a habit of mind is there obtained which, without comparison, forms a more accurate, judgment of things than the rusty attainments of the pedants.”  From this time forth, it may be said that the arbiter of truth and of taste is not, as before, an erudite Scaliger, but a man of the world, a La Rochefoucauld, or a Tréville.[5] The pedant and, after him, the savant, the specialist, is set aside.  “True honest people,” says Nicole after Pascal, “require no sign.  They need not be divined; they join in the conversation going on as they enter the room.  They are not styled either poets or surveyors, but they are the judges of all these."[6] In the eighteenth century they constitute the sovereign authority.  In the great crowd of blockheads sprinkled with pedants, there is, says Voltaire, “a small group apart called good society, which, rich, educated and polished, forms, you might say, the flower of humanity; it is for this group that the greatest men have labored; it is this group which accords social recognition."[7] Admiration, favor, importance, belong not to those who are worthy of it but to those who address themselves to this group.  “In 1789,” said the Abbé Maury, “the French Academy alone enjoyed any esteem in France, and it really bestowed a standing.  That of the Sciences signified nothing in public opinion, any more than that of Inscriptions. . .  The languages is considered a science for fools.  D’Alembert was ashamed of belonging to the Academy of Sciences.  Only a handful of people listen to a mathematician, a chemist, etc. but the man of letters, the lecturer, has the world at his feet."[8] — Under such a strong pressure the mind necessarily follows a literary and verbal route in conformity with the exigencies, the proprieties, the tastes, and the degree of attention and of instruction of its public.[9] Hence the classic mold, — formed out of the habit of speaking, writing and thinking for a drawing room audience.[10]

This is immediately evident in its style and language.  Between Amyot, Rabelais and Montaigne on the one hand, and Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac on the other, classic French comes into being and dies.  From the very first it is described at the language of “honest people.”  It is fashioned not merely for them, but by them, and Vaugelas,[11] their secretary, devotes himself for thirty years to the registry of decisions according to the usages only of good society.  Hence, throughout, both in vocabulary and in grammar, the language is refashioned over and over again, according to the cast of their intellects, which is the prevailing intellect. —

 In the first place the vocabulary is diminished: 

* Most of the words specially employed on erudite and technical subjects, expressions that are too Greek or too Latin, terms peculiar to the schools, to science, to occupations, to the household, are excluded from discourse;