This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Marie-Hélène Drivaud with Peter Sokolowski is about how the emergence of dictionaries of European vernacular languages mirrors the increased literary and bureaucratic use of those languages, starting in Italy. Italian literary production, the founding of the Accademia della Crusca, and the comprehensive dictionary of classical Latin by the Italian monk Ambrogino Calepino provided examples for writers and scholars in France. The Latin, Latin-French, and French-Latin dictionaries by Robert Estienne became the foundation of French lexicography, and Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue françoyse continued this tradition in 1606, using both Latin and French in definitions. The Académie française, founded in 1634, was given a mandate to oversee the “purification” of grammar and vocabulary, but their dictionary was preceded by those of Pierre Richelet and Antoine Furetière. The traditions of the literary dictionary by Littré and the encyclopedic dictionary of Larousse began in the mid nineteenth century. A modern descriptive approach followed in the 1960s with Le Petit Robert and continues with digital and online editions.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first draft of Grouchy’s Lettres on Sympathy, the only text to be published under her name in her lifetime. In contrast to commonly received historical wisdom, it argues that Grouchy did not, in fact, begin writing this treatise between 1791 and 1793. Rather, it suggests that it was first composed around 1786, in response to an Académie française competition to produce the best elementary moral treatise on the duties of the man and the citizen. It goes on to reconstruct the contents of the original text. Her aim, in this first draft, was non-political: she wanted to demonstrate how individuals, rather than regurgitating a catechism, could learn to discern moral truths for themselves through a reasoned reflection on the sentiment of sympathy. She predominantly engaged with the ideas found in the moral, pedagogical, and epistemological works of Rousseau, Smith, and Locke. Despite the circumstances of its eventual publication as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is argued that Grouchy demonstrated significant disagreements with Smith, and instead hewed closely to the ideas of Rousseau.