This summary chapter on rhetorical theory in seventeenth-century France looks successively at the ideas of Guez de Balzac, Descartes, Port-Royal (Arnauld and Nicole), the Jesuit mundanes (Rapin, Bouhours) and the Cartesians Cordemoy and Lamy. The divergence between the first two authors seems to be at the root of the divisions between the following authors.