François Hédelin, the abbé d’Aubignac (1604-1676), is best known as a theatrical theorist at a time in France that the theatre enjoyed elevated status and unprecedented popularity, fully supported by and indelibly associated with the State. Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, was instrumental in placing dramatic works at the forefront of the nation’s cultural agenda. As the tutor of Richelieu’s nephew, the Duc de Fronsac, D’Aubignac was given special favours in the Richelieu household and was provided with two Abbeys (Aubignac and Maimac). Between 1635 and 1645, even though D’Aubignac gained a reputation as a good preacher (leading eventually to the publication of his sermons in 1671), he seemed much less enthused by holy orders than by the theatrical life of Paris, and he is known to have attended numerous plays by emerging playwrights of the day, not least Pierre Corneille, whose play Le Cid (1637) was to have such a profound effect on notions of what constituted tragedy and how it conformed to the morals and sensibilities of seventeenth-century France.