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Studying the eloquence competition organized by the Académie Française between 1864 and 1866 allows us to understand the place that Saint-Évremond occupied in the memory of the nineteenth century. It becomes clear at each stage of the competition—from choosing the topic to selecting the winners—that Saint-Évremond’s task was to provide an acceptable representation of the seventeenth century, which had a bad reputation at the time. Saint-Évremond was unclassifiable, bringing numerous interpretive conflicts into sharp relief while at the same time lending himself to compromise. His elevation obeyed a double logic, one of both revelation and diversion: the Académie used him to recognize part of the seventeenth century that had been looked down on, but this gesture of openness also reveals a strategy of avoidance, explored in the present article.