The many facets of Sébastien de Brossard’s personality have always baffled historians. One has the impression that his real place was somewhere other than where people wanted to put him. His Dictionnaire, thanks to which he has not been completely forgotten, came too early for him to enter the Encyclopédistes movement; the catalogue of his collection projected him back into the past and showed a man rooted in the 17th century; his music remained virtually unknown; and no one imagined that he could have had relations with the literary circles that revolved around the Mercure. What’s more, all these images were blurred by his clerical status, which could have seemed a serious obstacle to all these activities.

The work gathered here, the result of a symposium organised in June 1995 by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and the Fondation Royaumont, will finally enable us to get to know this Sébastien de Brossard, an "honest man" who turned out to be extremely likeable and who, to our delight, has left many traces of his multiple activities, from Paris to Strasbourg and from Strasbourg to Meaux.