A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal covered not just polite manners, but all the "civilized" norms of society and culture, as opposed to elements considered childish, irrational, savage or vulgar. Professor France shows how interpenetration and compromise between polite and rude, tame and wild, are central features of classical writings, arguing that polite society needed and desired its opposite.