Because he was considered “bizarre” by his contemporaries, Bonneville, who was an active agent of the Revolution, a poet, and a translator, can serve to illustrate the diverse and then changing values of the adjective, just as much through the “Cercle social”, a mixed and colourful undertaking, as through the illuminist ideas which led him to confront the limits of rationality, and through the distance between his critical and poetic work and the neoclassical norm which then dominated.