Literary banquets proliferated in the last ten years of the century. They illustrate the mediatization of literature at the very moment when that world was postulated to be independent. Each of these great dinners seemed to draw the portrait of a “Writer with Group”, posing as if for a literary posterity without the History. The eloquence that was put on display during these banquets had to be in keeping with what Mallarmé called an “intimate ceremonial solemnity”. Speeches, various forms of spoken account, all this resulted in an occasional literature which reached its fulfilment in diarist writings and the kinds of toasts delivered by Mallarmé.