Over the centuries, its guests have included the Marquise de Sevigne, whose letters documented 17th-century French society, and Enlightenment thinker and encyclopedist Denis Diderot.
The exchange of letters has been played out on a broader landscape of rising unemployment and fears that French industry will fall further behind as its economy slumps.
Then French, where spelling is almost as crazy as in English, but where at least one given group of letters tend to be always pronounced in the same way.