In the prefaces to his French translations of Tacitus (1640) and Lucian (1654), Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt rationalizes his substantial revisions by appealing to the canons of French literary taste that his translations helped to form. This view resulted in translations that were clearer and more stylistically felicitous than the source texts, but also bowdlerized so as to avoid any violation of French linguistic norms as well as any moral offense. Perrot d’Ablancourt is very much aware that his discursive strategies flouted conventional notions of equivalence. Yet he makes clear that his domesticating choices are not arbitrary, but based on an interpretation that displays an acute sense of historical difference. He just does not feel that this difference is worth preserving in itself and certainly not at the cost of departing from an elegant style as he conceives it.