Abstract: Two representatives of the Swiss-French nobility of the Englightenment, mother and daughter. kept a diary which they did not intend to publish. It is a multifunctional space. We study three dimensions connected to a « practical memory » fixed in writing, the diary’s educational aspect and the ties binding the close family, itself an emerging model of the privatisation of space. The relationship with time is marked by submission to worldly requirements and the vertiginous whirl of sociability.
