Music and texts: an overview of the sources: A general description of the air ; The publications ; The composers ; Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: a description ; The song texts ; Poetic structure ; Style or elocution: figurative language and poetic syntax ; Poetry and rhetoric
Rhetoric and meaning in the seventeenth-century French air: Seventeenth-century French sources on rhetoric and music ; Persuading the passions
Musical representations of the primary passions: The primary passions ; The agitated passions ; The modest passions ; The neutral passion: Le contentement ; Summary
Setting the texts: Painful love ; Bittersweet love ; Enticing love ; Joyous love ; Summary
Form and style: the organization and function of expressions, syntax, and rhetorical figures: Form (disposition) ; The organization of expressions in short airs ; The organization of expressions in long airs ; Form in single-strophe airs ; The rhetorical sections of a piece: their function and expression ; Style (elocution): poetic structure, punctuation, and rhetorical figures
L'art du chant: performing French airs: À haute voix: the importance of orality ; The art of proper singing: tone and style ; Ornamentation ; The pronunciation of seventeenth-century French ; Syllabic quantity ; Tempo ; Le mouvement ; Repeats ; Basso continuo accompaniment
Salon culture and the mid-seventeenth-century French air: The French air and conversation ; Musical seductions ; Galanterie and the air: undercurrents of eroticism and lessons of morality ; Women singing airs as men
The late-seventeenth-century air and the rhetoric of distraction ; The air after 1670 ; Songs and the rhetoric of distraction ; Pleasure, airs, and the new rhetoric ; The legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre.