cenacle

1. A clique or circle, especially of writers.
2. A small dining room, usually on an upper floor.

[French cénacle, from Old French cenacle, the room where the Last Supper took place, from Latin cēnāculum, dining room, garret, from cēna, meal. Sense 2 , Middle English, from Old French, from Latin cēnāculum.]

cénacle [say‐nahkl], a clique or coterie of writers that assembles around a leading figure. A characteristic of the hero‐worshipping culture of Romanticism, cénacles appeared in Paris from the 1820s onwards around Charles Nodier and, most famously, Victor Hugo.

Name given to groups of Romantic poets and writers; the most famous of these met during the Restoration in Nodier's salon at the Arsenal and at Hugo's house in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In the early 1830s a group of Hugo's younger admirers formed the Petit Cénacle. See Balzac's Illusions perdues for the picture of a cénacle.

for the site of the Last Supper see Cenacle

Cénacle is the name given to a Parisian literary group of varying constituency that began about 1826 to gather around Charles Nodier. The group sought to revive in French literature the old monarchical spirit, the spirit of mediæval mystery and spiritual submission. The chief members were Vigny and the brothers Deschamps. They were soon joined by Lamartine, Hugo, and Sainte-Beuve, who describes the group as "royalists by birth, Christians by convention and a vague sentimentality." Their organ was La Muse Française. Musset, Mérimée, and the elder Dumas were involved within the Cénacle, too. Time and the revolution of 1830 wrought changes in the attitudes of the members of Cénacle. Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval were attracted to the group at the time of the revolution, but the reasons for the existence of the Cénacle dissolved. The group lost its reason for existence with the triumph of Hugo's Hernani (1830).

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