Abstract: Beginning with a comparison between the Discours and the mobile rhetoric of the declamatio, Michael Boulet undertakes an examination of variation in the enunciation and identification of addresses, in so far as this variation results from a voluntary system of expression. He can thus take into account the way in which La Boétie constructs irregularity, orality, and incompleteness in the Discours, which are also deliberate manifestations of the powerfulness of his speech.