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Carl Sloane, Correspondence, Early Music, Volume 42, Issue 1, February 2014, Page 155, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cau022
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In a recent article on French Baroque temperaments, Mark Lindley discusses a temperament proposed by Jean-Phillipe Rameau in Nouveau système de musique (‘Innovations in temperament and harmony in French harpsichord music’, Early Music, xli/3 (2013), pp.403–20).
The essence of Rameau’s description is that the first seven 5ths above C are narrow by 1/4 comma each, the next three are (increasingly) closer to true (plus justes), and the last major 3rds and the last two 5ths are consequently wider than true. It is further recommended that the process begin on By instead of C to favour the most commonly used keys.
Although Lindley does not offer a concrete reconstruction, I believe that there is a problem with his analysis, in that he, along with just about everyone else, ignores a clearly enunciated statement on page 111 of Rameau’s treatise: ‘In this temperament, all the semitones are approximately either major or mean’ (Rameau’s mean semitone, 135/128, is a comma larger than the small semitone (Nouveau système, p.26), and is given by seven 5ths up and a comma down). From the foregoing, it will be obvious, and presumably would have been to Rameau as well, that seven 5ths narrowed by 1/4 comma each will give a semitone 3/4 of a comma smaller than mean, or 1/4 of a comma larger than the small semitone.
