As well, the advantages that writers gained from visiting salons extended to the protection by their hosts. The salons provided crucial support in the career of an author, not because they were literary institutions, but, on the contrary, because they allowed men of letters to emerge from the circles of the Republic of Letters and access the resources of aristocratic and royal patronage. As a result, instead of an opposition between the court and the Republic of Letters they are instead a collection of spaces and resources focused around the court as a center of power and distribution of favors.