The paper strives to ascertain whether Gilles Ménages deserves, as far as derivational morphology is concerned, the label of archaistic "remarqueur" and to single out, especially in relation to his main rivals (Bouhours, Andry de Boisregard) his basic guidelines underlying his comments and observations focused on a number of derivational patterns (deverbative nouns suffixed in -ment, formation of feminine nouns, etc.).