Assisting with its birth was Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, well known not only to historians, but to schoolchildren from the books of Alexander Dumas. At dinner parties the de facto ruler of France noted that noblemen, like commoners, are picking in their teeth with a knife. In order to reform the aristocracy, the founder of the French Academy ordered all knives to be rounded. So the table knife was born and its inventor was Cardinal Richelieu.