The Collected Works of Descartes, Volume 1: Correspondence

...[truly a] friend of the philosopher. The precious collection was thus sent to France, where it did not arrive until after many delays, in 1653. There, a final misfortune awaited it, which almost caused everything to be lost irreparably: the chest containing the manuscripts, having come by sea as far as Rouen, was then entrusted to a boat that was to go up the Seine to Paris; as it approached this city, the boat sank, and Descartes’s manuscripts remained for three days at the bottom of the water, “at the end of which God permitted that they

” were found some distance from the site of the shipwreck.
” This accident meant that it was necessary to spread out all these papers
” in various rooms to dry them. This could not
” be done without much confusion, especially in the hands
” of some servants who did not have the intelligence of
” their master (Clerselier) Claude Clerselier (1614–1684) was Descartes's friend and the primary editor of his posthumous works. to preserve their sequence and arrange-
” ment.”

These details are found in the Life of Mr. Des-Cartes, 1691, vol. II, p. 428: the author, Adrien Baillet Baillet was Descartes’s first major biographer; his work remains a primary source for the philosopher's life., must have been well-informed, for he composed his work in collaboration with the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Legrand, to whom Clerselier had bequeathed these papers in 1684, no doubt after having told him of the misadventures. However, Clerselier, in his Preface of 1657, says not a word of the shipwreck nor of the salvage, and merely declares that what gave him the most trouble, “was that these letters

” being written only on loose sheets, all detached
” from one another, and often without date or catchword original: "reclame"; a word at the bottom of a page that matches the first word of the next page to help with ordering,
” the disorder that had set in meant they did not follow
” one another, and one could recognize neither beginning
” nor end; so that,” he adds, “I was obliged to read
” almost all of them, before being able to rejoin them to
” one another, and to be able to give them any form, to
” arrange them afterward in the order and the rank that they
” hold.”

But a careful examination of the three volumes makes one recognize that the disorder, of which the editor complains, did not exist for all the letters, and that a fairly good number, doubtless gathered and perhaps even sewn into several bundles (items A,