The Collected Works of Descartes, Volume 1: Correspondence

dates, February 22 and July 13, 1638 for LVIII, LIX, and LX; August 12 of the same year for LXI; and nothing for LXII and LXIII.

Here is another correspondence that Clerselier could have easily completed and dated: he concerned himself with it even less. Chanut Pierre Chanut (1601–1662) was a French diplomat and a close friend to both Descartes and Queen Christina of Sweden. kept a memento original: "memento"; a record or logbook of correspondence. of the letters he wrote or received; Baillet Adrien Baillet, Descartes's first major biographer. and Legrand would later use it to establish several dates. Chanut had also recovered his letters upon the philosopher's death, and Baillet would provide long passages from them in the Life of Descartes. Yet Clerselier made no use of these family papers. Perhaps he had to contend with the modesty of his brother-in-law Chanut was Clerselier's brother-in-law., to which he pays tribute in the dedication of his first volume: Chanut had not even permitted this dedication to be printed in 1657, and it was necessary to wait until after his death in 1662 to provide it to the public in the second edition of 1663. Perhaps, also, the dictates of propriety stood in the way of publishing letters in which an ambassador spoke freely of the Queen to whom he was accredited, and while she was still living (Christina did not die until 1689). — These same reasons, added to a sense of reserve quite natural for a woman, explain why Clerselier could not surrender the letters of Princess Elizabeth Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate, a brilliant student and long-term correspondent of Descartes. to public curiosity: she had requested them back immediately upon Descartes's death; Chanut returned them to her, and the Princess, says Baillet (vol. II, p. 428), "would not permit any of them to be printed alongside those of the philosopher." However, she did allow copies to be taken, and it was in this way that they were later rediscovered and published in 1879 by Foucher de Careil.

Always through a similar excess of modesty, Clerselier—who printed three responses made to him at the end of the first volume—did not simultaneously provide his own letters to which Descartes was responding. And by the same negligence or perhaps indifference, he did not date these three responses.

Finally, the three letters to Balzac Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, a famous French writer known for his influence on the French language. (C, CI, and CII) have no date; it was easy, however, to date at least the last two...