Last year, while on academic leave in France, I discovered a letter in a Paris archive, and I present my translation of it below. I realize that subscribers to scholarly journals are rarely asked to read translations of archival documents anymore. Yet by declining to do so, these scholars do not, I presume, mean to impugn the authenticity of these manuscripts. In the present case, I hope that they have confidence in the chain of custody that links its author's pen to my presentation and that they trust my knowledge of the French language, as well as my fidelity to the principles of sober editing. Rather, I assume that their reluctance to read such texts stems from their belief that the translation of nineteenth-century manuscripts, whatever their intrinsic interest, no longer offers the sort of value-added originality for which the academy is willing to award credit. I quite agree; it shows no great merit to discover an interesting letter in the archives. Which is to say that we now seem to believe that historians—even historians of science like myself—are expected to provide a kind of creative authorship.

The episode referred to in the letter was infamous in its day. If readers need any additional rationale for continuing, I would add that the incident was cited by the eminent sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton (recently deceased) in his seminal 1957 article, "Priorities in Scientific Discovery." In that article Merton explained why academic credit is awarded exclusively to those scientists (and scholars) who publish their discoveries first—because, he argued, only priority of publication can assure readers that the published work has not been plagiarized from someone else. In that article, Merton also remarked that "[Michel Chasles's] credulity stretches our own."¹ After reading this letter, I think you will agree. Yet might not such a stretching be just what current scholarship needs if it is ever to practice what it preaches about practice? After all, if writers in the humanities really are determined to expose the sociolinguistic terrain upon which the credulity of scientists is challenged or assuaged, and if they really mean to argue that experiment and the observation of nature are in themselves insufficient to spark controversy or command assent, and if they really want to contend that scientific skepticism and its warrants for belief are generated in part by literary technologies, largely borrowed from domains remote from the hard sciences, then perhaps we ought to take a more expansive view of what counts as a credible account of the past. That is, if a narrow descriptive facticity cannot exhaust the plenitude of nature, why should the plenitude of the human past be more easily encompassed? Yet many historians continue to represent the past in as positivist a mode as any scientist, and they continue to do so using literary technologies—both forms of writing and the presentation of evidence—that historians borrowed back from the natural sciences in the nineteenth century.

The letter which follows is my translation. The text is signed by Denis Vrain-Lucas and was composed on the official prison stationery of the Maison Centrale de Poissy. It is dated 13 August 1871.

The Text

To my most respected Sir, the illustrious academician, Michel Chasles,²

    I am writing to you in my own hand—familiar to you at long last—in the hope that I might help you come to terms with the hoax so recently perpetrated upon our beloved enterprise in the field of the history of science and featured so unexpectedly in all the daily newspapers. I will not attempt to deceive you again; I address you with the hope that you will find it in your heart to pardon me. Such a pardon might do more than restore my liberty, it might also restore my reputation, a thing not so easily conferred by the officials in charge of this establishment.

    It is true that I acquiesced to the banal sequence of events as recited by the imperial prosecutor—notably, that I alone had penned the letters so widely believed to be from the hands of Pascal, Newton, Galileo, and others—letters that you took to be the authentic voices of the past. In that narrow sense, I stand guilty as charged and am now paying the price for my deeds. But I am counting also on our mutual service to a higher authority. Isn't justice supposed to transcend banal chronicle? Isn't that why we have human judges with human hearts, to take account of circumstance and human frailty? And isn't a sense of justice, for that very reason, a prerequisite for telling the fullest history of our times or of times gone by? If so, then my acquiescence to the prosecutor's banal recitation does not negate the fact that I have at all times acted with patriotism, with honor, and in the service of science and its history. You must therefore read my courtroom confession as a calculated display. You know better than anyone the circumstances that brought us to that dark moment. How the nation's foremost scientific institution—in which you, at age seventy-four, still play a leading role—had become a cuckold in a Feydeau farce, and how the magistrates were determined to right the social order (at my expense!) by shifting the venue to the solemn theater of justice.

1.Robert K. Merton, "Priorities in Scientific Discoveries" (1957), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago, 1973), p. 309.

2. The principal archival sources for the antecedent life, opinions, and trial of Vrain-Lucas can be found in the Archives de l'Académie des Sciences (Paris), Dossier Paul Helbronner: Denis Vrain-Lucas to Michel Chasles, 7 Oct. 1869; Vrain-Lucas, "Le Mystère dévoilé" (1869–70); Vrain-Lucas, "Mes Observations sur le rapport de MM. Bordier and Mabille, experts" (1870); and Vrain-Lucas, "Moyens de defense" (1869). See also the Archives Nationales (Paris), Dossier BB24/725: Vrain-Lucas, "Demand en grâce" (1873); and also the Bibliothèque Nationale, Department of Manuscripts (Paris), Dossier NAF 709: "Specimen des faux autographes fabriqués par Vrain-Lucas"; Vrain-Lucas, "Galilée, Pascal, Newton: Mémoire motifs qui m'ont fait agir," 20 Sept. 1869. Additional archival sources can be found in the Bibliothèque de l'Institut (Paris); Archives Départementales, Département de la Seine (Paris); Archives Départementales, Département d'Eure-et-Loir (Chartres); and Bibliothèque Municipale de Châteaudun (Châteaudun).

The academic debate over the Vrain-Lucas forgeries can be followed in Alphonse Quetelet et al., Bulletin de l'Académie royale de Belgique, 2d series, 22 (1866): 204–7, 343–46, 478–79, 544–45; 23 (1867): 417; 24 (1867): 83, 199–204; and especially in Chasles et al., "Mémoires et communications," Comptes-rendus des séances de l'Académie des sciences 65 (1867): 89-93; along with many additional references in vols. 65–69 (1867–69).

    Contemporary newspapers provide information regarding the academic controversy and the trial; see L'Amateur d'autographes, Le Droit, Gazette du tribunaux, Les Mondes, La Presse (Paris), Le Temps, The Times (London). For published primary sources on the affair, see Henri Bordier and Emile Mabille, Une Fabrique de faux autographes, ou récit de l'affaire Vrain-Lucas (Paris, 1870), trans. under the title Prince of Forgers, by Joseph Rosenblum (New Castle, Del., 1998); Étienne Charavay, Faux Autographes: Affaire Vrain-Lucas (Paris, 1870); Chasles, Aperçu historique sur l'origine et le développement des méthodes en géométrie (Brussels, 1837) and Sur L'Ouvrage de M. Faugère intitulé: Défense de B. Pascal, et accessoirement de Newton, de Gaililée, etc. (Paris, 1868); Armand-Prosper Faugère, Défense de B. Pascal et accessoirement de Newton, Galilée, Montesquieu, etc. contre les faux documents presentés par M. Chasles à l'Académie des sciences (Paris, 1868); Vrain-Lucas, Le Parfait Secrétaire des grands hommes; ou Les Lettres de Sapho, Platon, Vercingétorix, Cléopatre, Marie-Madeleine, Charlemagne, Jeanne d'Arc, et autres personnages ilustres (Paris, 1924).