Those who were best equipped in the past to write a biography of Descartes embarked on the project with great reluctance and explicit apologies. This pattern was set by the first major biographer, Adrien Baillet, in the late seventeenth century. As he began the task, he had on his desk more original documents by Descartes and his contemporaries than anyone has ever collected since then. Nonetheless, he suggested that Chanut, Clerselier, or Legrand would have been a more suitable biographer than himself. Charles Adam was equally hesitant about writing his Life of Descartes (1910), even though he had just completed editing the eleven-volume edition of Descartes' works with Paul Tannery. ‘In the current state of our knowledge’, he wrote, ‘it will not be possible for a long time to complete such a work properly.’ Adam thought that a good biography would require preparatory studies of philosophical and scientific topics in the early seventeenth century, and more research on those who influenced Descartes and on his personal relations with contemporaries.

When the late Terry Moore asked me if I were interested in writing a biography of Descartes, I answered too quickly in the affirmative. I did not appreciate adequately the unsatisfactory state of Descartes' correspondence, although I believed that many of the studies that Adam talked about had been done during the past century.