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One of our best friends is dead. Pierre Mesnard, a frequent contributor to MOREANA from n° 1 to 20, was to have written an essay in n° 24.
The evening ofMarch 12, Madame Mesnard noted at dinner that her husband seemed tired, but then, she had seen him tired from overwork for forty five years. She went out for a Lenten sermon on "the last things". She found him dead on her return.
He was "the age of the century". At least for the last fifteen years, he had been the acknowledged leader in French sixteenth-century scholarship, as well as one of the very few complete humanists, of a type that is unlikely to exist in the future. He had studied science under Einstein and Langevin in Paris, written an M. A. dissertation on Cartesian physics, marginally to majoring in Arts. A historian of philosophy, he enjoyed a hard-won triumph at the Sorbonne in February 1936 with his Essor de la philosophie politique au 16e siècle, a doctoral thesis which is now in its third edition - an extremely rare event in the history of French dissertations. More's Utopia occupies one of the best chapters in that epochmaking book.
Professor Mesnard looms large in our journal. In n° 6, a revealing picture of him against the background of the creeperclad mansion which houses his Institute illustrates an eight page article by Jean-Claudc Margolin, to mark his election to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Two of our special issues contain long and substantial essays by bim (n° 15-16 pp. 401-430, n° 18-19 pp. 165-184).
The pages that follow feature his handwriting and his methods of work, reflect his mind and his soul. His manifold greatness will inspire worthier, fuller commemorations : ours will probably be the first in time.
What More as a young man wrote of oíd age, calling it
"Of our short life, the last and best part", was certainly true of Mesnard. He had three books in the press when death seized him. He had been dying from the incurable wound oflosing his eldest daughter in October 1968. Despite his resilience and the comfort of Christian hope, he never recovered from that blow. Those who knew him sensed that he would...