About two thirds of the surviving letters are in Latin, while one third of them are in French. Scaliger may never have written a letter in any other language. He wrote to Italian scholars in French and to German and English scholars in Latin. He seems never to have mastered Dutch, the language of the country in which he spent the last fifteen years of his life. He could certainly have written letters in Greek, but there is no evidence that he ever did so. Composition in Greek was something of a literary tour de force, and to use Greek would have been ostentatious and unseemly in the practical matters which occupy most of the letters. He may well have written a letter, now lost, in Hebrew to the Samaritan communities in Egypt and Mount Gerizim in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a copy of their Bible. Latin translations of two Hebrew letters from the Samaritans appear to be a reply to this lost letter. The letters written by Scaliger himself display a very similar ratio: about two-thirds are in Latin and one third are in French.This figure may have been distorted by accidents of survival. Latin letters are perhaps more likely to survive: the trivial and the mundane are more likely to be written in the vernacular, and more likely discarded as unimportant over the centuries. One such accident is worth noticing: the correspondence between Isaac Casaubon and Scaliger – a total of 255 letters written over fifteen years – survives nearly intact.It survives partly because both parties to the correspondence were equally famous. These letters represent about 16% of the entire corpus, and they are all in Latin. Although they were both native French speakers, there are no letters between Casaubon and Scaliger in that language. This may be a preference of Casaubon rather than of Scaliger: there are, in fact, very few letters in French extant among Casaubon’s extensive correspondence. One wonders what language the two men would have spoken if they had ever met.

Other French scholars – such as Denys Lambin and Nicholas Rigault – corresponded with Scaliger in French. Pierre Pithou preferred the formality of Latin for his earliest letters to Scaliger, but soon dropped almost exclusively into French for the rest of their long correspondence. Many who were able to write a decent Latin letter still chose to approach Scaliger in French. It is possible that at least some of these were deterred from writing in Latin by Scaliger’s formidable reputation as a Latinist. Women, as a rule, wrote to Scaliger in French, not in Latin. In 1608, for example, Scaliger received a letter from a noblewoman informing him that her sister had just had a daughter. She expresses the wish that Scaliger had got married at the same time as her sister so that their children could marry. It is difficult to imagine what the elderly bachelor, now in the last year of his life, made of such a statement. It is certainly hard to imagine it being written in Latin. Despite his move to the Netherlands , it seems that Scaliger continued to regard himself as a Frenchman. His move to Leiden was seen, at least by his admirers, as a blow to France’s prestige. He certainly appears to have written in French much less frequently after he moved to Leiden . Before his move to Leiden , about three-quarters of his surviving letters are in French. After his move, the ratio is reversed: more than 80% of his letters from Leiden are in Latin.This is, of course, an inevitable consequence of such a move. At Leiden he came into contact with a good number of German protestant scholars, and established contacts with England. He continued to write French letters regularly until his death, but his old French friends died and Joseph outlived most of his family by many years. He died, as it were, in exile, although a very comfortable one. His will was written in both French and Latin. (PB).