Gilles Menage was a scholar in seventeenth-century Paris who talked well and knew it. After he died in 1692 his friends wrote down what they remembered him saying, in his rooms and at other people's tables, and printed it as the Menagiana. It sold, so it was extended, and by the time an Amsterdam bookseller named Pierre de Coup took it on it ran to four volumes. These are the second and third, printed in 1713 and 1716, with the same engraved frontispiece in each, Menage in a medallion held up by Fame, signed by Jacobus Schijnvoet.
They were bound together, in the same calf by the same hand, and have stayed together for three hundred years. Both have lost their headcaps to shelves and thumbs. The first and fourth volumes are not here and we do not know where they went.
Menage is usually named as the model for Vadius, the pedant in Moliere's Les Femmes savantes. He seems to have taken it reasonably well.
