It is difficult to write a book about something that does not exist. For a brilliant novelist like Flaubert, the dream of writing a book about nothing – un livre sur rien – is tempting, but for the more pedestrian scholarly writer who depends on an object to describe there is something hopeless about such a project. So a book about chance in seventeenthcentury France, the high point of rationalist thought, seems to be condemned even before it begins. Lorraine Daston writes eloquently:

And yet …

The very rationalists who rejected chance – la fortune or le hasard – as being simply a name for human ignorance continued to write as if there were many things that happened by chance. Arnauld and Nicole open their important Logic, or the Art of Thinking (La Logique, ou l'Art de penser, 1683) by saying, ‘This little work was born entirely by chance …’ (‘La naissance de ce petit ouvrage est due entièrement au hasard …’).