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Emergency measures were in place restricting the post during the plague epidemic. The most secure route for getting letters to Hooke was apparently via Wilkins. In September Moray told Oldenburg that he intended ‘to write within a day or two to Dr Wilkins, to put Mr Hook to the finishing his observations &c concerning the Cometes’.38 Two days later Moray advised Oldenburg: ‘I think you will do well to let Mr Hook know what [Huygens] sayes of Glasses [lenses] & what else concernes him by writing to Dr Wilkins.’39

At the end of September Hooke went to the Isle of Wight to attend to family business (his mother had died at the beginning of the summer), taking him even farther out of range of regular correspondence with Oldenburg in London. He remained there till the end of the year, occupying himself with geological investigations on and under the cliffs of Freshwater Bay. He returned briefly to London at the end of December, before once more returning to Epsom, finally rejoining the Royal Society circle in London in late February 1666.40

From July 1665 onwards, then, it appears that Hooke is being ventriloquised by Oldenburg in his absence in the Auzout–Hooke ‘controversy’.

On 13 August Auzout wrote once again to Oldenburg, again responding to Hooke point by point. Oldenburg’s translation of this letter into English survives. It is apparently intended for Hooke’s use, since it carries marginal annotations goading Hooke to respond to supposed ‘slights’ by Auzout in the text (which Oldenburg has made rather more provocative than the original): ‘What say you to this?’; ‘A handsome sting again will be necessary’; ‘Me thinks, here you may toss railleries with him’; ‘To this I say, He will needs make you say, what you say not’; ‘Non sequitur. You must rally with him again.’41 Perhaps Oldenburg hoped to have Hooke respond to Auzout himself when he returned to London. Perhaps he intended to act once more as intermediary, and to write another letter to Auzout, incorporating remarks of Hooke’s provoked by his own deliberately antagonistic annotations and prompts. Neither thing happened, because Auzout now acted pre-emptively. In July or August 1665 he republished his original ‘Letter to the Abbé Charles’, together with the entire correspondence to date between himself and Hooke (via Oldenburg) in French in Paris.

Oldenburg reacted indignantly, claiming he had never intended his last letter for publication. Auzout replied in some puzzlement – surely the correspondence had always been intended as part of a public epistolary controversy:

I am very upset that you are not happy that I have, at the request of my friends, published the letter that you were gracious enough to write to me to explain Mr Hooke’s feelings [concerning my continuing criticisms]. I did not consider this letter to be something belonging entirely to you, but rather as the reply of Mr Hooke, and because we had already both of us begun to print material on that topic, I saw no harm in supplying the rest, since our friends wanted so much to have sight of the continuation of the dispute.42

It seems clear from Oldenburg’s discomfiture that he had indeed himself composed the detailed arguments attributed to Hooke in the letter to Auzout of 23 July. He now found himself embarrassed by their being made public, which risked bringing the fact to Hooke’s attention. Fortunately, as we know, Hooke’s French was limited. In what was probably an act of damage limitation, Oldenburg summarised the arguments of Auzout’s new book in English, abbreviating and omitting parts Hooke might have construed as betrayals of trust, and published his synopsis in Philosophical Transactions.

Meanwhile Moray, Huygens and Auzout were corresponding vigorously about the affair, savouring every contentious sentence in the exchanges, often passing each other’s letters on as enclosures, and including copies of the Journal des sçavans and Philosophical Transactions where appropriate. In early June 1665, Auzout told Huygens that he was eagerly awaiting