What can be said that is new about the School of Lausanne to professors and students of the University of Lausanne? You must have heard before almost anything I can present. Nevertheless, I dare hope that my research will at least enable me to throw a special light upon certain familiar matters.

There are some facts about Walras's life that are not recorded in the archives of Lausanne, archives that in other respects are so rich. For example, I could mention his private life, which was so carefully hidden by him and his daughter, Aline, from their Swiss contemporaries. Fearing that their friends in the canton of Vaud, who were models of decorum and propriety, would mistakenly think ill about her father, Aline Walras sent most of his private correspondence to Lyons, where I found it preserved in the law school. That correspondence put me on the track of other materials, which I uncovered in the archives of Montpellier, in the records of the cemetery in Paris, and in the register general's archives devoted to the Walras family. I hasten to add that if the facts uncovered by this search would have caused some frowns in certain quarters in the time of Walras, they were not scandalous facts, although they ran counter to social conventions.