 Mersenne’s own considerations on the status of eternal truths in God’s intellect explain why he should have had qualms about Descartes’s puzzling doctrine (which might amount here to no less than making mathematical truths somehow contingent, depending on the arbitrary will of God—even though Descartes himself, who often points out the necessity of mathematical truths, never draws such consequence). Mersenne position seems closer to cardinal de Berulle’s, and Augustine’s exemplarism: eternal truths are exemplar ideas present in God’s intellect and illuminating our own. They proceed from God’s nature as His Verb, but they are not similar to creatures, they are not “freely” created.