The earliest French philologists, such as Perion and Henri Estienne, had sought to discover the origin of French in Greek and even in Hebrew. For more than a century Gilles Ménage's "Etymological Dictionary" (1650, 1670) held the field without a rival. Considering the time at which it was written, Ménage's was a meritorious work, but philology was then in the infant stage, and many of Ménage's derivations (such as that of "rat" from the Latin "mus," or of "haricot" from "faba") have since become bywords among philologists. A great advance was made by Raynouard, who by his critical editions of the works of the "Troubadours", published in the first years of the 19th century, laid the foundations on which Diez afterwards built.