It is often claimed that Petrarch was the first to climb Mont Ventoux, although he did not suggest so himself. The mountain was likely already climbed in prehistoric times and there is even a slightly older written account of an ascent, by Jean Buridan, who on his way to the papal court in Avignon before the year 1334 climbed Mt. Ventoux in order to make some meteorological observations. It further seems implausible that Petrarch sat down and wrote the six thousand words we have, in elegant Latin with correct quotations from the classical poets, before dinner after an eighteen-hour hike up and down a mountain. In fact, whether Petrarch himself climbed the mountain has been doubted by modern scholars; according to Pierre Courcelle and Giuseppe Billanovich, the letter is essentially a fiction written almost fifteen years after its supposed date, and almost a decade after the death of its addressee, Francesco Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro. Lyell Asher argued, indeed, that the ascent of the mountain was a figurative account of writing the letter itself.