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Arnauld is not copying Quintilian, but he is reworking him in order to go beyond him.

Quintilian is a fundamental reference point for Arnauld: ‘Quintilian and all the other rhetoricians, Aristotle and all the philosophers...’

As Arnauld recognized, the question of where to draw the line between facts that were too strange to be credible and facts that were strange but stubborn was far from straightforward.

As Arnauld had argued in The Logic of Port-Royal, plain facts beat strange facts every time.

However, if you mistakenly assume that the key problem lay in distinguishing clues from testimony, then you might conclude that it was only in The Logic of Port-Royal that Arnauld finally differentiated the two, for we are told that he drew a distinction between ‘internal evidence’ and ‘external evidence’.