Descartes' Bones Page 16

  He began reading aloud. He gave his colleagues a history of the pertinent events associated with the bones of Descartes, culminating with the third burial ceremony, two years earlier, at which he and others were shown the contents of the coffin, whose meagerness he characterized as “really a bit remarkable.”

  Then he turned his attention to the object before them. The marks tattooing its surface were intriguing, he admitted. “But,” he said, “what proof have we from elsewhere regarding its authenticity? Some inscriptions, more or less effaced, that one makes out on the convexity, which are the names of the successive owners, with some dates and nothing more.” True, there was what seemed to be a testimonial of some sort on the skull. But who was to say who this Planström was? And what information could be had about the presumed accuser who had written this barely legible sentence about him? One could infer almost anything from it. Even if Planström had indeed taken the skull in 1666, it didn’t indicate when the skull was actually separated from the body. That could have been done “either at the home of Ambassador Chanut, immediately after the death, or in the provisional grave of 1650, or in the tomb of stone, or in the presence of Terlon in 1666, or finally at Peronne when the cask was opened by the customs officials.” It was even possible, Delambre added, that it had been removed for a particular purpose that was part of the historical record. It was known that Chanut had had a death mask made of Descartes, from which a French artist named Valary who had been a regular of Christina’s court had sculpted a bust (both the death mask and the bust subsequently went missing). Could it not have been that the sculptor “separated the head from the trunk in order to cast it at his ease and that he then neglected to return it?” Delambre asked his colleagues. “One at least has to admit that it has some plausibility.” That would mean there was a gap of sixteen years from the time the head was separated from the body until this novel record on the forehead of the skull indicating that Planström had “taken” it. How did one know that someone early on, knowing of the fuss over the unburying of Descartes’ bones, had not had the notion to adorn a random skull with writing in order to perpetrate a prank or deception, perhaps to make money? And once the first owner was deceived, all the others would have accepted the provenance as genuine. All they had, Delambre insisted, was “one assertion lacking proof” that the brain inside this skull had once thought “I think, therefore I am.”

  All in all, Delambre considered it most likely that the skull had never left the body. The remains Delambre had seen in the coffin were mostly fragments, which, on consideration, suggested to him that the body had suffered severe exposure, and it was logical to suppose the skull had been treated similarly and had been reduced to a similar state: “It is not impossible that it is very well the same with the skull after 169 years.” Delambre concluded with a request that his report be included in the register of the academy “in order that someone may respond to my objections or clarify my doubts.”

  It didn’t take long for a response. Cuvier seems to have sat listening to his illustrious colleague with mounting bewilderment. Delambre’s report was a stew of contradictions and irrelevancies. Cuvier rose to address his colleagues. In any analysis, Cuvier believed, common sense had a part to play in one’s reflections. Why imagine, for instance, that the head might have been sawed from the body immediately after death in order for the bust to be created? What possible basis was there for so grisly a supposition? Cuvier chided his fellow secretary for manufacturing elaborate scenarios and suspicions. The “principle of parsimony,” a tenet of science, says that it is better to prefer simpler explanations to more convoluted ones. Surely it was more sensible to suppose that this Planström had taken the skull than to imagine someone not taking Descartes’ skull but using another man’s head and inventing a fiction around it. Especially considering what had launched this investigation: the fact that when the coffin was opened two years earlier there was no skull found with the remains.

  Besides, Cuvier asserted, the skull itself indicated when it had been taken from the rest of the bones: in 1666. That meant the year the remains were unearthed in Stockholm, at or around the time of the ceremony in the residence of the French ambassador. It seemed clear to Cuvier that “the moment when this head would have been removed must be when the bones were packed up to be taken to France.” As to who took it, there was clear evidence to that as well—not conclusive but compelling: “Planström.” Find that man, and the mystery would begin to unravel.

  Cuvier might have wondered about his colleague. Physically, Delambre, as he laid out his views on Descartes’ skull, probably presented to his fellow scientists a reduced figure from what he had been even a few years before. He was ill enough that he was making arrangements for his own death (he would be dead the following year). Could senility or some weakening ailment have affected his reasoning powers? Every member of the academy knew of Delambre’s tremendous tenacity and determination, which either stemmed from or was exemplified by a childhood incident. When very young, he had been stricken by smallpox, which partially blinded him and, to boot, left him without eyelashes, giving him, for the rest of his life, a naked, preternaturally defenseless aspect, simultaneously intense and wan. Imperfect eyesight had led him to overcompensate: he read voraciously in his youth, willing his vision to improve, and it did. Then, like someone struck by a muscular disorder who vows to become a professional athlete, he developed a desire to peer into the tiny aperture of a telescope, to squint at points of light hundreds of thousands of miles away and see new things in them. He subdued his distinct handicap to the point of becoming the leading astronomer of the day, not to mention devising the standard of measurement that would revolutionize science.

  But were his powers still intact? Cuvier must have wondered. Delambre seemed to have gone to great lengths to create difficulties in his analysis of the skull. It might be worth noting another possible explanation for Delambre’s refusal to allow informed speculation into his thinking. He had a particular and highly unusual reason for sensitivity toward anything that smacked of uncertainty in scientific investigation—one that neither Cuvier nor any of his other colleagues in the academy could have known and that, if it had been known, would have caused a scandal.

  Thirty years before, when Delambre led the team that did the calculations from which to derive the length of the meter relative to the circumference of the earth, by measuring the arc from Dunkirk to Barcelona, he had had a partner named Pierre-François-André Méchain. The two astronomers had divided the work, Delambre starting in Paris and going north and Méchain heading south. Late in the game, after years of toil, thousands of miles of travel, and untold calculations, and with the final result established, Delambre had made a devastating discovery. His partner had miscalculated, then covered up the error in his work. Delambre had made this discovery in 1810, eleven years before his encounter with Descartes’ skull. He then made what Ken Alder, author of The Measure of All Things (2002), considers a fateful personal and professional decision. He covered up the cover-up. In the archives of the Observatory of Paris Alder found Delambre’s handwritten notes, which had apparently lain unseen since he wrote them: “I have not told the public what it does not need to know. I have suppressed all those details which might diminish its confidence in such an important mission. . . . I have carefully silenced anything which might alter in the least the good reputation which Monsieur Méchain rightly enjoyed.” Yet Delambre had preserved the logbooks with their errors, along with the acknowledgment of his own discovery. He had anguished over the issues of truth, error, and certainty and had made an allowance for error and uncertainty. Now, at the end of his life, working on a project of little real-world significance but a certain symbolic importance, Delambre was struck by a need either to have absolute certainty or else to dismiss entirely the skull’s legitimacy. There’s no way of connecting this need to the discovery of a scientific error and his decision to hide it, but Alder’s own thesis is that Méchain’s error and Delambre’s
discovery of it are important in the history of science because these twin facts show the dawning realization on the part of “hard” scientists that certainty is impossible, that error and inaccuracy are a component of their work. If Delambre’s willingness to bury his partner’s error indicates an awareness of the very modern notions of probability and error as facts of life, then his refusal to consider circumstantial evidence in support of the authenticity of Descartes’ skull was perhaps a tug in the other direction—a reflexive urge to eradicate uncertainty, to purify.

  Cuvier, meanwhile, thought the evidence regarding the skull strong enough that he took over the investigation. More needed to be known about the circumstances of the disinterment in Stockholm. He contacted a man named Alexandre-Maurice Blanc de Lanautte, comte d’Hauterive, who held the government position of archivist in the office of foreign affairs. Hauterive had had an exotic career, serving in Constantinople as part of the French diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire and in New York as consul to the newly founded United States before settling into a research position. Cuvier told him the particulars of Descartes’ life and death and the names of the officials who had been involved in the transport of the remains. Perhaps an answer would be found in the official correspondence of the time.

  Cuvier, Delambre, and Hauterive had access to the same early source on Descartes’ life that we have today: the biography by the seventeenth-century priest Adrien Baillet. Cuvier noted that Baillet indicates in his biography that he had available to him letters from Terlon to d’Alibert, the treasurer of France, and a written note by Simon Arnaud, the marquis de Pomponne, who was in the process of succeeding Terlon as ambassador to Sweden and who attended the 1666 exhumation and the ceremony at the ambassador’s residence.

  Hauterive, however, was unable to find any relevant documents in the government files. “The correspondence of M. le Chevalier de Terlon, minister from France to Sweden in the years 1666 and 1667, makes not a single mention of the transport to France of the remains of Descartes,” Hauterive reported to Cuvier.

  But he did find something. He went on to add that “one had the idea to consult various printed works, one of which presented curious information on the object in question.” Hauterive had discovered a Swedish work from the mid-1700s citing a chain of ownership of the purported skull of Descartes. There was an originating name and a story to go with it. The man who had taken the skull, according to this source, had played a role in the events surrounding the first disinterment. The source gave this man’s name: “Is. Planström.”

  AND SO WE GO BACK to the beginning, which is to say the end—the dead of night in the dead of winter in the year 1650. In an upper-floor room of a building in central Stockholm, an ailing man breathes his last. After some dispute, it is decided to bury him in a forlorn cemetery a mile away, on the outskirts of the city. The suns of sixteen summers warm the earth in which the remains lie, and the deep cold of sixteen winters freezes it. Within the first 128 days—according to estimates of modern forensic anthropology and based on an average temperature of 50°F—the soft tissue would have decomposed. The bones would likely have begun to bleach in the first year. Before ten years had passed the bones would have started to exfoliate and crack. If the coffin was weak (it was described as “porous”), roots, rodents, and worms would hasten the decay.

  Sixteen years after burial, then, the remains are dug up and hauled back to the same building in which the man had spent his final hours. There, in the chapel of the French ambassador’s residence, a ceremony is held, presided over by officials of the Catholic Church in Sweden. The bones—which have become separated—are transferred to a copper coffin that is two and a half feet long. Hugues de Terlon, knight of St. John and French ambassador to Sweden, who is in the process of assuming his new post in Denmark, asks permission to take, as a personal relic, a bone of the right index finger. The coffin is kept, until the time of departure for Paris by way of Copenhagen, at the residence of Terlon, where it is watched over by members of the Stockholm city guard.

  Isaak Planström was the captain of this guard contingent. The details of his involvement came via Hauterive’s information. Hauterive discovered that in 1750 a school headmaster named Sven Hof, from the town of Skara, wrote of traveling some years earlier to Stockholm to visit a friend and colleague named Jonas Olofsson Bång, who proudly showed him the skull of René Descartes. With the object came a story. The skull had come down to Bång from his father, a brewer and merchant named Olof Bång who had told him how he came by it. A man who had owed him money had died, and the elder Bång collected some of his property in lieu of payment. Among the items was the skull of Descartes. Bång told his son that the deceased, Planström, had had the job of watching over the remains of Descartes before they were to be shipped to France. Planström had explained his act by saying he felt that Sweden should not “lose completely the remains of such a famous person.” Bång said that the guardsman kept the skull for the rest of his life as “a rare relic of a philosophical saint.” Bång in turn kept it for the rest of his life and passed it to his son.

  The younger Bång told this story to his friend Hof, then apparently said something to the effect that he would like to find appropriate words with which to adorn the object, whereupon Hof wrote out a few commemorative verses in Latin, and Bång later inscribed them onto the top of the skull. Hof’s account included the Latin lines, which were identical to those on the skull that was now in the possession of the academy.

  Berzelius, in his letter to Cuvier, noted the various names adorning the skull, some of which were illegible or only partly legible, and suggested that it should be possible to work out from them a history of the skull’s career in Sweden. In the 1860s and 1870s, a man named Peter Liljewalch did that. Liljewalch was born in the Swedish city of Lund, became a medical doctor and specialist in infectious diseases, joined the army and traveled to Denmark, Germany, and Russia, and eventually became court physician to Desideria, queen of Sweden and Norway from 1829 to 1860. Sometime thereafter, Liljewalch returned to Lund and settled into the curious retirement project of charting the Swedish owners of the skull of René Descartes.

  In the summer of 2006 I traveled to the manuscript division of the Lund University library, where a librarian laid before me the collection marked “Liljewalch.” I opened folders filled with delicate sheets covered with notes in an elegant nineteenth-century hand. Liljewalch had followed trails backward in time, pursuing the lives and deeds of the men who, for one reason or another, had come into possession of the skull. Somehow the cranium made its way from the younger Bång to a military man named Johan Axel Hägerflycht, who kept it until he died in 1740. When his goods were dispersed the skull fell into the hands of a government official named Anders Anton Stiernman. His is one of the names still visible on the skull, on the right side, along with a year, 1751. When Stiernman died his son-in-law, Olof Celsius, found himself its owner and promptly placed his own signature on the occipital bone, at the lower back. This Celsius was a man of the cloth who became the bishop of Lund. His interest in the head of Descartes must have been as a scientific charm or talisman, for science was in the family. His father was a botanist, other elder relatives were astronomers or mathematicians, and his cousin Anders Celsius was the astronomer for whom the temperature scale is named.

  At first blush Johan Fischerström, the next owner, an “economic superintendent” in Stockholm, does not seem to have satisfied the skull’s penchant for finding its way to people who had pointed associations with one or another of the main features of modernity. But Fischerström was evidently a man of passion, and the notable aspect of his life turns out to have been not his career but his love interests. He became the object of affection of Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, who is sometimes referred to as Sweden’s first feminist. She was a serious student of philosophy and the doyenne of Stockholm’s leading Enlightenment-era literary society, the excellently named Order of the Mind Builders. Nordenflycht became renowned for he
r mix of philosophical moodiness—over issues such as the role of reason in shaping moral decisions—and lovesickness. Her fame came from her poetry, in which she explored themes of nature and loss. She met Fischerström at a Mind Builders gathering sometime in the early 1760s, when she was in her early forties and he was in his late twenties, and fell for him. He left her for a younger friend of hers, and legend has it that she drowned herself as a consequence. The cad Fischerström lived on and procured the skull of Descartes sometime after to add it to his cabinet of curiosities.

  Fischerström kept the skull until he died in 1796, and when his property was auctioned off it was bought by a tax assessor named Ahlgren, whose signature can today barely be made out behind where the left ear would be.

  In the 1760s, while Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht was suffering the inattention of Fischerström in Stockholm, another Swedish devotee of eighteenth-century philosophy, named Anders Sparrman, was getting the best possible scientific education, under the tutelage of the great botanist Carl Linnaeus. On completion of his study Sparrman signed on as a ship’s surgeon in order to travel to Asia. He returned after two years in China laden with samples of the country’s flora and fauna, which formed the start of his own cabinet of curiosities. In 1772, fueled by a passion for collecting specimens of the natural world, he ventured to Africa, where he supported his collecting habit by dispensing medical advice and teaching the children of an official of the Cape Colony. One day late in the year an Englishman named John Forster showed up, off a ship that was anchored in Table Bay. Forster was himself a naturalist, and the two instantly became fast friends. Forster avowed that there was no better place for an enthusiastic young naturalist such as Sparrman than on board the ship on which Forster was at that moment serving. Its captain, James Cook, was then in the midst of his second voyage of discovery, and Forster convinced Cook that the Swedish naturalist would be a valuable addition.