Descartes' Bones Read online

  Descartes was a self-centered, vainglorious, vindictive man who stayed remote from his family and had few close personal friends, but with the arrival of the little girl he seems to have changed in some basic way. The child was, according to his early biographer Adrien Baillet, the love of his life. Fathering a child out of wedlock was a serious offense, and Descartes took pains to keep the fact hidden, but at the same time he acknowledged the baby as his own in the baptism registry (though he used only his first name).

  They moved around over the next few years, this curious little family, Helena officially as his servant, Francine as his “niece.” In 1640, he wrote to a female relative in France, saying that he was preparing to bring his daughter there to learn the language and be educated. In early September, before the move to France, he took a short trip to Leiden. Then came news: Francine had been stricken with scarlet fever, “her body all covered in purple.” According to one account, he returned in time to hold her in his arms as she died. She was five years old.

  The five years of his daughter’s life, followed by her death, formed a kind of pivot around which Descartes’ work turned. Before, a main focus was on medicine and curing disease, which came in part as a result of his own childhood illness. He dissected animals, as if expecting to find, somewhere within the recesses of the body, an actual key. The experience of fatherhood, and then of losing a child, coincided with a broadening of his focus. It was as though staring into what is surely the blackest of all holes—the grave of one’s child—pulled him out of the body, led him to conclude that it would not give up its secrets so easily, and compelled him to look to the universe for answers.

  AT THE SAME TIME, however, Descartes maintained confidence in science and its power to aid and extend human life. And that, surely, was one component of the anger that wracked him as he lay dying on an icy February night in Stockholm. And with the anger came bitterness, for he hadn’t really wanted to come here to begin with. Stockholm was far from the European centers of power. Besides that, he detested the cold. He had been born and raised in the Loire Valley, the sunny garden of west-central France, and he cared about personal comfort. Sweden he dismissed as a remote “land of bears between rocks and ice.”

  But the stream of letters from his friend Chanut inviting and urging him to Stockholm had come as he was at a low ebb. He had been living in the Dutch provinces for more than twenty years, working to get his philosophy accepted in what were supposedly Europe’s most freethinking universities, but the battles in Utrecht and Leiden had worn him down. He had begun to realize the difficulty of the task. He felt old and tired; a change was in order.

  Then, too, he had another reason for going north: the queen of Sweden. It was probably partly because of her that he accepted Chanut’s invitation. It was no doubt due to her that he, normally a sober dresser, did himself up in peacock fashion—long, pointy shoes, gloves of white fur, and his hair specially curled—as he boarded the ship that came expressly to pick him up on the Dutch coast.

  He met her the day after his arrival in Stockholm. He may have been surprised at first. Queen Christina did not, even according to her admirers, cut a dazzling figure. She was plain, with a prominent nose and mournful eyes. She didn’t care much for dressing up if she didn’t have to (she allowed all of fifteen minutes to ready herself in the morning). She was short and a bit stocky, with tiny feet. She liked riding, hunting, and shooting, and when she was on horseback she wore a man’s collar, so that Chanut, in describing her, once said that anyone who didn’t know the rider was the queen of Sweden would think her a man.

  This was one of many hints that would lead later writers to claim that the doctor who had delivered her had spotted a tiny penis; there were rumors of gender bending, hermaphroditism. Probably they were the sort of sexual slander spread by men who didn’t know what to make of a woman who wielded power, but during her prime she managed to behave in such a way as to ignite gossip. She never married, for one thing, and once remarked with loathing that being a wife would be like being worked over “as a peasant does with his field.” She was said to treat certain young ladies with unusual familiarity and, with one in particular, to “perform immoral acts.” Meanwhile, she allowed a French physician at her court free rein over her bedroom—he wrote lasciviously to a confidante that she had “begun to taste,” whatever that means.

  But despite appearances, all agreed that when she opened her mouth to speak everything changed. Christina’s personality—crafted by the circumstances of her life as well as by her intellect and learning—was unstoppable. She was brilliant, intellectually voracious, and domineering. She was only twenty-two when Descartes arrived at her court, but people had been talking about her for many years—since her father had died in battle in 1632, making her queen at age six. She grew into a psychologically complex monarch, maybe too much so for a stolid country to know what to do with. Looking back on her early childhood must have been like mulling a hazy dream. Her father, King Gustav Adolf, had held sway over a land that was still medieval, a nation made up of scattered small farming settlements dotting an endless expanse of meadow and pine and birch forests. He was a mythic figure, blond and Nordic, a dreaded warrior whom enemies called “the lion of the north” and who held court in the open air; his peasants paid taxes to him in kind—cattle, barley, oats, hides. Currency existed in his time, but the daler, because it was of copper, the country’s chief metal, tended to be unwieldy: a coin was typically the size of a dinner plate.

  Gustav Adolf wanted Sweden to become a power to rival the nations to the south, and he largely succeeded, thanks to his skill in maneuvering Swedish warriors through the thicket of the Thirty Years War. By the time he had fallen in the mud of lower Saxony, with bullets in his back, arm, and skull, Sweden commanded respect from its neighbors and was moving toward a sophisticated society, economy, and governmental bureaucracy. His chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, held the reins of power until the young Christina reached maturity. Like Alexander the Great, she was groomed from early life in books and the art of war. One of the things that had intrigued Descartes was the reputation she had as a ferocious intellect, someone who could keep up with even a great philosopher. Building on her father’s achievements, she now wanted to turn her court into one that would rival that of France. She wanted artists, poets, philosophers. She wanted an academy of science. Thus the invitation to Descartes.

  But, too, on her side there was something deeper. If the force called modern asserted itself most clearly in science and philosophy, there was also a political dimension. The year before Descartes arrived in Sweden—1648—represents one of history’s political watersheds. The Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War—which together had engulfed most of Europe—came to an end simultaneously in that year. The treaties that ended the two wars were seen by those involved as a dividing line between past and future. If you were alive then, you would have taken part not in a single celebration but in an ongoing party that spread across the months and into the next couple of years. (Not long after Descartes arrived in Stockholm, Christina sponsored a ballet—The Birth of Peace—devoted to the topic. Its libretto was long believed to have been written by Descartes, on the queen’s orders, but recently the philosopher Richard Watson has argued convincingly that Descartes was not the writer.) Those protracted conflicts, largely religious in nature, involved a level of slaughter that had never been known before. The negotiators charged to end them crafted, in the process, a new secular sense of the relations between nations and, with it, new thinking about the meaning of peace and how societies might relate to one another. Rather than being tied to Rome, or to one of the Protestant confessional blocs, nations saw themselves as independent actors that could control their own fates. It was, in a word, the advent of secular politics.

  In this new age, the leaders of the nation-states of western Europe were hunting for innovative tools and tactics that they could leverage to their advantage. Science—or Cartesianism, or new philosophy—was comin
g to the fore at the same time this political thinking was evolving, and political and military leaders looked to it as a potential source of power. In a sense it was a trope that had played out endlessly before and would continue to do so in the future. The duke of Milan had hired Leonardo da Vinci to create military hardware; the United States would secretly smuggle Wernher von Braun and other German rocket scientists out of Germany during and after World War II, scrub them of their Nazi associations, and put them to work founding the American space program. Christina got reports on the frenzy of scientific exploration going on across the continent—people doing unheard-of things with cadavers and flower bulbs, injecting quivering animals, gazing at the heavens, predicting imminent findings that would shake society to its foundations—and she wanted to be a part of it.

  After his first, hopeful meeting with the queen, Descartes took a floor in Chanut’s house and tried to settle into life at court. He quickly found, however, that the other intellectuals she had assembled resented him. He also discovered that, where earlier Christina had been keen on his philosophy—she had read his latest book and had written to him herself, through Chanut, posing questions on the nature of love and on how the modern notion of an infinite universe could be squared with Christian belief—she now seemed to have moved on to other things.

  In particular, she had fallen heavily for Greek esoteric knowledge, a semimystical inquiry into nature that relied on ancient writers and that for a brief time rivaled the mechanistic new philosophy as a potential replacement for Aristotelianism. When Descartes discovered that the queen was giving much of her attention to the study of ancient Greek, he reacted as if it were an illness she had caught, saying to a friend, “Perhaps this will pass.” He, after all, wanted to sweep away the old learning in favor of science and experimentation and considered such study a colossal waste of time. He soon came to see Christina as a dabbler and a dilettante. And she seems to have been disappointed in him, too: he appeared more doddering curmudgeon than fiery revolutionary. His philosophy didn’t seem transferable into political power or, for that matter, personal growth.

  The mutual disillusionment played out over the course of the winter, and in circumstances unfavorable to Descartes. He liked to work at night and sleep in late; she always woke at four in the morning, and she decreed that he would give her philosophy lessons beginning at five o’clock. In the black predawn he lumbered by coach from Chanut’s house over the little hump that was the center of the island that formed Stockholm’s core and trudged up to the castle perched grandly above the harbor. It was cold, the coldest winter in living memory, his lifelong fear of catching colds and fevers reasserted itself, and he became dark. “Here men’s thoughts freeze like water,” he wrote in the last letter of his life. And added frankly, “I am out of my element.”

  And so came illness, and its worsening, and then the realization—after calling for remedies of his own concoction (for example, wine infused with tobacco to induce vomiting)—that he would not recover. Outside, far away, forces that he had helped set in motion were continuing without him. Letters came from Paris, London, Amsterdam. Pascal wanted updates on an experiment on barometric pressure for which Descartes had been giving him temperature readings. Who knew if a month or a year hence wouldn’t bring a discovery related to the regeneration of human tissue or proof that celestial bodies were governed by the same forces as those on earth, which would firmly establish his mechanical notion of the universe? Walls were collapsing, scales were falling from people’s eyes. And here he lay, in this remote, cold, stony world, a veritable tomb.

  Finally Descartes agreed to let the physician Wullens see him again. But he remained cantankerous, so that Wullens was baleful in his Latin follow-up report, calling his patient homo obstinatus and complaining afterward that Descartes had told him “that if he had to die, he would die with more contentment if he did not have to see me.”

  Then came the final indignity, which Descartes not only relented to but, in ultimate capitulation, asked for out of the extremity of his desperation: to be bled. Three times his arm was opened; the blood that pulsed out, Chanut’s secretary noted, was “oily.” Rather than improvement, Wullens reported, there came “the death-rattle, black sputum, uncertain breathing, wandering eyes.” When death arrived, it was seemingly with spite on its breath.

  NOW THIS WAS AWKWARD. Chanut and Christina had lured the great man to them, they had taken him under their protection, and then they had, well, killed him. Christina could let his death wash off her royal personage, but Chanut, as both friend and diplomat, felt the full brunt of guilt. Much as he would have liked to avoid them, there were responsibilities to perform: he had to break the news. His letters fanned out across Europe, beginning the day after the death. To the comte de Lo-ménie, the former French secretary of state, he lamented: “We are afflicted in this house by the death of M. Descartes, . . . a rare man of the century.” Perhaps to deflect responsibility, he went on to explain that the philosopher had been in Sweden because “the Queen of Sweden had desired to see him with a passion.” To Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who had become close friends with Descartes, Chanut bowed low in anguish: “I . . . say to you, Madame, with an incredible pain, that we have lost Monsieur Descartes.” While to Claude Saumaise, a French linguist whom Christina had invited to her court, he wrote, “Mr. Descartes, who gave us the method and the design, will not have the pleasure to see the beginning of it”—meaning, presumably, that Descartes would not live to see the full flowering of science. And here Chanut tried to assuage his guilt a bit by noting that Descartes had died after an illness “in which he did not want to avail himself of the assistance of the Doctors.”

  The news of the death spread and, oddly enough, caused some bewilderment. The idea that Descartes would end disease and dramatically lengthen life had become so widely held in certain circles that some intellectuals refused to believe he could be dead. “Impossible,” wrote the French abbé Claude Picot, who said he had been convinced that Descartes “would have lived five hundred years, after having found the art of living several centuries.” How could the chief investigator of longevity die so young? There had to be a sinister explanation, something that, as Picot said, “deranged his machine.” A rumor sprang up, which circulated for decades, that he had been poisoned.

  Meanwhile, there was the matter of the body. Christina announced that she wanted to bury the great philosopher in Stockholm. If in life he hadn’t been the ornament to her court that she had wanted, perhaps in death he could add some luster. Chanut’s position would logically have impelled him to insist that the body be returned to France, but then again that would draw another, greater round of attention to the awkward fact that the man had died here, under his watch. He acquiesced.

  But where to bury him? There was no question in Christina’s mind. He would be given a full ceremony and laid to rest in the Riddarholm Church, the ancient resting place of Swedish kings, whose number included her father. Chanut was appreciative of the high honor offered to a countryman, but he definitely did not want this and set himself obsequiously to convincing the queen to rethink her decision. He sent his secretary, an especially pious man named Belin, to the castle to explain that his reasons for desiring other arrangements had to do with religion. Descartes was a Catholic; France was a Catholic nation, which wouldn’t appreciate one of its native sons being buried in a Lutheran setting. Plus, there had already been whispers at Christina’s court that Descartes and Chanut together were trying to convert the queen from Swedish Lutheranism. Perhaps Her Majesty could appreciate, Belin offered, that burial in the state church might be . . . undiplomatic?

  Christina relented, and if Chanut’s deep objective was to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible, he achieved it. The place, time, and circumstances of burial might have served for a plague victim. At four o’clock on a winter morning, barely twenty-four hours after the death, a small procession traveled a mile north of the center of Stockholm, wagon wheels creaking in
the frozen ruts, and turned into a lonely little cemetery whose charges were mostly orphans. Apparently Chanut had made some inquiries and concluded that because children who had not attained “the age of reason” were not considered to be outside the graces of the Catholic Church, such burial ground, if not exactly sanctified, could not be said to be unholy. Theologically, it would do. Better still, it was remote.

  Four men—one of them Chanut’s seventeen-year-old son—carried the coffin to the waiting grave. A small group of people gathered around it in the frozen darkness, their faces lit by flickering torches. Beneath the icy swirl of the indifferent heavens, the sole priest invoked the name of God. Dirt skittered on the coffin lid. Then everyone went home.

  Banquet of Bones

  EATH,” THE PHILOSOPHER LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN once wrote, “is not an event in life.” He meant, maybe (for it’s hard to be sure—Wittgenstein was rather titanically cryptic), that being dead is not something we actually experience and that since we aren’t conscious of a nonliving state it is literally meaningless, so instead of spending our lives worrying about the future we should look at each instant as an eternity. We should live in the moment.

  Perhaps this is true, and wise, but in an ordinary sense Wittgenstein was completely wrong. Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we butter up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here.