Descartes' Bones (29 page)

“Where are the remains of Descartes?”
Le Temps
asked. “A controversy ensued yesterday . . . not on the doctrine of the philosopher but on the place, the state, and the authenticity of his remains.” The story went on to note drily: “A plaque affixed to the church of Saint Germain-des-Prés indicates that they repose there. A plaque is not, one must say, irrefutable proof.”

Government officials had unraveled the whole chain of historical events and personalities, from Chanut and Christina to Paul Richer and his exotic tripartite bust, and they came to conclude that there was a weak link somewhere. Why, when the coffin was opened before the final burial, did it contain mostly bone chips and powder? These were not proper remains. Digging up the coffin would be unlikely to yield further clues since no one doubted the reports of Delambre and others who attended the 1819 reburial. A problem must have occurred earlier. Somewhere—over six countries, across three centuries, through three burials—something had gone wrong with the handling of the remains of René Descartes. Once this was realized, the matter was dropped—no one wanted to go to the expense and bother of digging into the ancient church for a few handfuls of dubious powder—and it has largely remained dropped since that time.

Of course, it doesn't matter. There are something like thirty-one wars being fought on the planet as I write. We are on the verge, or over the verge, of irreversible environmental damage. There are epic confrontations brewing that transcend national borders, which have to do with clashes of religious, economic, and political systems. The insignificance of some bits of bone lying beneath the floor of a church in Paris—whether or not they ever belonged to the person to whom they are attributed—is fairly monumental.

But my point in pursuing the trail of Descartes' bones has been metaphorical: uncannily, they seem to form a spine, if you will pardon the expression, of modernity itself. Sixteen years after Descartes' death, Hugues de Terlon considered Descartes someone who had penetrated to the mystical heart of nature, and he took a finger bone as a religious relic, a holy object meant to bridge the gap between the material and the eternal. By the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet and his compatriots looked on the bones in the mirror-opposite way: as relics of secularism, symbols of the force that reoriented people and society toward the here and now and gave rise to the principles of individual liberty, equality, and democracy. For Berzelius, Cuvier, and other nineteenth-century scientists, the skull was a talisman of science. Descartes' bones—or rather, the meanings people have attached to them—are really about who we were and are, including the convictions and confusions and confrontations that divide us.

Quite beyond that, a search for answers of the sort I've been conducting is itself utterly Cartesian, is it not? The Cartesian method lies beneath not only the scientific method but other modern modes of inquiry. We are a probing, analytical culture. Of course, a certain amount of baggage comes with this. The American philosopher John Dewey characterized the modern mind since Descartes as being caught up in a hopeless “quest for certainty”—hopeless because certainty does not exist in the real world. In absorbing Descartes' mind-body dualism, we have set up our understanding of knowledge this way: there is a fixed world of objects that is “out there,” and there is a mind “in here.” Knowledge is what happens when the mind reaches out to that fixed world. Dewey called this view a “spectator theory of knowledge.” A thing is real, we think, if we can see it and hold it, if it can be associated with a particular time and place, if it happened in history. But according to current thinking in philosophy and science, this is not how reality works. We are supposed to understand that things that seem to be hard and clear and certain are in fact floating on a sea of probability. Contingency—whether in nuclear physics or in morality or in our personal relationships—is a governing principle. Like children outgrowing fantasies, we are supposed to realize ultimately that there is no such thing as certainty.

But we want it anyway. We probe the world and our past. Were the American founding fathers heroes or slave drivers? Who was Jesus and how do intelligent Christians square his supposed miracles with our understanding of the physical world? We are all part-time historians, genealogists, doctors, investigators. We demand information about our child's illness; we hire private detectives to check up on our spouse; we haul that piece of furniture that has been in the family for generations to an appraiser to learn its value; we have difficult conversations with parents about the circumstances of our birth. The archetypal modern figure may not be Descartes or Galileo or Einstein but Sherlock Holmes. The success of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories was in no small part due to their capturing the modern fascination with inquiry that was part of Victorian society—the idea of applying observation and analysis to the ordinary world and revealing the hidden structure of things. We are all detectives. Sifting clues and making deductions is in our blood—or perhaps better to say in our brains.

And we crave closure. What actually happened to the “body” of Descartes' bones is a mystery, but we like mysteries when they come paired with solutions. So here is mine.

I
AM STANDING ON A
wide plaza—the highest point in Paris—looking at one church but seeing two. I'm holding a postcard of an ink drawing of the scene before me as it existed four centuries ago. The real-life church in front of me, with its somberly busy façade mixing elements of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, is nearly exactly as it appears on the postcard. But where, on the postcard, immediately to the right of it—wall to wall, in fact—stands a church with a sedate Gothic brick façade, there is now a gap, a narrow street that connects this plaza, the place du Panthéon, to the street behind (the rue Descartes, no less) and the warren of Latin Quarter streets that descend to the Seine. By squinting and folding the postcard in half I can replace the missing church, relocating it up against the wall of the existing one.

The church on my right—the one that isn't there anymore—was Ste.-Geneviève. Here, on an early summer's evening in 1667, friends and followers of Descartes, having orchestrated the disinterment and transfer of his remains from Stockholm, laid them to rest on French soil, near the relics of the city's patron saint, Gene-viève herself. Here the bones of Descartes remained for more than a century until, in 1792, anti-Catholic mobs threatened the church, so that its abbot begged the keeper of the revolutionary government's
dépôt des monuments
to come and save what could be saved.

Alexandre Lenoir—that sepulchrally dashing rescuer of artifacts—took official charge of the situation and went to work. He took sculpted figures, columns, plaques, and markers. He took the tabernacle. He took coffins and sarcophaguses. He took bones. But he did not take the remains of René Descartes. It was a time of chaos and violence, of roving gangs, makeshift roadblocks, burning buildings. For Lenoir, given his business, it was an intensely busy moment, as he sent his small team of assistants to retrieve objects from every part of the city. Speaking specifically of the moment when he supposedly retrieved the remains of Descartes from Ste.-Geneviève, Lenoir wrote four years later that “the circumstances of that time were not happy ones for me.” We have no way of knowing what this personal source of unhappiness was, but his suggestion is that he was distracted.

Though he was trained as a painter, Lenoir's skill was not in art; he fancied himself a scholar of architecture, but he made basic mistakes in his descriptions of buildings and their features. However, as his biographer has said, Lenoir was a registrar of the first order: his records of his holdings are unparalleled, and an important database of French art and architecture; his renderings of the tombs in the church of Ste.-Geneviève are meticulous. And yet he made no record of recovering the remains of Descartes.

Decades later, long after Lenoir's beloved Museum of French Monuments was closed, and after Berzelius discovered the skull purported to be Descartes' in the collection of a casino operator in Stockholm, Georges Cuvier, seeking to unravel the tangle of threads surrounding Descartes' bones, wrote to Lenoir at his home in Paris. There was a considerable disparity between the two men: Lenoir was at this point more or less relegated to obscurity, while Cuvier, as permanent secretary of the academy, was one of France's great figures. The letter was written under the seal of the Academy of Sciences and carried the weight of authority:

Cuvier's focus was on the skull, and his tone formally polite, but he was clearly suggesting some mishandling of the remains between the time Terlon packed them in Sweden and Delambre and others saw them. And the man most associated with them during that time—who had supposedly retrieved them from Ste.-Geneviève and then held them in his keeping for twenty-seven years—was Lenoir.

Lenoir wrote back at once. He didn't even bother to pick up a fresh sheet of paper but scrawled his reply on the back of Cuvier's letter:

He went on to say that he had found one small piece of bone plate that could have been a skull fragment; it was this that he had cut into circles and distributed to friends as rings.

But two years before Cuvier's letter Lenoir had also been asked about the transfer of Descartes' remains, and on that earlier occasion he had given a somewhat different answer. In the immediate aftermath of the reburial in the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, and perhaps in response to questions from Delambre, the city's conservator of public monuments had wanted to look at the records from the time when Lenoir dug up the bones, but he couldn't locate any reference. “You will not have found, Monsieur, the record of the exhumation of Descartes in the archives of the museum,” Lenoir informed him, “because none was written up.” The reason, Lenoir said, was that “this operation was conducted revolutionarily”—that is, during the chaos of the Revolution. It took place, he went on, “in the presence of the police commissioner of that section of the
quarter”
and “at the request of Messieurs the abbé Saint-Léger and Le Blond,” who were both members of the Monuments Commission. “They are both dead now,” he added, then noted that “the remains . . . were brought to the Petits-Augustins by a commissioner whom I paid.”

Lenoir appears to be suggesting that he himself was not present when the remains were dug up. “At their arrival at the museum, I placed [the remains] in an antique porphyry tomb,” he continues, painting a picture of others as having not only dug in the church but carried what they found to the grounds of the museum, where he received the remains and put them into the ancient sarcophagus. The seemingly superfluous note that Saint-Léger and Le Blond had both since died—and were thus not available to corroborate his account—also sounds like a reflexive covering up of an awkward or embarrassing fact.

The awkward fact, it seems to me, is that Lenoir failed to get the remains of Descartes. It was an unhappy time, there was the chaos of the Revolution, he sent others—as indeed he often did. Then there is the evidence. Lenoir says that what he—or his assistants—found was “the remains of a coffin of porous wood” and some meager fragments. But there was no wooden coffin. The burial ceremony of 1667 had been a grand affair—recall that the Cartesians had pulled every string in order to have the translation and reburial of their great hero treated as an officially sanctioned event—and the copper coffin in which Terlon had originally packed the remains was accompanied by a copper sword on which Claude Clerselier, the editor of Descartes' papers, inscribed an account of the translation and the names of those taking part. This work was done, in the words of Baillet, “in the presence of these friends.”