Descartes' Bones (6 page)

Elsewhere he noted blithely, “Now I am dissecting the heads of different animals in order to explain what imagination, memory etc., consist of.” If the arrogance was uniquely his, this sort of naïveté with regard to the imminent payoff of science was something he shared with his contemporaries. There was a tendency, in that idealistic moment at the birth of the modern, to believe that solutions to some of the most complex of human problems were just around the corner, and Descartes was convinced that his method was the key. He insisted, for one example, that to achieve mental health one need only turn the method of reason on oneself. Once people did that, perversions and manias would fall away, as would ordinary feelings of jealousy, fear, greed, and anger.

The optimism went further still. The body was a machine; therefore it simply needed to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly. In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death. Descartes became convinced that he would crack the body's code and extend the human life span to as much as a thousand years. At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote—and he seems to have missed the joke—that he were not “prevented by the brevity of life.”

As absurd as Descartes' hopeful ideas about medicine seem today, they were believed by others. Europe's greatest intellectuals were as aware of his medical focus as they were of his philosophical and mathematical discoveries. He gave Blaise Pascal medical advice. The Dutch statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens wrote to ask if Descartes could pause in his investigations long enough to give a few hints on “the means to live longer than we now do.” Royals wanted to be updated on his progress, to know if he had yet found a way to increase the life span “to equal that of the Patriarchs.” He seemed to relish the role of medical adviser, but in the absence of some basic medical discoveries—germ theory, blood types, anesthesia, microbes, and bacteria were centuries in the future—much of his advice was sound if unexciting: he tended to recommend rest, soup, and keeping a positive outlook. Meanwhile, proving that he was truly modern, as he saw gray hairs sprouting on his head after he turned forty, he got to work on a process he believed would retard graying.

Of course, Descartes did not go down in history as a medical researcher. His focus broadened eventually beyond the human body, and one reason for that broadening had to do with the body itself and its frailty. Descartes never married and had almost no known intimate relations, but he was, after all, human. We happen to know that on October 15, 1634, while he was lodging at the home of his associate Thomas Sergeant in Amsterdam, Descartes had sex with a woman named Helena Jans, who was his host's housekeeper. We can be precise about this because nine months later a child was born, and afterward Descartes gossiped to a friend and told him the date of conception, of which he had obviously made a note. Helena Jans was in the employ of Sergeant, an Englishman who ran a bookshop and who lived in a house that still stands in the center of the city (it is just around the corner from the Anne Frank House), but when several months later Descartes left Amsterdam for the Dutch town of Deventer, where he had previously been living, Helena Jans went with him. Her daughter was born there; they named her Francine.

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.

A
T 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 coming 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.