Descartes' Bones (7 page)

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.

N
OW 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
L
UDWIG
W
ITTGENSTEIN
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.

Death comes most squarely into our lives at the places where we leave those who have died. In this respect, there is a noteworthy difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. A cemetery is a universe unto itself, an ocean of memories, each of which is always inexorably being carried further out to sea. A cemetery's vastness restricts the activity that takes place in it: the only reason to go there is to bury loved ones or pay respects. Graveyards, however, usually attached to old churches, are wedged into a human landscape, and everyday life has a tendency to wrap itself around them. Wander into an urban churchyard on a sunny day and you will probably find other people: kids playing tag, a homeless man sipping soup, people strolling, taking stock of their lives. This mingling in of ordinariness seems an unspoken nod to mortality, an acceptance—partial, anyway—of the fact that we, too, will actually die.

The Adolf Fredriks churchyard, in north-central Stockholm, is today an urban sanctuary rimmed by office buildings and shops. Tombstones scattered across the grass run a gamut of eras and funereal styles. There are tilting, centuries-old mini-obelisks, almost druidic in the angular cut of their tops, their faces weather-blasted of all records of the life that once occupied the remains beneath. There are art deco pink marble slabs, and rectilinear blocks with spare, geometric 1950s simplicity, neatly etched with crosses and the sans-serifed names of the departed: Johansson, Baggström, Thordal, Köpman. The yard is quietly busy; office workers come with lunches to sit among the graves. The most visited site is a raw, smooth, twisting monolith whose only marking is the swirl of a signature. In 1986, on the street that runs along the east side of the churchyard, Olof Palme, Sweden's outspoken leftist prime minister, was shot to death. The unassuming character of his gravesite suits a country famed for its spare design sense, and it remains a place of continual, understated pilgrimage.

Three and a half centuries ago, this was a forlorn little graveyard in the countryside, the out-of-the-way place Pierre Chanut chose for his illustrious friend's final rest. Christina ordered an imposing monument and had its four sides covered with Latin inscriptions, written by Chanut, extolling the epochal wisdom of the deceased and containing the names of both herself and Chanut.

The tomb is gone today, and so are the remains. In the spring of the year 1666—the first of May, in fact—with a strengthening sun warming the top layer of soil, coaxing life out of the dead land, a shovel bit into the precise spot of earth where, sixteen years earlier, a ceremony of supposedly permanent interment had taken place. Much had changed in those sixteen years. Most convulsively for Sweden, Christina was gone. Her enthusiasm for Greek esoterica had been short-lived, but the gossip about her interest in Roman Catholicism had proven to be on the mark. In 1654, four years after Descartes' death, she abdicated her throne, converted to Catholicism (in the staunchly Lutheran nation that Sweden had become since the Reformation it was insupportable that the monarch be a Catholic), and moved to Rome. There, as the most famous woman in the world and now either the most notorious or the most revered, depending on one's religious perspective, she had created an altogether new persona.

Christina's dramatic transformation—from enlightened monarch to religious convert of dubious sincerity (in Rome she continually flouted Catholic observances)—sparked incredulous speculation as the events unfolded, and the speculation has never ceased. Almost immediately people blamed—or credited—Descartes, whose commitment to his faith was well known, despite the charges of atheism that dogged him. But the contact between the queen and the philosopher had been limited and strained, so that, despite indications from Christina herself that Descartes had had a hand in her conversion, her biographers have looked elsewhere for sources of influence. Most have found it within her own nature: a deep, quixotic restlessness, a hungry, almost angry search for answers, for certainty. This, perhaps, was where she and Descartes had truly intersected.

Chanut, too, was gone. He had returned to Paris the year after Descartes' death and himself had died in 1662. The current French ambassador to Sweden, who watched as the shovel dug deeper and slowly revealed the coffin lid, was a very different sort of man. Where Chanut had been an enthusiastic promoter of science, a futurist who believed in the real-world possibilities of Cartesianism, Hugues de Terlon stood frankly with one foot in the past. He was a knight of St. John, a member of the chivalrous order based on Malta, whose glory dated to the First Crusade. Terlon was an imposing man of fifty-four, with a patrician nose, a thin, curling moustache, and eyes that had seen battle among northern European foes from Lübeck to Piotrków. He maintained an archaic and militaristic form of Catholicism. He was not only a warrior and a diplomat but also a member of a religious order that mandated a vow of celibacy.

Terlon was a loyal servant to Louis XIV, but he had been especially devoted to the Sun King's mother, Anne of Austria. Anne's husband, King Louis XIII, had died when their son was five years old, so that the queen took over the government as regent until he reached maturity. To aid her during this interregnum, she had deepened her already quite intense faith and had forged bonds with devout noblemen such as Terlon. Anne attended Mass several times a day and had a dizzying network of churches and convents at which she prayed on various feast days. She also took part in the revival of relic worship that had sprung up in the mid-seventeenth century. She owned several pieces of saints as well as a fragment of the Cross.

Because Terlon was also known for his piety, as he traveled through the war-scarred landscapes of northern Europe on behalf of the French Crown, displaced members of religious orders sought him out for aid. Along the way, he, too, became a collector of holy relics. Friedrich Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg, one of the most powerful men in Europe, on meeting Terlon amid the chaos of battle outside Warsaw in 1656, gave him a coffer of relics that, he said, had been looted from a church in Vilna. In 1657, an advance guard of Swedish soldiers pillaged a convent outside Strasbourg. When Terlon arrived, the nuns emerged from the smoke and ruin and pressed him to take the convent's most sacred possessions, their relics, for safekeeping, which he did. In both cases, Terlon carried them with him on his journeys and, on returning to Paris, presented them to Anne, the mother of the king.

Now, in Sweden, Terlon had been asked to deal with relics, and he went about it with the same pious zeal. The unearthing of Descartes' bones that day in May 1666 must have run like a reversed film of the burial, for after the coffin was undug it was loaded onto a cart and hauled back down the same road, across the same bridge, and carried into the same building in which Descartes had lived and died. This was still the residence of the French ambassador, and Terlon was determined to keep the remains close at hand.

The sequence of events that unfolded next is important to understanding what was really taking place—as is the level of detail with which the matter of the shipping of a box of bones was committed to written record.

Terlon had been in the process of leaving Sweden—he was being transferred to the post of ambassador to Denmark—when he had received an official communication from the French government ordering him to quietly approach Swedish officials about the possibility of removing the remains. He asked for and received the permission, and now he took the rather extravagant step of engaging a contingent of Swedish soldiers to guard them around the clock as they lay in the chapel of his residence. Whether Terlon noted it or not, the captain of the Swedish guard, a man named Isaak Planström, seemed to take a particular interest in the assignment.

Terlon arranged for the body to travel with him as far as Copenhagen. He had a special copper coffin made that was only two and a half feet long. The improbable reason for this—besides the fact that the original wooden box in which the body had been laid had rotted—was that his superiors in France were concerned that if it became known that he was transporting the remains of René Descartes his party might be attacked and robbed. The cult of Cartesianism had grown strong in the years since Descartes' death, and others had developed an interest in the remains.

The manner of Terlon's subterfuge followed from the state of the remains after sixteen years. When he opened the coffin into which Chanut had had the corpse laid, he found that putrefaction was complete: soft tissue had gone, leaving bones that had loosened apart. A small box—just long enough to accommodate the largest leg bones—would be more inconspicuous than a coffin.

Another religious ceremony then took place in the chapel of Terlon's residence. The ambassador had assembled his embassy staff, other members of the French community in Stockholm, and Catholic priests—in fact, “nearly the whole Catholic Church of Sweden,” according to Descartes' seventeenth-century biographer, who had access to Terlon's report of the event. That may not have been all that vast an assembly given the semipersecuted state of Catholicism in Sweden at the time, but it was clearly church sanctioned. They were all there to witness a ceremony of repackaging: to the accompaniment of formal prayers, the bones were taken from the rotted wooden coffin and put into the small copper box, where they were stacked one atop another in a manner that was deemed to be “without indecence.”

Here Terlon paused the proceeding in order to make a request. He asked the assembled Catholic clergy if he might “religiously” be allowed to take one of the bones for himself. In particular, he had his eye on the right index finger—a bone “which had served as an instrument in the immortal writings of the deceased.”

It's worth pausing to consider this request. Those in Paris who had worked through channels in the French government to have the bones removed and brought to France had their own reasons for doing so, which had to do with philosophy and politics, as will become clear in the coming pages. Terlon's interest was quite different but just as noteworthy. He was no mere courier: he was a knowledgeable man of the world. Descartes' fame had spread in sixteen years, and both Cartesianism and the man whose name it bore were the subject of rumors, hopes, and fear. Here in Sweden, the estate of the clergy, the branch of the government controlled by the Lutheran Church, had tried, two years earlier, to outlaw the teaching of Cartesianism, so great was the threat they felt from it. In Leiden and Utrecht, after the first debates about Cartesianism had flared up, the philosophy had become rooted, so that while Terlon was overseeing the disinterral Cartesianism was growing in strength in nearly all branches of the universities. In France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, men who had been students during Descartes' lifetime were now professors, churchmen, and physicians and had brought with them certain convictions about the truth of the Cartesian method of acquiring knowledge and the overall approach to nature that it implied. In each place, a battle was intensifying and becoming more complicated. It wasn't a case of “science” versus “religion,” or even of the purely new versus the utterly old. Some, like Gysbert Voetius at Utrecht, believed the materialism in the new philosophy was a direct attack on Christianity. At the same time, however, important Jesuits and Oratorians—two of the most prominent and intellectually driven Catholic orders—had become Cartesians and actually saw the philosophy as a way to protect the faith.