Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  Rene Descartes first saw light in his grandmother's house on the banks of the River Creuse in La Haye, and he was baptised three days later, on 3 April 1596, in the town's Catholic church of Saint-Georges. A significant footnote to these innocuous facts is that Saint-Georges was his grandmother's parish church only because a closer church, Notre Dame, had been granted to the town's Protestants seven years before. So Descartes' first public act, that of being baptised, took place in a manner determined by the great religious divisions of the time.

  Another footnote concerns a legend—the evidence suggests that it was invented long after the philosopher became famous—to the effect that Descartes was born in a country ditch halfway between La Haye and Chatellerault. The story has it that his mother was en route from Chatellerault to her mother's house in La Haye, a distance of eighteen miles, and was overtaken by her labour pangs at the exact halfway point, outside a farm called La Sybilliere (providing a suitably prophetic association for the birth of a great thinker). This "halfway point" detail has the tinge of fiction to it, as does the additional detail that Descartes' mother was so weakened by giving birth that she had to rest at La Sybilliere for two nights, thus explaining why three whole days elapsed before Descartes was baptised. The most probable reason for the "delay," of course, is that Descartes' various godparents had to be informed, and then had to travel to La Haye. The eighteen miles separating Chatellerault and La Haye was a day's journey; so the sending of a messenger, and his return journey with the prospective godparents, would itself have taken two days.

  Fourteen months after Descartes' birth his mother was again at his grandmother's house in La Haye for a lying-in. This time the outcome was fatal. Descartes' mother died on 13 May 1597, six days after giving birth to a baby boy, who followed her into the grave a mere three days later. At the time of this tragedy Descartes' father Joachim was at his duties in the Parlement at Rennes, and young Descartes himself was most probably still with his wet-nurse. What happened after this direful event is a blank in the record, though it is probable that all three of the children, Pierre, Jeanne and Rene, went to live with their grandmother at La Haye for a time, and that the boys then moved to Chatellerault to be raised by their great-uncle Michel Ferrand (who was also Rene's godfather). Joachim remarried three years after being widowed, moved to Rennes to be close to his duties, and raised a new family of children, leaving his first family behind with their mother's relatives.

  This was not a bad arrangement. Descartes' great-uncle-cum-godfather Michel Ferrand was a substantial citizen. During the negotiations preceding the epochal Edict of Nantes in 1598 (the Edict giving protection to France's Protestants), Ferrand was lieutenant-general of Chatellerault—an office corresponding to that of mayor, though much grander-sounding—and in his town the Protestants of all France met to discuss the provisions of the Edict before it was enacted. He was still lieutenant-general in 1605 when another national meeting of Protestants took place there to protest against Catholic violations of the Edict. The man in charge of the 1598 Edict negotiations was the King's first minister, Maximilien de Bethune, due de Sully. Ferrand was likely not involved in any direct capacity with the discussions themselves, but he was probably Sully's host, and certainly would have been responsible for the local organisation of the event.

  One historian of Poitou, Alfred Barbier, claimed in an 1897 study that Michel Ferrand was a staunch Catholic who opposed concessions to the Huguenots.1 This seems improbable. Poitou had the largest Huguenot population of any French province (nearly a million by the mid-seventeenth century), and relations between Poitevin Catholics and Huguenots had been consistently good right from the beginning of the Reformation. As a leading public figure in a town with a large and influential Huguenot population, Ferrand was unlikely to have been anything but tolerant, if only because he could not afford to be otherwise. And if so, his was a good house in which to be brought up.

  The example of tolerance was not the only thing that made Ferrand's house a good one to be raised in; the physical environment of La Haye and Chatellerault contributed as well. The beauty of that region of France, and its warm summers, was one of the last things Descartes spoke about when he was dying, showing that the impression it left on him was a deep one. Farms and gardens, and the ubiquitous hedges after which the village of his birth was named, stood between half-timbered houses, those still remaining tile-roofed but probably thatched then. Rodis-Lewis perceptively notes that the swiftly turbulent river Creuse that runs through La Haye must have given Descartes his first ideas about the motion of matter, while the everyday occurrences and avocations of rural life provided him with similes he later used in constructing his scientific theories. He had seen bundles of damp hay steaming from the spontaneous heat generated within them, and new wine boiling when left to ferment on pomace (the pulp left after pressing). He had seen how wind, blowing through a hedge, carried off leaves and straw caught in the branches, and how dust was raised by the feet of passers-by. And he had watched milk being churned until it separated into cream and butter, and grains being sieved. Each of these mundane examples appear in his scientific writings as illustrations of such phenomena as "cardiac heat" (Descartes said that it is no more mystifying than the spontaneous heat in hay and fermenting wine); the way "subtle matter" passes through interstices in coarser matter (the wind through the hedges); and how the "humours" of the body work like sieves separating oats from rye.2

  These indirect glimpses of the world of Descartes' childhood so perceptively garnered by Rodis-Lewis are, with a very few others, the only ones that relate specifically to his early experience. Descartes otherwise said little about his childhood. He referred to it no more than a half-dozen times, and, except for the autobiographical snippets in the Discourse, always in passing merely. He related that because he was born in the "gardens of Touraine" he preferred a mild climate. In a letter, he said that his health was poor as a child because he had inherited a dry cough from his mother and was always pale, prompting his doctors into pessimism about his chances of surviving into adulthood. But he added that by the time he reached his twenties he had grown ruddy and robust, and for the most part enjoyed good health thereafter. In another letter he recalled having a tenderness for a girl with a mild affliction, which had a permanent effect on him: "When I was a child," he wrote, "I was in love with a girl of my own age who was slightly cross-eyed; consequently whenever I looked at her unfocused eyes the impression of that vision of her on my brain was so linked to what aroused the passion of love that, for long afterwards, whenever I saw cross-eyed people I felt more inclined to love them than others."3

  But though the references are fleeting they are suggestive, for example Descartes' comment about inheriting poor health from his mother. The letter in which this occurred spoke also of his mother's death, misdating it to shortly after his birth. Written in the early summer of 1645 to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he had been having an absorbing correspondence and indeed friendship since 1642, it offered advice on the Princess's health—she had been suffering from a cough and a fever—and said, "The most common cause of a slow fever is sadness . . . My mother died a few days after my birth from a disease of the lungs caused by distress. From her I inherited a dry cough and a pale complexion, which remained with me until I was over twenty, so that all the doctors who saw me until that time condemned me to a youthful death. But I have always been inclined to look at things from the most favourable angle and to make my chief happiness depend upon me alone; and I think this inclination gradually overcame the weakness which was effectively part of my constitution."4 This passage suggests that as a boy and youth Descartes was, though his health was delicate, fortunate enough to have a naturally positive, independent and reflective outlook. All three traits served him well for the next chapter in his story, which was his going as a boarder to the newly founded and immensely prestigious Jesuit college of La Fleche in Anjou, not far from his home in Chatellerault.

  Despite the cri
tical remarks Descartes made in the Discourse on Method about his education at La Fleche, he himself recognised it as the outstanding school of his day. Twenty-two years after leaving it, and a year after the Discourse was published, he replied to a request for advice on where the best schooling was to be found by singing the praises of La Fleche. The school attracted "so many young people from all parts of France," Descartes wrote, "and they form such a varied mixture, that by conversing with them one learns almost as much as if one travelled far." He praised also the "equality maintained by the Jesuits among themselves, treating almost in the same fashion the highest born and the lowliest." And the clincher for him was that "there is no place on earth where philosophy is better taught than at La Fleche."This mattered because although not everything taught in philosophy "is as true as the gospels, nevertheless, because philosophy is the key to the other sciences, it is extremely useful to have studied the whole philosophy curriculum in the manner it is taught in Jesuit institutions, before undertaking to raise one's mind above pedantry in order to make oneself wise in the right way."5

  The founding of La Fleche in 1604, when Descartes was eight years old, was in itself a notable event, given the religious and political complexities of the day. Its story is inseparable from that of its royal founder, Henri IV, and inseparable too from Descartes' story, in many different ways additional to the obvious one of his being educated there.

  Henri IV was one of France's most remarkable kings. Born in the Protestant faith in 1553 to Antoine de Bourbon, he was regarded by the Huguenots as the nominal head of their cause. In August 1570 the Huguenots and the Valois king of France, Charles IX, reached an agreement aimed at ending eight years of intermittently violent hostility between the country's Catholics and Protestants. They signed a treaty subsequently known as the Peace of Saint-Germain. To mark the occasion Charles IX betrothed his sister Margaret of Valois to Henri de Bourbon, a gesture intended not merely to symbolise but to cement the rapprochement between the two sides of the religious divide—or so it seemed.

  The marriage between Henri and Margaret took place two years later, on 18 August 1572. Six days after the wedding celebrations, on the night of the feast of St. Bartholomew, an appalling episode in France's history occurred: a massacre of Huguenots. It had long been meditated by Charles IX's advisors and especially his mother, the chilling and dangerous Catherine de Medici. The massacre started when the Huguenots' effective leader, the Admiral de Coligny, was murdered outside his house in Paris by royal troops, and with him a number of Huguenot nobles. Then the killing spread to Huguenot households elsewhere in Paris. Front doors were smashed down, whole families within murdered, their houses looted. A spate of royal orders to provincial cities encouraged officials to subject local Huguenots to the same treatment. Lyons, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Rouen saw frightful slaughters; the river Rhone carried so many corpses from Lyons down to Aries that the Arlesians could not drink the water for three months afterwards. Instructions from Paris reached local officials in such a sporadic way that the massacres in Toulouse and Bordeaux took place respectively a month and two months after the initial events in Paris.

  Henri reacted by hastily converting to Catholicism. Nevertheless his father-in-law, the king, or more accurately the king's mother, Catherine de Medici, did not trust him, and kept him under house-arrest at court. In 1576 Henri escaped, reverted to Protestantism, and took arms against the Catholic monarchy as again one of the leaders of the Huguenot cause. Repeated outbreaks of fighting over the next several years at last prompted Spain to send troops to aid the French Catholic side; but by the time they did so Charles IX had died, his brother Henri III had succeeded him, and Henri de Bourbon had become heir to the throne because of the death of Henri Ill's immediate heir presumptive, Francois due d'Alencon. Henri III, last of the Valois kings, was assassinated in 1589, and Henri de Bourbon succeeded him. But in order to assert his rights as Henri IV, he had to fight France's Catholics yet again. He defeated them and then besieged Paris, but could not take the city until, in 1593, he converted to Catholicism a second time, saying (so legend famously has it), "Paris is worth a Mass." The city therefore opened its gates to him, and his victory was complete.

  More importantly, though, Henri IV won the peace that eventually followed. By means of the Edict of Nantes, which granted a large measure of religious freedom to Huguenots—a freedom they enjoyed for nearly a century afterwards—and successful economic policies, Henri IV restored France to order and prosperity in an astonishingly short time.

  And then, in 1603, Henri invited the Jesuits to return to France. He had banished them eight years earlier because one of their number had attempted to assassinate him. Now he not only welcomed them back but patronised them handsomely. He took a confessor from among them, and gave them the palace of La Fleche—his birthplace— so that they could open a school in it. He was deeply attached to La Fleche, leaving instructions in his will that both his and his wife's hearts were to be buried in its chapel. But his interest in the idea of founding a Jesuit college was not merely sentimental. He paid for the necessary renovations and alterations to the palace, and interested himself in the rules and curriculum for the pupils. He had always been keen to improve education, beforehand appointing regents for various colleges and providing salaries for teachers. When they returned he went further, entrusting an elite institution wholly to the Jesuits, whose idea of "total education" impressed him—a conception of education as a moulding of the whole intellect and personality by what might now be called "immersion" techniques (the pupils did not spend much time holidaying at home with their families in the course of a year), and by encouragement and reward rather than the more traditional method of the birch.

  Such was the institution Descartes entered in the spring of 1606, aged ten. His older brother Pierre was at La Fleche too. The two boys were known to the college's first rector, Pere Chastelher, a native of Poitou, and to its second rector, Pere Etienne Charlet, who was a relation of Descartes' mother. The Descartes boys were not, therefore, going into the keeping of strangers. Evidence that the Jesuit fathers were kind at least to Descartes himself is attested by the fact that when, nearly four decades later, he wrote to Pere Charlet, he did so in warmly affectionate terms, calling him "my second father."6

  Kindness has its appropriate limits, however. Descartes' earlier biographers repeated a story alleging that because of his delicate constitution he was allowed to stay in bed until noon each day, a habit that remained with him throughout life. It is true that as an adult Descartes spent his mornings thinking and writing in bed, but the idea of a ten-year-old at boarding school staying in bed until lunchtime seems improbable not only for the early seventeenth century, but even with a "second father" as the college's rector. Descartes was not the son of a grand nobleman (such—and there were quite a few at La Fleche—were housed in the main college buildings with their servants), and he therefore lived with the majority of the 1,200 pupils in one or other of the ordinary boardinghouses scattered round the village in the neighbourhood of the college. The legend of school mornings abed is doubtless a result of Chinese whispers: Descartes must have told someone that his preference for mornings in bed was acquired at an early age, and this was transmuted into a legend about an improbable indulgence at school.

  Still, the irrepressible Baillet offers us reason to believe that Descartes stood out among his school-fellows. When Henri IV was assassinated on 14 May 1610, his heart was brought to La Fleche according to his stated wish, and Baillet tells us that Descartes was one of twenty-four boys chosen to take part in the final ceremony of interment, after the heart in its urn had been carried in procession through the black-draped college buildings, accompanied by members of the royal family, nobility, priests, and a guard-of-honour of archers, all clad in profound mourning. A great arch was erected for the cortege to pass through, and the central court of the college was decorated with Henri IV's royal insignia and depictions of his soul being wafted to heaven by angels.<
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  Did Descartes help to carry the urn containing Henri's heart? His intellectual gifts might well have singled him out among his schoolfellows, and a mark of that distinction might equally well have resulted in his being chosen as one of two dozen acolytes to attend the murdered king's heart as it went to the chapel. But Baillet himself gives us cause for doubting the veracity of the story when he says that the twenty-four youths in question were "gentlemen" students. Descartes, like the majority of his fellow students, indeed came from the gentry; butamong this number were some five hundred sons of dukes, marquises, counts and other noblemen, and distinctions of rank were taken seriously. Since nothing else is reported of Descartes being singled out for special attention at the school, a grain of salt is obviously needed here. The porters of the urn containing Henri's heart were without doubt sons of ranking noblemen, and Baillet's claim that Descartes was among them has to be treated as legend-making.

  The interment of Henri's heart at La Fleche was nevertheless significant for Descartes. Henri IV had been murdered by a Jesuit called Ravillac, so there is black irony in the fact that, by his own wish, the king was buried by Jesuits among the Jesuits, whom he had patronised and supported with such generosity. The staff of La Fleche assiduously honoured Henri's memory with festivities and competitions on the anniversary of his murder for as long as the college thereafter lasted; but nothing could expunge the fact that the many assassination attempts made on Henri IV were motivated, as the final successful one was, by suspicion of him as a former Protestant who, in pursuit of his policy of containing the Habsburg power in its Spanish and German empires, sided with Protestant interests everywhere in Europe. The Jesuits, as already noted, were the advisors and encouragers of the Habsburgs, who, like their Jesuit mentors, saw themselves as the champions of the Catholic church, and who were soon to plunge Europe into three decades of hideous war in an effort—ultimately unsuccessful— to reclaim for Catholicism all territories lost to Protestantism.