Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  On his return to Paris the first thing Descartes did was to buy himself a smart green silk suit, complete with a new hat and sword, and to rent a princely apartment in the city centre, close to the Court. He was living up to his expectations, and chose not to indulge any delay in playing the part of a gentleman pensioner of the King. However, even as Descartes combed his moustaches and donned his feathered hat to visit the Court, so the Court, and indeed the whole of Paris, was thrown into a sudden dangerous turmoil by the events known as the Fronde.26 These events were, as it happens, directly linked to the promise of his pension, and they were equally directly the reason why he never received it; although in neither case was he the personal focus of the difficulties.

  As noted above, France's Louis XIV, destined for splendour, was then still a boy, and the country was being run by his redoubtable mother, Anne of Austria, and her unpopular chief minister Cardinal Mazarin. Between them they had emptied France's coffers, a large component of their extravagance consisting in the gift of pensions to many people, mainly their own families and supporters. Descartes was to have been a beneficiary of this largesse, though he might have realised that all was not well when he received not one but two handsomely embossed parchments promising the pension, but without any money to follow, for this conjunction of events quite eloquently suggested bureaucratic disorder and an empty treasury.

  As a remedy for their financial difficulties Anne and Mazarin devised a beautifully simple plan: to place a four-year stop on the salaries of the magistrates of the high courts, excepting those in the Parlement of Paris. The idea was, to put it mildly, not welcomed. Both the high courts and the Parlement drafted a law limiting the royal prerogative, in an attempt not only to control the Crown's powers of taxation, but to limit the centralising tendency of Mazarin's rule, in which he was extending the policy of Richelieu.

  Anne and Mazarin retaliated by arresting several members of the Parlement. That was too much for the population of Paris, which immediately took to the streets, barricaded over a thousand of them—thus making the city impassable—and demanded the release of the imprisoned members of Parlement. Anne and Mazarin were forced to back down.

  But only temporarily, for the Peace of Westphalia had just then been concluded, releasing the French army for service at home. Anne and Mazarin secretly left Paris and ordered the returning army to blockade the city, which it did. By this time it was clear to everyone that the Fronde was larger than a merely local conflict between Court and magistracy over money, but had turned into a major battle over the rights and powers of the monarchy. As such it shared an underlying theme with the great and much longer-lasting struggle across the Channel in England, where Charles I was about to lose his head, but the outcome was not constitutional monarchy and the growth of representative government, as in the island kingdom, but the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, and the need for another and far bloodier revolution nearly 150 years later.

  As for the immediate crisis, it was resolved at Rueil in March 1649 by a compromise between the Court and the Parlement of Paris. For Descartes the Fronde was a debacle. The day that the barricades went up was 27 August 1648; there were, to be exact, 1,260 barricades, which made movement around the city not only difficult to impossible, but quite likely dangerous to a small middle-aged gentleman in a fancy green silk suit. That is why the moment he heard that the barricades were going up Descartes fled. He took immediate refuge at Picot's house, then left the country as soon as he could. The degree of his hurry can be measured by the fact that his old and trusted friend Mersenne was on his death-bed, and indeed died just a few days later on 1 September; but Descartes did not tarry to bid him farewell, or to see him to his grave.

  When he had recovered his breath back in the Netherlands, which took several months, Descartes wrote an indignant letter to Chanut:

  I have thought it just as well to write nothing since my return, in order not to seem to reproach those who called me to France. But I must say that I consider them to be like friends who invited me to dinner at their home, and then when I arrived there, I found that their kitchen was in an uproar and the cooking pot was turned over, and that is why I have returned without saying a word, in order not to increase their embarrassment. But this encounter has taught me never to undertake a voyage on promises again, even if they are written on parchment.27

  He wrote again the next month, still smarting and annoyed:

  It seems that fortune is jealous that I have never desired anything of it, and that I have tried to conduct my life so that fortune would never disoblige me if it had occasion to do so. I have proved this in the three voyages I have taken to France since I retired to this land, but particularly in the last, which was commanded on the part of the king. To convince me to do it, I was sent letters on parchment, finely sealed, that contain the most grand elegies, which I don't merit, and the gift of a handsome pension. Moreover, in the details of the letters from those who sent me the king's letter, they promise me a great deal more than that if I would come to France. Ah, but when I arrived there, the unexpected troubles made it so that instead of finding what they had promised me, I found that I had to pay one of my relatives for the postage of the letters they had sent me, and that I seemed to have gone to Paris merely to buy a parchment, the most expensive and useless thing that I have ever held in my hands.28

  Continuing in this disingenuous vein he added, "This, however, bothered me little"; what bothered him more, he claimed, was that those who had invited him to Paris did not want him for anything useful—the "more" that had been hinted must have suggested to him an office, a diplomatic post, a title—for it had turned out that they merely wanted him there as a rarity, "like an elephant or a panther."

  The letter is disingenuous because Descartes' protestations about never having desired anything from fortune, and being indifferent to its gifts and cruelties, is palpably false, and never more so than at the very time he wrote those words. If a green silk suit and the allure of finely sealed parchment do not give them the lie, then the circumstances of his writing to Chanut certainly do; for in this letter he responded to an invitation that Chanut, by then French ambassador to Sweden, was relaying to him from the extraordinary and clever ruler of that country, Queen Christina, who wished to have Descartes come and live at her court in Stockholm. The correspondence between Descartes and Chanut on this topic, and between Descartes and the Queen herself, loudly and clearly shows Descartes' avid desire to move in elevated circles, but also his wariness about whether an invitation to do so might in reality mean that he would be a mere functionary, on the level of a tutor or governess. He wanted very much more than that. The letters he and the Queen had been exchanging since 1646 confirmed the high praises he had heard from everyone about her gifts of mind and character, and he was flattered to be her correspondent—and now, even more, to be invited to teach his philosophy to her; but he had burned his fingers by expecting too much from the great, and so he prevaricated.

  Had he prevaricated longer, he might have lived longer. But the combined persuasion of the Queen, Chanut, and his own ambition proved too much. At the beginning of September 1649 he set sail for Stockholm, sailing north away from the Netherlands, from France, and from life.

  11

  The Queen of Winter

  Descartes had met the Winter Queen, Elizabeth Stuart of Bohemia, and played a part in her downfall; he had become a friend of her daughter, whom he loved with an at least avuncular love; and now he met the Queen of Winter in a land so cold, as he wrote to a friend, that even thought froze there.

  When he arrived in Stockholm and met his employer, for that is what Queen Christina was, he was not meeting a stranger. They had been corresponding for three years through the good offices of Chanut, and although Descartes had written The Passions of the Soul for Princess Elizabeth, he had dedicated its extended and published version to Queen Christina. He did so with Elizabeth's permission; the latter, after all, had already had the more substantial Princ
iples of Philosophy indited to her, and Descartes wrote to her to clear matters beforehand.

  "The Queen of Winter" has a pleasing ring to it as an epithet for a female Swedish monarch, given the historical resonances; but in fact Christina was the opposite of a wintry queen. On the contrary, her northern land and its cold climate, its chilly Lutheran religion and its coolly reserved people, did not suit her. She longed for something altogether hotter: a life, a place, an experience more florid and coloured than her kingdom offered, something far warmer in sentiment and richer in texture than her life had hitherto contained. And this was not a question of Christina's wishing for passionate romance like Abelard's Heloise, or military adventures like Joan of Arc. The key lies rather in the dominating fact about Christina's story, which is that at the age of twenty-eight, in 1654, she abdicated her throne in order to become a Roman Catholic.

  Two of the people who played a role in this dramatic event—a role more rather than less direct, though hidden—were Pierre Chanut and Rene Descartes.

  Christina was born in 1626, the only child of Sweden's great king, Gustavus Adolphus, whose military reforms and innovations had made the Swedish army the most formidable in Europe, thus laying the basis for its leading role in the Thirty Years War. Gustavus had entered that war for two reasons: his sincere concern for the fate of the Protestant cause, and his desire to restore Sweden's financial fortunes by securing a Baltic empire, which meant acquiring land on the Baltic's southern shore. This aspect of his policy, however much he tried to conceal it, was transparent to the German princes who stood to lose territory in Pomerania and elsewhere to satisfy Gustavus' aims, and that proved a complicating factor in the war.

  Gustavus was killed at the battle of Lutzen in 1632 when Christina was only six. Her mother, Marie-Eleanor of Brandenburg, was the sister of the ill-fated Frederick V, Elector Palatine, putative King of Bohemia, which meant that Christina was cousin to the Princess Elizabeth. Marie-Eleanor had given birth to Christina after a number of difficult pregnancies and still-births, and soon afterwards went mad. She was looked after in a place away from Court, a household that was more a private prison than an asylum; and therefore had no influence on Christina's upbringing. The man appointed as regent was Sweden's leading nobleman, Axel Oxenstierna, an exceptionally able individual who prosecuted the war with as much if not more astuteness as Gustavus would have done. So successful was he, indeed, that the Treaty of Westphalia gave Sweden much of what it wanted in the way of acquisitions; Western Pomerania including Stettin and the Oder Estuary, Wismar in Mecklenburg, and the bishoprics of Bremen and Verdun. It was a considerable coup, not least because by then Sweden desperately needed the revenues.

  Christina started attending council meetings when she was fourteen. The regency council consisted of five people of whom Oxenstierna, his brother and a cousin made three, giving the regent an inbuilt majority. Christina was not always in agreement with the council. She wanted the war to end as quickly as possible, while Oxenstierna needed to secure maximum mileage for the Baltic plan. When Christina came of age in 1644 the tension between the two of them increased, made worse by Oxenstierna's swingeing reforms of the country's administration, which Christina interpreted—rightly, as it happened—as an effort by him to limit her power.

  A more thorough account of Christina's reign and her conflicts with Oxenstierna would show that much of the wisdom in the case lay on his side. The truth is that she was not a good queen, and by the time she abdicated she had become deeply unpopular with her people because of the folly of some of her decisions. But the public aspect of her life was not entirely paralleled by its private side. Although she had been educated like a boy, and had a man's skills on horseback and with a gun, she was a highly intelligent woman who loved learning, and when she went on hunting trips she had the classic authors read aloud to her. In this respect she reminded observers of Federigo da Montefeltro, the hook-nosed Duke of Urbino immortalised by Piero della Francesca, who was wont to have Aristotle read to him at breakfast before taking the field at the head of his mercenary army.1

  Christina was keen also to make her court a centre of learning and culture that would do justice to the highest Late Renaissance ideals. She invited scholars and writers, musicians and architects to Stockholm, and she had a theatre constructed to the latest technological specifications, with machinery to transform the stage from a mountain landscape to a seashore, from a forest to a ballroom.

  In October 1645 Chanut had visited Descartes in the Netherlands, en route to Stockholm to take up his appointment as ambassador there. By that time Descartes' thoughts were turning towards pensions and sinecure posts, and he lost little time in dropping a hint to Chanut that the court of the celebrated young Swedish queen might have something to offer. He immediately arranged to have a copy of the Meditations sent to her, and followed it with a letter to Chanut in which, in his customarily disingenuous style, he disclaimed any interest in having his name known to anyone at all, least of all the great, "but"—Descartes was a master of these "buts"—"since I am already known to a multitude of Schoolmen who look at my writings the wrong way and seek ways to harm me at all costs"—he was in the midst of his great quarrels—"I am greatly inclined to hope also to be known by people of the highest rank, whose power and virtue could protect me."2 He was nothing if not an accomplished writer of the insinuating letter; he continued, knowing that Christina would be sure to see these words, "Moreover, I have heard that this Queen is held in such high esteem that, although I have often complained about those who wished to introduce me to some grand person, I cannot forbear thanking you for having spoken so kindly to her about me."3

  It becomes amusing after a while to observe Descartes' method of seeking social advancement, about which one could discourse at length. It can be summed up thus: "I do not at all wish to enter Court circles, BUT should you be good enough to drop a word in Her Majesty's ear . . ." It is unlikely that Chanut was in the slightest taken in by it, but he was anyway much disposed to help, and within a short time the philosopher and the Queen were corresponding, via Chanut, on matters as abstract as the size of the universe, as intimate as the distinction between rational and sensual love, and as important as the nature of the greatest good.

  In passing, it might be noted that in his letter on the nature of love, Descartes included the anecdote about how, when he was a boy, he had fallen in love with a girl who had slightly crossed 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."4 Queen Christina, as Descartes would have known from engravings of her portraits, was cross-eyed.

  When, at length, Christina wrote directly to Descartes to tell him that she had read his Principles, he wrote first to Chanut— "I received as an altogether undeserved favour the letter which that matchless Princess condescended to write to me. I am surprised that she should take the trouble to do so; but I am not surprised that she took the trouble to read my Principles, because I am convinced that it contains many truths which are difficult to find elsewhere."5 Again the words were intended as much for Christina herself as Chanut; and there was even a remonstrance in them, for it had taken Christina a long time to respond to his gift of the Principles. To the Queen herself he wrote, "If a letter were sent to me from heaven and I saw it descending from the clouds, I would not be more surprised than I was to receive the letter which Your Highness so graciously wrote to me; and I could not receive a letter with more respect and veneration than I feel on receiving your letter."6 And then he in effect offered her his presence, should she command it—though in a suitable manner, of course: "All who love virtue must consider themselves fortunate whenever they have an opportunity to render a service to her. Since I make a special point of being one of those persons, I venture to swear to Your Majesty that she could command nothing of me so difficult that I would not always be ready to do everything possible to a
ccomplish it."7

  Christina duly invited Descartes to Stockholm, and Descartes duly prevaricated, trying to get assurances from Chanut that he would not be going with false hopes of the kind he had suffered in Paris. Other biographers and commentators read Descartes' prevaricatory letters to Chanut as evidence that he did not want to go; I read them as evidence that he did not want to go unless on genuinely good terms. And by good terms he did not mean money or position only; he wished to know whether Christina really wanted to learn his views, for he hoped that if they had official sanction from a monarch it would help them to secure more of a foothold than they had so far won—for, of course, they were still not the official doctrine of the schools, as he longed for them to be. He doubtless hoped that they might be adopted in the schools of Sweden, which would be a start.

  Chanut passed Christina's invitation to him in late February 1649, and in a reply specifically intended to be read by the Queen, Descartes declared himself instantly ready to fly to her side. But to Chanut himself he privately wrote:

  I shall give you, if I may, the trouble of reading two of my letters on this occasion. For I assume that you will want to show the other to the Queen of Sweden, and I have saved something for this one which I thought she need not see—namely that I am having more difficulty deciding about this visit than I had imagined I would have. It is not that I do not have a great desire to serve this Princess. My confidence in your words, and my great admiration and esteem for the character and mind which you ascribe to her, are such that I would wish to undertake an even longer and more arduous journey than one to Sweden in order to have the honour to offer whatever I may contribute towards the satisfaction of her wishes.8