In the evening, while everyone else was away at dinner, Descartes asked his valet to help him out of bed so he could lie on the couch by the fire. He made it to the couch and lay there for a few moments. But he was too ill now, and the bleeding had sapped his strength. He opened his mouth and said: “Ah, my dear Schluter, this is the time I must leave.”
These were Descartes' last words. He lost consciousness, and Schluter immediately rushed to get the Chanuts and the doctors and servants.
After a few more hours, it became clear that Descartes would not survive, and a priest, Father Viogue, was called in to administer the last rites. At four the next morning, Descartes died. It was the eleventh of February 1650; he was almost fifty-four years old.
Even Descartes' earliest major biographer, Adrien Baillet, mentions the rumors that began to circulate right after the philosopher's passing: that he was poisoned by Weulles in conspiracy with other members of the queen's court allied against him. (Another rumor Baillet mentions was that Descartes had died from excessive drinking of a Spanish wine, and that he wanted to die because he was heartbroken that the queen did not take well to his philosophy. Of course neither claim is likely to have been true: Descartes never drank much, and the queen was enamored with his philosophy.) Recently, a biography of Descartes by Jean-Marc Varaut, published in France in 2002, made the claim that Descartes was poisoned.
Queen Christina's court was rife with anti-Cartesian elements. Many of the people around Descartes were jealous of his place close to the queen's heart; others hated his philosophy and considered him an atheist; and there were people who despised the French philosopher because they feared his potential effect on their queen. Descartes was a Catholic and the queen and most of her subjects Lutheran. Many people feared the influence of a Catholic who was so close to the queen. And the fact that Descartes was treated by a physician who had vowed to see him dead makes the claim of a poisoning all the more believable.
And in fact, the suspicions the grammarians harbored against Descartes and his influence on their queen became a reality four years after Descartes' death: in 1654, Christina abdicated and converted to Catholicism.
Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador, who should have taken care of Descartes' interests, took inexplicable actions after the philosopher's death. The queen, who was inconsolable at the death of her dearest adviser and friend, wanted to bestow on Descartes posthumous Swedish nobility and to have him buried with the kings of Sweden. She also planned to build a grand marble mausoleum for her beloved philosopher, the man she called “My Illustrious Master.”
But unexpectedly, the French ambassador opposed the idea. He argued with the queen that burying Descartes with the kings of Sweden would offend the Swedish nobility since Descartes had died a Catholic. Instead, he asked the Queen for permission to bury Descartes in the cemetery of the hospital for Orphans. Children who died before the age of reason were buried here, but also Catholics and Calvinists, since they belonged to religious minorities in the land.
The queen found the ambassador's request extremely strange, and was inclined to dismiss it. But Chanut was a persuasive man, and she was a very young, inexperienced queen. Chanut convinced her that this was for the better, since it would not be wise for the queen to antagonize her subjects, certainly not now. The ambassador knew the queen's secret—he knew that she had already been planning to abdicate and to convert to Catholicism. He used that knowledge to push her to agree to his plan. Reluctantly, the queen agreed, but insisted on paying for the expenses of Descartes' funeral. The funeral took place the next day, without much fanfare, but following the usual ceremony of a Roman Catholic burial. Descartes' coffin was borne by Chanut's eldest son and three senior officials of the French embassy. Few others were present as the philosopher's body was interred in the wretched cemetery the ambassador had insisted be Descartes' resting place.
Years after Descartes' death, on October 2, 1666, his body was exhumed, and the remains—apparently without the skull—were repatriated. They arrived in France in January 1667 and were placed in the Chapel of Saint Paul. From there, Descartes' bones were moved to a crypt in the Church of Sainte-Genevieve-du-Mont in Paris. That church was destroyed during the French Revolution. There was a move in France to rebury the remains of the great philosopher in the Pantheon with France's most distinguished citizens, and the Convention voted to approve the relocation, but the Directoire reversed that decision, and instead the body was moved to the Museum of French Monuments. Finally, in 1819, Descartes found his final resting place in the ancient Church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres.
The famous Swedish chemist Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848), the discoverer of the elements cerium, selenium, and thorium, was in Paris at that time and present as Descartes' remains were reburied. He was astonished to learn that there was no skull with Descartes' bones. As fate would have it, just as Berzelius returned to Sweden, an auction was held in Stockholm in which a skull reportedly belonging to Rene Descartes was one of the items to be sold. Berzelius bought it.
Baron Berzelius then wrote a letter to a French baron, G. Cuvier, who was the perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. In his letter, he told Cuvier that he was donating to the French nation the skull of Rene Descartes, which he had just purchased, so that it “be placed with the other remains of the philosopher,” clearly meaning that he wanted Descartes' skull to be buried with the rest of his bones in the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. But the French baron thought otherwise. For reasons that have never been explained, once the perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences received the skull, he placed it on display in a museum.
Descartes' skull, without a lower jaw and without any teeth, and with obscure writings in ink extending from the top of the cranium down to the forehead, found its ignominious end at the Musee de l'Homme (the Museum of Man) in Paris. The mangled skull reputed to be that of the great French philosopher now serves as part of a tasteless museum display about the development of the human skull. It shares its glass case with a skull marked “Cro-Magnon. Age: 100,000 years”; another, marked “Cro-Magnon. Age: 40,000 years”; a human skull of “An Early French Peasant, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Age: 7,000 years”; and a video camera that projects the visitor's head onto a television screen, below which a caption reads: “You, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Age: 0-120.”
Descartes' skull is labeled “Rene Descartes, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. French Philosopher and Savant. Place of Origin: La Haye, Touraine. Emigrated to Sweden.” Below it, the caption continues: “Age: 343 years (in 1993).” Under the skull and the caption is an old book, open to its title page: Rene Descartes, Selected Works of Descartes.
After Descartes was buried in Stockholm, on February 13, 1650, Pierre Chanut decided that a complete inventory of the philosopher's possessions should be made, but said that he felt that he should not be the only person compiling it. He therefore asked the queen to send a representative to the embassy to assist in, and be present at, the making of the inventory. The day after Descartes' funeral, February 14, the queen sent Erik Sparre, the baron of Kronoberg and president of the Court of Justice of Abo in Finland, to represent the crown at the making of the inventory. Also present were embassy officials, Father Viogue, who had been Descartes' confessor, and the deceased philosopher's valet, Henry Schluter.
Descartes' skull
All of Descartes' clothes and other personal possessions were given to Schluter, who was inconsolable at the loss of such a good master. According to Baillet, this did not prevent Schluter from making a small fortune on these items a few years later. Descartes had left a few books as well. These books were set aside to be sent to Descartes' heirs in France.
The next day these same men met again in the embassy to decide what to do with the items found in Descartes' coffer. The strongbox was opened, and found to contain several handwritten manuscripts, as well as copies of letters and documents Descartes had written and clearly deemed of importance. An inventory was then made of the mat
erials, and Ambassador Chanut took all of these items under his “particular protection.”
The items left by Descartes in his locked box shed light on what the philosopher kept close to his heart—and hidden from the world. They included the following:
Descartes' embarrassing Letter of Apology to Voetius—a painful
reminder of the debacle that helped push him out of Holland
Nine volumes of copies of letters Descartes had written against
Voetius
Copies of Descartes' “Responses to Objections,” the objections
having been sent to him by his academic opponents in
Holland and elsewhere
Copies of letters Descartes had written to his dearest friend,
Princess Elizabeth
The other items in the box were pieces of manuscripts, all handwritten and none published, with obscure titles such as Preambles, Olympica, Demoaitica, Experimenta, and Parnassus. Clearly, Descartes had kept these manuscripts for himself, never intending to have others see them. Among these manuscripts was that unique parchment notebook containing cryptic mathematical symbols, geometrical drawings, and mysterious signs that could not be identified. All the items in the inventory were labeled by Latin letters: A, B, C…, with the letter U always appearing with an umlaut (Charles Adam and Paul Tannery have surmised that this was Schluter's influence). The parchment notebook bearing mysterious symbols and drawings and sequences of numbers was given the designation “Item M.”
The French ambassador, who did not care much about what happened to the remains of the late philosopher, allowing them to be buried in an undistinguished grave in Sweden and perhaps even failing to prevent the body from being dismembered, cared much more about the papers he had left behind. Pierre Chanut decided—without consulting with Descartes' heirs in France—to send the collection of items in the inventory as a present to his brother-in-law Claude Clerselier in Paris. But he was too busy to accomplish this task, so in the meantime the treasure would have to wait.
Two and a half years later, the ambassador prepared to leave Sweden for a new ambassadorial appointment, in Holland. He started to ship his possessions out of Sweden, and used the opportunity to send Descartes' manuscripts and letters to Clerselier. There had been pressure on the ambassador to allow the publication of some of Descartes' manuscripts, and in particular, a German biographer named Daniel Lipstorp, of Lubeck, had repeatedly asked Chanut to see Descartes' papers for use in his biography of the philosopher. But the ambassador was involved in intense diplomatic work on behalf of France in Sweden and Germany— in fact, he was even for a time in the very city of Lubeck—and had neither time nor patience for publication requests. In any case, he wanted to make sure to send everything to Clerselier; finally he made the arrangements for the shipment. The box with Descartes' hidden writings traveled to Rouen, went up the Seine to Paris, sank with the boat, and resurfaced, and the documents were saved by Clerselier.
Claude Clerselier maintained possession of all of Descartes' manuscripts until his death, in 1684, eighteen years after Leibniz had hurriedly copied parts of the manuscripts in Paris, in 1676. When Clerselier died, Descartes' papers were given to Abbe Jean-Baptiste Legrand. A short time later, the abbe responded to a request from another cleric, Pere Adrien Baillet, who asked to see the manuscripts so he could use them in the biography he was writing about Descartes. Legrand agreed to contribute as much as he could to Baillet's efforts. And it was thus that Baillet got to see Descartes' hidden manuscripts and letters. He incorporated the information in his biography of Descartes published in Paris in 1691. After over three hundred years, Baillet's biography is still the most comprehensive one ever written about Descartes.
After Legrand's death, Descartes' manuscripts disappeared. We have only the copies of some of them made by Leibniz, and a description of some of these manuscripts in Baillet's biography. But perhaps, someday, Descartes' original manuscripts may be found in the dusty and forgotten archive of some French monastery.
Baillet's biography of Descartes describes the inventory that was made in Stockholm on February 14 and 15, 1650. Adam and Tannery wrote in 1912 that a copy of the inventory was found at the French National Library in Paris. A second copy had been sent to Holland— Pierre Chanut had sent it to Descartes' friend in Holland, the scholar Constantijn Huygens. The elder Huygens wanted it for the benefit of his son, Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), who would become a famous physicist and mathematician. Through the correspondence to his father that accompanied the inventory, Christiaan Huygens would become aware that in 1653, Descartes' unpublished manuscripts had been placed in the hands of a certain Claude Clerselier living in Paris.
Descartes' death left Queen Christina distraught and deeply depressed. She became convinced that she should not stay in power. She felt empty without the comforting guidance of her philosopher—his advice on how to rule well, his ideas about the meaning of life, and the strength of his religious belief.
Within a year of Descartes' death, Queen Christina suffered a severe mental breakdown. To everyone's surprise, she frequently asked to see Father Antonio Macedo—a Catholic priest. Descartes' influence apparently extended beyond the grave and took the form of the queen's increasing attraction to his religion. In 1654, Christina abdicated and left Sweden to move to the center of Catholicism, Rome. She took a circuitous route throughout Europe, disguised as a knight, and met Catholic clergymen along the way, learning from them more about her new religious direction. She then converted to Catholicism and settled in Rome. Christina remained restless, and perhaps missed being a queen, for she attempted to seize the city of Naples and proclaim herself Queen of Naples. When the attempt failed miserably, she did not give up: she tried to secure for herself the crown of Poland. Once this attempt failed as well, Christina returned to Rome and settled there permanently. She died in 1689 and was buried in Saint Peter's Basilica.
Twelve years after the death of Descartes, the former queen of Sweden wrote:
We certify by these presents that Sire Descartes has contributed much to our glorious conversion and that the Providence of God is served by him and by his illustrious friend Sire Chanut to give us the first lights that His grace and forgiveness would bestow on us to make us embrace the truths of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion.
The former queen made this statement public so that the world would know what had brought her to her decision. From their point of view, the grammarians were right to worry.
Chapter 20
Leibniz's Quest for Descartes' Secret
THE YEAR DESCARTES DIED IN Stockholm, 1650, a four-year-old boy in Leipzig, Germany, watched as Swedish soldiers evacuated his city, as dictated by the Peace of Westphalia, signed two years earlier, ending the Thirty Years War. France and Sweden, winning allies in the war, were to leave German soil. But as the occupation ended and the war was over, Germany began its long period of intellectual and cultural decline in the wake of the devastation brought on by the long years of fighting.
The boy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was an unusual child. Already when he was four, those who knew him well recognized his incredible brilliance. His father, who was a professor at the University of Leipzig, knew that his son was a genius— but unfortunately could not enjoy witnessing his son's great achievements in life because he died at age seventy, when the boy was only six years old. Gottfried read ancient Greek and Latin classics, which he found in his father's library, and within a few years had devoured books on history, art, politics, and logic. But while he was interested in many areas, he had a special ability in mathematics. And within mathematics, the young Leibniz had a very particular gift: he knew how to decipher codes.
The boy applied this unique talent both to words and to numbers. He was enamored with the mysterious, the hidden, the forbidden. His passion became the decipherment of secret messages and the quest for hidden knowledge in mathematics. Leibniz could disassemble and re-combine letters to form words of a stunning number of
variations and could do so with amazing speed. Similarly, he knew how to extract prime numbers by factoring numbers, and how to count and evaluate combinations. These skills lie within the area of mathematics called combinatorics: the study of combinations. One example of the work Leibniz did in the study of combinations was the following. He defined a notion, which he named y, as being composed of the simple notions a, b, c, and d. He then defined the following combinations: l=ab, m=ac, n=ad, p=bc, q=bd, and r=cd, as well as s=abc, v=abd, w=acd, and x=bcd. He then noted that only the combinations ax, bw, cv, ds, Ir, mq, and np lead back to y. Recognizing his many gifts, Gottfried's mother sent him to an elite school, the Nicolai School in Leipzig, which he entered in 1653.
At the school, Leibniz formally learned Latin and progressed much faster than the other boys. The reason was that he had found books that were misplaced by an older student and read them voraciously. When his teachers found out that he was learning Latin outside the classroom and had already mastered the language while the other students were still struggling with the basics, they became upset and told his mother and aunts (who were helping the mother raise her son) that they should prevent the boy from reading books that were above his level. But he continued to raid his late father's library and to read more advanced books.
In 1661, after graduating from the Nicolai School at the age of fifteen, Leibniz enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study philosophy. He read the works of Aristotle, and took a course on the mathematics of Euclid from Professor Johann Kiihn. This course was so difficult that Leibniz was the only student in the class who understood the subject matter. The student ended up helping the professor explain the theorems to his classmates. Leibniz also studied Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, and Descartes.
Descartes's Secret Notebook Page 18