PART 1 Mysteries

Remains of a Hidden Life

The name Descartes is now associated with intellectual summits. For many people, the name evokes the fierce engagement of French philosophy or the rise of modern science; for others, simply the famous phrase cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” That pithy phrase both challenges credulity and asserts the real, asking us to reexamine the foundations of everything we know on the simple basis of a proof of our existence. Over the generations, then, the process of interpreting and memorializing Descartes’s works has built up a legacy of mountainous proportions. For almost anyone engaged in exploring intellectual terrains, whatever the viewpoint sought, the peak named after him is seldom out of sight. Great climbers have scaled it from every possible approach, challenging one another with feats of close reading and command of the literature; for the rest of us, all kinds of guides are ready to help any amateur to the top and back by well-tended paths.

But mountaintops best serve as a place from which to look out into the distance. If we want to get a good look at the heights themselves, we must circle back lower down and look up. If we do, we notice around us that not all the trails lead toward the top. On these lower slopes the paths move through woods and meadows, more often heading around the mountain than upward to the rock and ice. In the foothills, too, it is possible to move about more freely, without need of a fixed itinerary and someone else’s rented equipment. If we pause to explore these foothills, we glimpse traces of an older geology. An earlier version of this peak rested on hills and valleys that can still be identified, and in them can be found the remains of once mighty cities. It was a wilder world, where beyond the walls wolves still roamed and armies gathered, one that frequently stirred the blood. If you have the time to nose about down here, you might even begin to wonder about the mortal and life-size person after whom the mountain came to be named, and at which of the ancient inns he might have stopped for rest and conversation with friends. It would be worth looking in, for it is said that he could be a charming gentleman, on most occasions putting his sword to the side.

In fact, the living René Descartes could have walked straight out of the pages of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Descartes took part in the action at the siege of La Rochelle, which figures prominently in the last pages of the novel, and when René introduced himself to others, he gave his name as the sieur du Perron—a title originating from an estate he inherited from his mother—while his printed portrait bore his coat of arms (see fig. 1).1 While he received an education suitable for the French elite, he also learned to fence well and to ride skillfully, being trained to ride the “great horse” used in battle, the destrier. By his twentieth birthday he was living in Paris, where he dressed fashionably in green taffeta with a plume in his hat and a rapier at his belt, cultivating crowds of friends; enjoying love stories, music, poetry, ancient mythology, and jokes; and for a period spending long hours at the gaming tables, apparently accumulating large winnings in the process. (In French, the words des Cartes, which is how Descartes wrote his surname, might even suggest playing cards.) Like Dumas’s protagonist, D’Artagnan, he did not walk through the city followed by mobs of retainers—as did the great aristocrats of the day—but singly, employing only a valet and a few lackeys.2 But soon, and lasting for a decade, he would be caught up in the wars of his day, finding himself not always on the side of the victors.

Unsurprisingly, then, the real Descartes learned to use his sword skillfully. An early biographer who had known Descartes in person, Nicholas-Joseph Poisson, insisted on Descartes’s long experience as a young soldier, “serving Mars before Minerva,” and reporting that those who had known him had heard tales of his adventures from his own mouth; in Poisson’s day, a personal memoir from his period of military service still existed.3 If his seventeenth-century biographers are correct, the young soldier also somehow managed to survive the later slaughter of the imperial army at Nové Zámky (in what is now southwestern Slovakia; at the time also known as Neuhausel). Another early biographer, Pierre Borel, therefore made a point of writing that Descartes was “good both at the Pen and the Pike,” and that he loved “the valiant as well as the prudent and learned.”4 That he later became known for his books places him among such other famous soldier-authors of the period as Cyrano de Bergerac. Like Cyrano, so many men in arms took an interest in the new sciences and medicine of the day that one historian has used the term “soldier-savant.”5 We should not be surprised, then, to find Descartes writing to a friend that the pursuit of true philosophy was a work of valor, or that the struggles by which one arrives at truth are like the battles in war.6

Put another way, like other young cavaliers of his era, Descartes cultivated chivalry. He well knew the genre’s greatest model, Amadis of Gaul, the book so admired by Miguel de Cervantes that his own Don Quixote mocked the imitators. So popular was Amadis in the France of Descartes’s youth that one of the most frequently reprinted handbooks was composed of extracts of courtly speeches from it, suitable for any occasion.7 In the story, Amadis was secretly fathered by the union of the beautiful Elisena and the powerful king Perion, then like Moses set on the waters to be discovered and brought up in another household. There he showed his innate virtue in ignorance of his heritage, becoming a knight errant, suffering many trials and enjoying many rewards in love before eventually being recognized as King Perion’s true son and rescuing the kingdom. The sieur du Perron, too, was a virtual orphan, raised by others, spending many years traveling abroad to seek his fortune and suffering pleasures and pains in the process. As far as we know, he never saved a kingdom, but he kept the faith. Poisson tells of a moment when Descartes was returning to Paris on the Orléans road and was ambushed by a rival: not only did he defend himself well, he even disarmed his opponent; then, instead of giving the killing blow, he returned the captured sword for the sake of the eyes of the lady involved.8

Like D’Artagnan, then, Descartes not only studied war but “delighted to discourse with Women,” as Borel put it.9 A recently discovered portrait of him as a young man certainly shows him to have been handsome, and he seems to have exhibited a great deal of personal charm when he wished. He later fathered a child out of wedlock, and he loved this daughter, Francine, very much, being greatly moved by her death at the age of five. He must also have had some feeling for his daughter’s mother—Helena Jans, a printer’s housemaid—since when she finally married someone else, he put up a substantial dowry for her.10 But Descartes was best known for his conversations with women of noble rank. He had a long relationship with the young Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate—niece of the king of England—and a shorter one with the even younger Queen Christina of Sweden. The last work he published during his lifetime, The Passions (1649), owed an enormous debt to the comments and inquiries of them both, especially Elizabeth. He listened. It is written with a view to the universal passions that move us all, including love and generosity. Descartes’s first book, the Discours (1637), was originally written in French so that it could be appreciated by women,11 and his work came to have many supporters among the ladies who frequented the salons of Paris, who helped establish Descartes’s reputation as a brilliant philosopher.12 Even better, the figure who pulls the strings in Dumas’s novel (without ever making a personal appearance) is the Duchesse du Chevreuse (see fig. 2), a most remarkable woman, involved in many of the greatest events and conspiracies of the period, considered not only a charismatic beauty of many great love affairs but clearly possessed of a forceful mind, a powerful spirit, and a clear sense of the right and just; it was her son, Louis-Charles d’Albert, the duc de Luynes, who translated Descartes’s Meditations (1641) from Latin into French, with Descartes’s help.13 Our chevalier probably knew the brilliant duchess in person.

But he was also good with men. His letters are full of affection for his male friends, even passionate expressions of love.14 Some of his best friends were accused of moral libertinism, sometimes a code word for male–male love. During his exile in The Netherlands, Descartes lived for long periods with men, most important among them Étienne de Villebressieu and the abbé Claude Picot, the latter described as Descartes’s agent “concerning his domestic affairs and revenues.”15 Picot, in turn, was a good friend of the poet Jacques Vallée, sieur des Barreaux, known as an epicurean and lover of the scandalous poet Théophile de Viau. About the same age as Descartes, Barreaux had been a classmate of René’s at school. Barreaux’s circle of friends later included not only Descartes’s friend Guez de Balzac but also Claude Emmanuel Lhuillier, known as Chapelle—one of Cyrano’s intimates—who was born out of wedlock to Marie Chanut, sister of the French ambassador to Sweden in whose house Descartes died. A member of Picot’s family was Paul Scarron, who also became an abbé, at age nineteen, and was reputed to be a “procureur” for Louis XIII and a client of the king’s chief mistress, Marie de Hautefort (one of the few women in whom Louis took an interest).16 When Descartes paid a brief visit to Paris in 1647, he resided in the same urban palace (hôtel) as the family of Madame Scarron de Nandiné—whose first husband was that same Paul Scarron—better known in later life as Madame de Maintenon, mistress and then wife of King Louis XIV.17

Descartes is discreet about it all. But in 1643, one of his Dutch adversaries would publish a book meant to harm him, among other things attacking Descartes for his sexual “dissolution and debauchery.”18 That some of his closest friends, at least, engaged in both what would now be called homosexual and heterosexual relationships should come as no surprise, since such mixtures were common among the rulers of the kingdom as well as elsewhere. A generation earlier, the aggressively effeminate king Henri III had provoked a succession crisis when his assassination left no heir. In Descartes’s own lifetime, Louis XIII (see fig. 3) was known to have favored many young men among his “pretties” (mignons), while the king’s younger brother, Gaston d’Orléans, and a prince of the blood, the Grande Condé, were among the many male aristocrats who had intimate relations with men as well as women, often loving relationships among men of valor and martial skill.19 Descartes’s own portrait was painted by Simon Vouet, who depicted many of the young men around Louis XIII. Probably for such people Descartes later wrote of the love and affection of an “honorable man for his friend or mistress.”20

Moreover, in the literature of the period not only male love but also androgyny is well represented. Perhaps the most successful work in the period of Descartes’s youth was a book composed by Honoré d’Urfé, Marquis de Valromey and Comte de Châteauneuf, who died on campaign in 1625: it was titled L’Astrée, after the goddess of peace, and published in five installments between 1607 and 1628. While the name of one of its many characters, Celadon, came to be a byword for love, that love embodied a symmetrical sexuality based on the pre-Edenic and alchemical myth of a united person who had no distinct gender, the desired union re-creating the Androgyn.21 The famous author of fables, Jean de La Fontaine, later called the free-swinging L’Astrée the “livre d’amour par excellence.”22 Gaston d’Orléans himself was utterly captivated by these tales of love, as were many of Descartes’s friends.

Had Descartes’s life taken a slightly different course, then, we might have seen him rise to be among the courtiers of the age, perhaps a kind of lesser duc de La Rochefoucauld, whose keen-sighted maxims exposed the springs of human action and self-regard for all to see. But Descartes ultimately chose to explain the physical sources of our embodied lives. And there is another difference: instead of ending his life amid the aristocratic households of France, Descartes died elsewhere, after two decades away from his beloved Paris. Earlier in life, his potential patrons fell from power, causing him to remain in search of opportunities; and just when his name began to be widely known, he found himself on the wrong side of the king’s coldhearted chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, and fled. His honors therefore came posthumously, and not for his actions or counsel but for his writings. Since he lived abroad, his compatriots came to know him mainly through his books and correspondence, thinking of him as a person apart, distant, alone.

Descartes has therefore earned a reputation not as an aristocrat but as a hermit. Depictions of him have consequently been shaped not by the genre of chivalry but of martyrology. They report that Descartes died tragically, an accidental victim of a woman’s vanity. He is said to have risen in the wee hours of the night in the frigid dark of a Swedish winter to tutor the young queen, herself an early riser, thereby exhausting himself and dying of a respiratory illness. But it seems that in fact the queen met him in person only four or five times, while at the time of his death a serious fever was running through the court. After his death, rumors circulated that he had been poisoned,23 while another story had it that he faked his death to run off and live among the Lapps, who were then reputed to be the most powerful magicians in the world.24

If not romance or martyrology, then, perhaps mystery. Mystery accumulated around him even in his lifetime. As one of his most orthodox modern biographers admits, “even though he left confusion in his wake, René Descartes always succeeded in covering his tracks.”25 Why he traveled abroad so often certainly perplexed his friends. And then there is the secrecy. When as a young man he headed off into central Europe, he jotted down in his notebook “I go masked” (Larvatus prodeo). It was a common phrase among people of his rank, who lived daily at court by acting out their public personae.26 But he spent years on the road throughout central and northern Europe followed by two years in Italy, and even after he returned a second time to the Dutch Republic, he could not settle, shifting his residence from such cities as Dordrecht to Amsterdam, to Franeker, Leiden, Deventer, and Utrecht, and then even to smaller towns including Sandpoort, Endgeest, and Egmond. He dissuaded friends from Paris from coming to visit and urged his correspondent Marin Mersenne not to let people know his address, while he also used drop boxes, instructing Mersenne to contact him by sending messages to other people from whom he could collect his post.27 He later adopted a motto from Ovid as his own: “He who lives hidden, lives well” (Bene qui latuit, bene vixit).28

The same motto is also said to have been adopted by the secretive brethren of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians.29 Coincidentally, when signing letters, he always wrote his name as “René des Cartes,” abbreviated as “R.C.” The fifth of the six rules of the brotherhood instructs its members to use “C.R.” or “R.C.” as their mark.30 Coincidentally, too, the first of its rules commands them to profess no other thing than curing the sick without a fee, while others ask them to blend in with the people of whatever country they inhabit; our R.C. was interested in medicine from an early date, while one of his moral maxims was to live according to the customs of the region in which he found himself. There is good evidence to show that he spent time at Ulm with the noted German mathematician and reputed Rosicrucian Johannes Faulhaber, and Descartes’s early notebook contains a sketch of a plan to publish a work dedicated to the Rosicrucians under the pen name Polybius Cosmopolitanus.31 After returning to Paris from the wars in Europe, he arrived in the midst of a public uproar about subversion by the Rosicrucian brotherhood, with many people fearing that he was one of its underground leaders. Reputed Rosicrucians were numbered among some of his closest Dutch friends as well. It is this line of association that a Jesuit critic later drew on in a satire that has Descartes making visits in spirit to the moon, stars, and even outer reaches of the universe after smoking strong tobacco mixed with a secret herb.32 Here we have an occult Descartes, far more resembling the secretive and reputedly long-lived Count Saint Germain than a straitlaced soldier or philosopher.

Who was he, then? Can we can spot him here in the foothills before attempting to climb higher?

Words on Paper

We need not doubt that about four hundred years ago the living René Descartes authored several books that became enormously influential in his own day and long after: in fact, Descartes is usually thought to be identical to his authorial persona. The power of his philosophy stems in part from his style of writing, which is simple and direct, not disputing with other authors or arcane opinions but setting out the real world as plainly as he could. In the first book he published, the Discours, he goes so far as to address the reader personally, almost as if writing a confessional letter to a distant friend. He begins by taking us aside to share a gentle joke about the human race, observing that good sense seems to be “the best distributed thing in the world,” since everyone thinks they have so much of it that they don’t need any more.33

But perhaps the joke is on us. Since “they” are the human race, we are them, and perhaps we are not so mistaken about having good sense after all. He himself has no special abilities, he says, since he shares the disposition of the rest of us: “For my part, I have never presumed my mind to be in any way more perfect than that of the ordinary person.”34 If we all have ordinarily reasonable minds, then, “the diversity of our opinions” must be due not to some people being intelligent and others not but rather to our attending to different things. We are diverse because we have different life experiences and different interests. If we want to find agreement, then, we need to proceed with deliberation, drawing demonstrative conclusions at each stage only with care. For himself, he had the good fortune to happen upon some paths “in my youth” that led him to search out the truth in a way he thought was solid and important enough to share. And yet, he acknowledged, “I may be wrong: perhaps what I take for gold and diamonds is nothing but a bit of copper and glass.” He is not setting out directions for everyone, then, simply writing about how it came to be that he tried “to direct my own” mind, sharing a kind of personal history, or even a fable, which some people might find useful and no one should find harmful. He hoped only that his readers would thank him for setting down his views honestly.35

As a reader, then, you meet the author as a mature, accomplished but humble person, a sharp observer of humanity capable of making jokes at his own expense, who invites us to partake in a quiet conversation about how things really are. You are free to stay or leave as you like. Descartes’s persona comes across not only as thoughtful and cheerful but as personal, reassuring, and inviting. He goes on to offer a few incidental details about himself. But he is also discreet. His chief works only occasionally address opponents, and then only with generalized passing swipes, seldom dropping names or referring to details, revealing only what is common to all and what is required to persuade the reader to listen in. We are included in a conversation removed from the hubbub of business and domestic life, or the fawning and intimidation of serving those in power, or the classroom. We are sitting apart, with time enough, the words alone having importance. Descartes was well versed in the methods of his literary friends, who cultivated the ability to invite their readers into dialogues of the imagination.

But there are other kinds of writing left behind by the living Descartes. As one would expect of evidence from four centuries ago, many sources have gone missing. In his case, however, that was not due to neglect alone but also to deliberate disposal. Descartes himself seems to have secreted away many of his personal papers, threatening his acquaintance Mersenne that “if I do not die in my own good time and in a good humor with the men who remain living, they will certainly not see [my papers] for more than a hundred years after my death.”36 In fact, he did die unexpectedly, and not among friends. What he might have buried deep will never be known. But what he openly left behind was sifted and culled by other people, too. Consequently, some papers were lost while others appear to have been destroyed. For instance, he seems to have written about his experience in arms, but it is now missing. His Discours promised a further work on the nature of the soul, which was never published nor recorded among his surviving papers. All this leaves plenty of room for speculation about what else disappeared.

Hints about the fate of his papers come chiefly from Descartes’s first scholarly biographer, Adrien Baillet,37 supplemented by recent investigations by the editors of a new edition of the Descartes correspondence.38 We know of two main caches of papers surviving his death. When he prepared for his departure from The Netherlands to Sweden in 1649, he put the papers and other items he wished to take along in a couple of chests for shipment, while another batch of his papers was deposited in a case left behind in Leiden with his trusted friend, the physician Cornelis van Hogelande (a fellow Catholic and reputed Rosicrucian).39 Descartes also left instructions with Hogelande on how to proceed should he die abroad. In such a case, Hogelande and a discreet friend or two could go through the papers, since there was nothing secret in them (qu’il y ait rien de secret), but because some of them might contain information that some of his correspondents would not want to become public, he would probably think it best to burn them. It is suggestive that Descartes draws a distinction between secrets and privacy, implying that he was privy to secrets—a word often associated with governments—and that they would not be found among the papers he was leaving behind. In any case, he continued, he only wanted posterity to have the letters that his enemy Voetius wrote to Mersenne, which Descartes thought would help protect his posthumous reputation (& que je desire être gardées pour servir de préservatif contre ses calomnies); these he set aside separately in the lid of the case.40

Once news arrived of his friend’s death, Hogelande opened the case in the presence of a notary and three witnesses: a mysterious French-speaking officer of the Dutch army named Louis de la Voyette who later served the Swedes (an intelligence officer?), and two professors from the University of Leiden, the mathematician Frans van Schooten, who had collaborated with Descartes on the publication of some of his works, and the physician Johannes de Raey, another friend. De Raey was still alive at about the age of sixty-eight when Baillet was trying to find out more about his subject, and he insisted (in a message conveyed via the theologian Philipp van Limborch, one of John Locke’s friends) that the letters Descartes had left in Leiden were few and unimportant. But it is also known that De Raey did not like Baillet’s prying into his friend’s personal life, telling Van Limborch that it had been very simple, whereas the French were falsifying it (Vita Cartseii res est simplicissima, et Galli eam corrumperent): perhaps De Raey wanted to throw Baillet off the scent.41 In addition, another long-standing friend of Descartes was present, the Dutch nobleman Anthony Studler van Zurck, who had served as an early recipient of letters intended for Descartes and loaned him a large sum of money (perhaps to pay fees to the French government for a pension that never took effect).42 Van Zurck seems to have kept at least some of the papers not destroyed, but all trace of these papers disappeared in the early nineteenth century aside from a few apparently returned by Hogeland to their originators, such as those of the secretary to the Prince of Orange, Constantijn Huygens.43 Only a few of the letters that Descartes explicitly wanted preserved are now known, and these only from copies. Baillet suspected that most of the letters were burned.44

In Stockholm, following Descartes’s death on February 11, 1650, another meeting was convened, this time by the French ambassador, Pierre Chanut. It included a representative of the queen, sieur Erric Sparre Baron de Croneberg. The other members could also be trusted to be discreet: Descartes’s valet, Henry Schlüter, and the chaplain and the secretary of the French embassy. They went through all Descartes’s possessions and made an inventory of his books and family papers (to share with his relatives). The following day—were they first handled by the queen or the baron?—the ambassador took possession of them. Chanut seems to have intended to publish at least some of the manuscripts, and probably about four years later, perhaps working with Christiaan Huygens (the famous scientist, and a Dutch Francophile), the ambassador composed a list of those he thought important for understanding Descartes’s scientific ideas, since known as the “Stockholm Inventory.”45 But other papers, such as the letters of the Princess Elizabeth, which Descartes had kept separate from the others and were returned to her at her request, were not recorded, so in fact we do not know the full extent of what survived from Stockholm, either.46

When the Descartes family expressed no particular interest in the papers, Chanut turned a large batch of them over to his brother-in-law, another friend of Descartes, Claude Clerselier. But a boat on which they were being transported sank in the river Seine. It took three days to recover the chest in which they were contained, and then many days further to dry them out, all of which put them into great disorder.47 Clerselier had worked with Descartes since 1644 and later devoted much effort to publishing editions of Descartes’s work and correspondence (for instance, bringing out a French edition of Descartes’s Description of the Human Body in 1664), but he has been shown to have heavily edited the letters he published, adding some passages and deleting others. Clerselier shared some of Descartes’s unpublished notebooks with other scholars such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Walter Ehrenfried Tschirnhaus, and their notes in turn provide invaluable evidence to us, but the materials on which they were based are now gone.48

Other hints about Descartes’s life began to appear, however, many of them based on personal recollections and personal papers acquired through unknown channels. Daniel Lipstorp of Lübeck compiled recollections of Descartes he acquired from Van Schooten and De Raey along with an account from a young “disciple” of De Raey’s who had met Descartes, named Van Berkel.49 On the French side, Pierre Borel produced an important short account of Descartes’s life in 1653 that went through several subsequent editions, including a translation into English in 1670.50 Although often overlooked, it is worth attention. Borel had taught engineering at Castres, proposing a canal that would later be constructed by others as the Canal du Midi, and would go on to be known as a committed Cartesian, chemist, royal physician, and member of the Académie Royale des Sciences.51 He added some crucial information to Lipstorp’s account, not only from an epitaph written by Marcus Zuerius Boxhornius at Leiden but, more important, from the recollections of Descartes’s military and engineering friends, particularly Descartes’s former roommate Étienne de Villebressieu (also a physician, alchemist, and engineer). Clerselier himself published some of Descartes’s letters posthumously in 1657, 1659, and 1666, and in doing so, he conveyed a few things about the life of the author in the prefaces. Finally, Queen Christina commissioned Nicholas-Joseph Poisson, an Oratorian priest, to honor her philosopher, and he published two studies of Descartes’s ideas that contain snippets of biographical information. Although he never completed a full biography, Poisson seems to have handed over some materials (originally obtained from the queen?) to Clerselier.52

But the chief source of information from the period, based largely on documents no longer extant, comes from the biographical project associated with the name of Adrien Baillet. When Clerselier died in 1684, having collected masses of Descartes materials but without having produced the biography he had hoped to write, the papers in his possession went to the abbé Jean-Baptiste Legrand. Legrand wrote further to people throughout France and Europe who might have additional information about Descartes, but to sort out the mass of collected materials he finally engaged a learned librarian, another abbé, Adrien Baillet, as a kind of ghost writer.53 Baillet was then working on revisions to a huge critical encyclopedia covering all of literature and on a comprehensive study of the lives of the saints, but he was willing to be interrupted, and he was able to turn the two-volume biography over to the printer in February of 1691.54 Two years later he published an abridgement of it that contained some further information (and which was translated into English in 1693) but he never completed the planned revised edition of the whole.55 Legrand kept possession of the papers used by Baillet, but following Legrand’s own death in 1704, they went to his mother and then disappeared.56 We do not even have a partial inventory of what was lost.

Because he had so much material at his disposal that has since gone missing, then, Baillet’s version of Descartes’s life must be our primary guide. But of course it requires interpretation. The fact that the Clerselier project had been delayed for thirty years suggests that more than a lack of energy was at work: probably there were internal conflicts about how to present Descartes’s life to the public. For example, one of the problems—if the hypothesis that I will outline in a moment is correct—would have been Descartes’s affiliations with discontented nobles around Gaston d’Orléans. Gaston would have become king had not his nephew been born—the child who became Louis XIV and ruled when the Baillet biography was published—and many of the discontented would also take up arms against Louis’s mother, the queen regent, Anne of Austria, in the midcentury rebellions known as the Fronde: at one point, she and her son had to be smuggled out of Paris at night. With the growing power of the Sun King, Descartes’s apparent associations with the troubled history of the period would have made finding an acceptable version of his life quite difficult had he had any connections with Gaston or those nearby.

There were certainly problems in reconciling Descartes’s philosophy with the increasingly conservative religious orthodoxy of the period, too. While Descartes wrote of God, he came very close to identifying God and Nature, a classically “atheistic” opinion. Descartes’s works had also been condemned by the archbishop of Paris in 1671 for raising questions about the Eucharist, while in 1675 a declaration of the royal Grand Council banned the teaching of his works. Moreover, although Baillet was an experienced and critical editor, he was living in a moment immediately after Louis XIV’s infamous revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The revocation withdrew the civil rights of Protestants in France, forcing them to flee, convert, or face confiscation of all their goods under threat of torture or execution. Descartes held the views of Augustine in high esteem, and so did Clerselier, but some of Descartes’s chief advocates were members of the controversial Augustinian “sect” of Jansenists, whose teachings on grace and salvation were considered too close to Protestantism to be acceptable to most of the ruling authorities in the French church. As a member of the Catholic hierarchy working in the libraries of noblemen, Baillet would have to be very cautious about what he reported, and how he spun it, if he wanted to make Descartes conformable for his audience.

Another possibility would have made an orthodox biography of Descartes even more difficult: One of Descartes’s recent biographers, Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, writes that Chanut was “known to be a member” of the Compagnie, or Société du Saint Sacrement, and Christina’s biographer, Susanna Åkerman, adds that Clerselier was also a member.57 The Compagnie was a secret society founded by the duc de Ventadour in 1627 as a way to unify France around a Catholic ethical culture. Mostly it included curés, bishops, jurists, administrators, and noblemen, including Condé’s brother, the Prince of Conti. It was sometimes frequented by ethical libertines, as well, including Pierre Gassendi.58 They advocated the prohibition of dueling, reverent behavior in churches, and other reforms, including the withdrawal of civil rights from Huguenots—Ventadour himself had attacked the Huguenots in the south of France—but they did so in private, advancing their interests not as a group but through individual members of influence who put forward the common proposals as their own. Cardinal Bérulle of the Oratorians, a group with whom Descartes himself was closely associated, had encouraged the Compagnie’s formation, although the archbishop of Paris refused his own approval and Pope Urban VIII refrained from granting it any special status.59 In due course the parlement (parliament) of Paris decided to prohibit secret assemblies “and the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement gradually yielded to the pressure of government hostility and suspended operations.”60 An examination of early twentieth-century publications of archival sources of the Compagnie for any references to Chanut, Clerselier, or Descartes has drawn a blank.61 That lack of confirmation cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a connection, but if it existed, it would have made the presentation of Descartes and his views during Clerselier’s lifetime full of inner contradictions because some other contemporaries thought that his subject was privately materialist, and so atheistic.

The moment of publication also followed the effort by Louis XIV and the imperious minister Louvois to destroy the Palatinate. In 1688, on the pretext that the king’s sister-in-law should inherit the principality, French armies marched into lands on the east bank of the Rhine, burning cities and towns to the ground and inaugurating what would become known as the Nine Years’ War. With the French in Germany, the Dutch stadtholder William III, Prince of Orange, gained a brief moment of safety for launching his coup in England—better known as the Glorious Revolution—which then allowed him to bring Britain and the United Provinces together into the war against France. But that meant further difficulties for Baillet, since Descartes’s early military service in the forces of the Prince of Orange and among a variety of German princes who now fought France would also have to be reported carefully if he were not to seem disloyal to contemporary readers.

Baillet was therefore understandably eager to highlight aspects of Descartes’s life and ideas that made him acceptable in this moment of conservative reaction in politics and religion, and to play down any other associations. He only hinted at the personal connections of Descartes in the early seventeenth century that might seem troubling from the viewpoint of the religious absolutism of Louis XIV. He was successful enough in his effort to receive approval for the dedication to be made to Louis Boucherat, chancellor of France and signer of the Edict of Nantes.62

Baillet did not simply bow and scrape, however. He had first been widely noticed for his nine-volume Jugements des Savans (1685–86), which celebrated the “liberty to judge.” His subsequent multivolume Vie des Saints (1695–1701) would show sharp criticism of the sources, questioning the documentation of reputed miracles in recent centuries.63 His critics often accused him of being more a copyist than a historian, but his doubt about the existence of miracles—at least those since the early church—also placed him among the secularly oriented philosophes. Moreover, his work of 1690, on pseudonymous literature, probed the disguises of authors and their multiple motivations for going masked. In other words, the learned Baillet examined his sources carefully; he was entirely familiar with dissimulation and its purposes; and when compelled, he might employ it himself by omitting or merely gesturing at difficulties. As far as we can tell, however, he did not invent.64

Yet moderns have treated Baillet’s biography with suspicion. From the perspective of the French republics, Baillet seemed too much a Catholic apologist, while in an age of positivism much of the information he reported had to be doubted since it could not be checked against extant evidence. His work came to be superseded by another comprehensive study, Charles Adam’s Vie et Oeuvres de Descartes: Étude Historique (Life and Works of Descartes: A Historical Study) of 1910, which applied the latest critical methods to the surviving sources. Adam’s biography arrived as the final installment of a painstaking twelve-volume collection and annotation of the Descartes materials which he and Paul Tannery published jointly between 1897 and 1910. In addition to reprinting all Descartes’s published works, they produced annotated copies of his letters, scraps of evidence about his lost workbooks and other writings, materials about him found in the papers of other people, and closely related primary sources. “Adam and Tannery” has become the baseline for all subsequent studies of Descartes, often showing up in footnotes simply as “AT.” Adam’s Vie certainly made excellent use the material he and Tannery had edited, and he drew on further archival details discovered by antiquaries (such as Descartes’s signatures as a witness to family baptisms), providing a verifiable account of his life. It remains indispensable. But while much new information was added, and errors in Baillet were identified and corrected, other events reported by Baillet dropped out because they could not be confirmed. Most important, the hints of aristocratic entanglements and dissimulation were downplayed in favor of seeing Descartes as an upper bourgeois individualist who had always intended to become a philosopher, a hero of modernizing France in the run-up to another great conflict with Germany.

Descartes’s religious orthodoxy also seemed to be confirmed by the multivolume publication of the correspondence of Marin Mersenne, a Minim friar and one of the chief organizers of the campaign against unorthodox and even atheistical implications of the philosophy of the period.65 During Descartes’s time abroad, Mersenne was certainly important for keeping him in touch with the views of other savants in France and elsewhere in Europe. Taken at face value, Descartes’s relationship with Mersenne seems to place him among the apologists for the Catholic Church. But Mersenne was also corresponding with avowed materialists such as Thomas Hobbes, and when Descartes happened to be in Paris at the time of Mersenne’s death on September 1, 1648, he departed without paying his respects to the deceased. We should be cautious, therefore, about assuming that Descartes’s “friendship” with Mersenne—which was of benefit to both as an epistolary relationship—implies like-mindedness, much less agreement with positions that later became orthodox doctrines. Even more important, their correspondence cannot illuminate Descartes’s early life, as it only begins in October 1629. As a matter of fact, any letters to or from Descartes before that year—that is, during Descartes’s first three decades and more—are scarce, amounting to only about a dozen (and half of these are part of the correspondence with Isaac Beeckman, whom we will meet in due course).66

In other words, reading Descartes through the Mersenne correspondence and AT’s volumes came to mean that the published works continued to dominate the life as the true Descartes. In fact, Adam’s Vie et Oeuvres des Descartes was not even reproduced in some later reprints of the AT volumes.67 His life came to be read through his literary persona rather than the other way around.

In Search of a Person behind the Words

During the twentieth century, then, the view of scholars was focused on the mountaintop and what could be seen from there, rather than on the geology from which it emerged. For those concerned with intellectual heights, a stripped-down version of Descartes’s life was all that was needed. This was entirely in keeping with twentieth-century modernism, which worshipped at the shrine of high theory. From Einstein’s relativity through quantum mechanics and string theory, the ability to reason about the fundamentals of nature abstractly was often taken to epitomize the highest reaches of human thought; other natural sciences also brought their richest offerings to the temple of fundamental concepts, while even in linguistics, philosophy, literature, anthropology, sociology, economics, and many other subject areas—history, architecture, and the fine arts included—unifying theories were given pride of place. For many who visited the temple of theory, “The chief girder in this framework of Modernity” was “Cartesianism,”68 held to be a dualistic philosophy posing a dichotomy between three-dimensional Nature and unconfined Reason, with preference for the latter. As for the foothills, a consensus arose from a straightforward reading of Adam’s biography: after a few lost years of wandering, the maturing Descartes determined on writing philosophy, went off to The Netherlands to find peace and quiet, and despite criticism won through. The incidents of his life were diversions or burdens, pulling him away from the high intellectual aims to which he had always remained loyal. In a kind of confirmation of the mind–body distinction, Descartes’s body was necessary only for carrying around his mind, which concentrated on the important work of thinking.

This modernist version of his life has remained powerful. For instance, it frames a handbook of the early twenty-first century written by some of the most learned authorities on Cartesianism.69 They write that Descartes set out for Germany to sign up with Catholic forces in the opening stages of the Thirty Years’ War but that he had no experience of “any armed combat”; he returned to Paris in 1621 after “having definitely abandoned his military career”; his subsequent travels in Italy were required by unspecified “other financial matters”; but at last Cardinal Bérulle “encouraged him to develop his philosophy as an antidote to atheism,” which caused him to leave bustling Paris for calm Amsterdam, a place where he could concentrate on writing.70 The authoritative study of his life by Rodis-Lewis, first published in 1995, elaborates but does not challenge this accepted view.71 The chief move in recent years—exemplified in the careful and comprehensive intellectual biography of Stephen Gaukroger—has been to question whether Descartes was really the canonical epistemologist or metaphysician, with a growing group arguing that he was more concerned with the natural sciences.72 The emphasis remains on the development of his ideas, with his life’s course mainly providing the backdrop rather than the motivation.

But one also senses a growing frustration with the limitations of the biographical consensus. The philosopher Stephen Toulmin, for example, did his best to give Descartes flesh and blood by investigating his possible responses to the assassination of King Henri IV in 1610. The teenage Descartes was then attending the Jesuit school at La Flèche, where the king’s heart came to be interred with great ceremony. Following Adam, Toulmin thinks that the youngster took part in the ceremonies and may have written an anonymous Latin poem for the occasion that compared Henri to the moons of Jupiter, which had themselves just been discovered a few months earlier by Galileo.73 Toulmin used such examples of the personal and local to press the case against scientific modernism in favor of a more authentic cosmopolitanism rooted in a humanistic openness to experience.

Two other philosophers, Richard Watson and A. C. Grayling, writing biographical studies with a light touch suitable for a general audience, raised further questions about Descartes’s motivations and the underlying nature of his real views. In doing so, both came to the conclusion that the usual account could not add up.

Grayling decided that Descartes was a spy. A well-known British philosopher and public intellectual, Grayling was penning a summary of recent work on Descartes, but as he wrote, he must have become increasingly irritated with not being able to explain what was motivating Descartes’s travels. So he speculated. When Descartes returned to The Netherlands in 1629, for instance, he did so as “a spy.” Grayling explained, “My suggestion is that he was in some way engaged in intelligence activities or secret work during the [previous] period of his military service and travels. It was because of this, I further suggest, that Cardinal Berulle warned him that he was no longer welcome in France.” (This suggestion implies that he was both a spy and an exile, which might also make him a double agent.) But Grayling then backs off, saying that he is not asserting that Descartes was a spy but is “merely mooting the possibility,” contending that “it is a plausible hypothesis, and merits its place in his tale.”74 Yet later he suggests it as the reason Descartes first went to the Netherlands in 1618 as well, going to the country during the Synod of Dort and leaving it when it was settled, implying that “he could have been sent as a pair of eyes and ears to observe how matters stood in the Breda garrison of Maurice’s army while the Arminian difficulties were going on.”75

Now, great personages of the day certainly did employ spies. In the English-speaking world of the period, the most famous spymaster had been Queen Elizabeth’s servant, Francis Walsingham, but in Descartes’s own generation the French Cardinal Richelieu became equally famous as a master intelligencer, with eyes and ears in every corner.76 From a few years later, the powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert has rightly been termed an “information master.”77 Then as now, powerful people desired access to information about their friends and enemies, with both personal and political decision making requiring the obtaining and retaining of secrets. Indeed, the “secretaries” of church and state were so called because they had access to “secrets.” Such men were certainly not above applying the methods of both fear and reward in recruiting informants. There are also many well-documented cases of scholars serving as intelligence gatherers and go-betweens, people such Sir Theodore de Mayerne, physician to Henri IV of France and James I and Charles I of England; or the martyred Giordano Bruno; or the German virtuoso Johannes Becher; or the Dutch savant and experimentalist Nicolas Hartsoeker; or later still, the famous Voltaire. There are even suspicions about why Baruch Spinoza paid a long call on French officers after they had taken the city of Utrecht in the invasion of 1672.78 Such well-known persons might be thought to be more like diplomats than undercover informants, but they certainly collected and passed on private information in secret.79

In Descartes’s case, there are hints. For instance, we can turn our attention to events following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, in which France’s ally, the Dutch Republic, withdrew from the war against the Habsburgs, leaving France to continue the fight on its own. As Watson points out, it was shortly after the treaty—which also removed from the conflict another French ally, Sweden—that French ambassador Chanut began in earnest to attract Descartes to Stockholm.80 At the time, one of Descartes’s most loyal friends in the Dutch Republic was Henri Brasset, then resident to the French embassy in The Hague. Brasset wrote to Descartes about how he placed some hope in the young new stadholder of the Dutch Republic, William II, Prince of Orange.81 William would indeed open secret negotiations with France about seizing the government of the Dutch Republic and then dividing the Spanish Netherlands between the kingdom and the Dutch Republic: following William’s march on Amsterdam in 1650, only his death from smallpox saved the republican system of the United Provinces from being turned into a principality.82 Given Brasset’s surviving message, the possibility that the young Descartes was an intelligence gatherer, or a well-positioned intermediary, must be taken seriously.83

If he was, however, we want to know for whom he was working. Grayling infers that “if Descartes was an agent of some kind, he was by far most probably so in the Jesuit interest,” and Jesuits, he further asserts, were agents of the Habsburgs.84 But this inference rests only on the well-known facts that Descartes had been educated at a Jesuit school and later hoped that his work would be acceptable to the order (it was not). It is also a far too simple characterization of the political position of the Jesuits during Descartes’s lifetime. Besides, the Jesuits were spread all over Europe and picked up information everywhere, so there is no need to suppose they required spies who were not members of the society in order to acquire news of major public events such as the Synod of Dort, as Grayling supposes. As Grayling himself notes, too, there is an additional problem, for “if Descartes was an agent in the Jesuit-Habsburg interest, he could not have been conformable with the policy adopted by his own country.”85 French interests were better expressed by Brasset’s implied notion that the French and Dutch might seize and divide between them the Habsburg territories on their borders. In other words, following Grayling’s hypothesis, Descartes would have been a traitor.

The American, Watson, on the other hand, wants Descartes to be a good guy—that is, in his view, working for the Protestants. He expressed his anger at the “Saint Descartes Protection Society” that made him into a good Catholic, terming his own work a “skeptical biography, as full of doubt about tradition and authority as was Descartes himself,” although he also offered plenty of speculation as well.86 He wrote, for instance, that Descartes’s return to The Netherlands in 1628 “was a revolutionary political act.” It coincided with the defeat of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle and the flight of many leaders of the Protestant French to The Netherlands (he claims). “It is as plain as can be,” Watson concludes, “that Descartes’s move . . . was an act of solidarity with republican French Protestantism against royalist Catholic totalitarian oppression, and of liberal Christianity against the Spanish Inquisition.”87 He also thinks that the story of the friendly interview with Cardinal Bérulle—whom he libelously terms a “genocidal maniac (and I speak precisely)”—was invented by Descartes’s first biographers, but that if it did occur, Descartes was being privately warned about his own position and so “may have seen flight as the only way out,” which would explain why Descartes’s subsequent secrecy was important: he “certainly did seem to feel threatened.”88

Such moves toward trying to understand Descartes’s life in light of the politicoreligious situation of his day are important and right, even if they are wrong in their speculative conclusions. If alert to them, one can notice such attempts in earlier biographical studies, too. A century ago, for instance, Adam noted some of the ways that Descartes did not always fit with expectations, wondering at the “double game” that he seems to have played.89 This line of questioning owes an even greater debt to Gustav Cohen, founder of the forerunner of the Institut Français in Amsterdam, who published a study of French literary travelers to the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century, among whom was Descartes. Cohen’s main theme was that liberty of conscience in Holland, coupled with the political alliance of 1598 to 1648, drew many French visitors northward, including the soldier-poet Jean de Schelandre and the powerful literary duo of Guez de Balzac and Théophile de Viau, and finally Descartes himself.90 Guez de Balzac became a close early friend of Descartes, while the one passage of poetry quoted from memory by Descartes in his surviving letters is from Théophile.91 But Théophile was also one of the most notorious French libertines of the period, burned in effigy in front of Notre Dame de Paris. In the course of treating Descartes as a visitor and resident in the low countries like Balzac and Théophile, Cohen uncovered new information not known to Adam and Tannery and, more important, stumbled across a host of personal and intellectual associations that raised further questions about Descartes’s religious orthodoxy. Accounts such as Maxime Leroy’s Descartes: Le Philosophe au Masque, as well as swashbuckling literary tales such as Dimitri Davidenko’s Descartes le scandalleux, followed up with other alternatives to the common narrative.92

Intellectual historians similarly wondered. René Pintard, the historian of the freethinking libertins érudits (philosophical freethinkers), puzzled at Descartes’s closest Parisian friends being either wanton gluttons and debauchees or alchemists and astrologers.93 More recently, after years of relative neglect, the importance of libertine philosophy of the period has been studied again, continuing to furrow brows in puzzlement.94 The libertines questioned received opinion about Christian moral philosophy, which they took to be rooted in doubtful doctrines derived from disputes about religious speculations rather than founded on the natural sources of human thought and action. On those bases they allowed their own critical lines of reasoning to go to places that made established opinion upset and often angry. One of the first scholars in recent years to raise new questions about French libertine authors was Françoise Charles-Daubert, who in building on the studies of Pintard thought it strange that Cartesians dealt with the same subjects as the libertins érudits when they and Descartes seem to have taken no notice of one another in their writings. That was doubly astonishing when it is noticed that they moved in the same circles, at least when Descartes was in Paris. The reciprocal isolation and silence was, she thought, intriguing.95 It would only make sense if the two groups were fellow travelers but with different and distinct audiences.

Following Charles-Daubert’s line, other intellectual historians have noticed more associations between Descartes and the libertines. Catherine Wilson wondered about whether Descartes might have been dissimulating his religious opinions in some of his writings, while Susanna Åkerman began to ask about his association with the mystical libertine Queen Christina; Anne Staquet and Alexandra Torero-Ibad more directly drew parallels between his thought and that of such people as Gassendi and Cyrano, who were previously thought to hold opinions quite other than Descartes’s.96 The views Descartes later stated can indeed be interpreted as important modifications, rather than rejections, of the Epicurean philosophy conveyed to Europe from ancient sources, most notably Lucretius. Recently, the prospect of approaching his works contextually has begun to shape books on Descartes written for English-speaking audiences, as well.97 But there has been a continued reluctance to explore how the aims of his writing might have been intertwined with the French libertines in his life before his exile.

A study that makes good use of what Natalie Davis has termed “tangential evidence” therefore seems timely.98 Descartes certainly had friends and adversaries who can be identified, and their views and associations can be examined for possible connections to events in his life. For instance, because Descartes had aristocratic pretensions, he seems to have sought preferment among the royal and noble courts during his first extended stay in Paris. That would place him in the world of the queen regent, Marie de Medici, and a group of nobles who would eventually be driven out of favor. When in 1617 Marie’s chief minister and favorite, Concino Concini, was assassinated in a palace coup, Descartes left Paris for the Dutch Republic to learn the art of war. That meant acquiring the skills and knowledge of military engineering, a likely source for the development of his mathematical talents, which would be on display so prominently in later years. The young aristocrat also went on to become caught up in the early events of the Thirty Years’ War, and then in the actions prior to the French fighting in the Valtelline in northern Italy; that activity was followed by service in the king’s forces at the siege of La Rochelle. His return to France, however, coincided with the rise of Marie’s younger son, Gaston d’Orléans, who had close ties with many of the discontented aristocrats. At the time of Descartes’s second departure for The Netherlands, at the beginning of 1629, the discontented were being forced into obedience to Cardinal Richelieu or into exile; Descartes left Paris just when Richelieu’s agents pushed one of his close friends, Balzac, into banishment to the countryside. Marie de Medici herself resisted but would flee abroad less than two years later, only to die in poverty. Descartes would not set foot in France again until after the death of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Politically, he may even have favored the mixed French and imperial interests of the house of Lorraine, itself a thorn in the side of the French king until Richelieu destroyed their lands in 1635. His personal loyalties were probably aligned with the ideals of his youth, when Marie de Medici sat on the throne.

Abroad, Descartes would begin to write philosophy, no doubt with purpose. The philosophy he would write in the Dutch Republic remained rooted in ideals shaped both by hope for the reconciliation of Christendom and a love of neopagan literature. On the basis of understanding movement in the material fabric of the world, the confessional differences of recent history might be overcome. Descartes may have hoped, too, like many around him, for peace in France and in Europe under the leadership of a loving and charismatic monarch who would be the first among equals in a republic of princes and nobles. Rulers including Catherine de Medici, Henri IV, and Marie de Medici had looked for common interests among the rival factions in the realm and negotiated settlements among them based on respect for lineage and a need for coexistence, while at the same time building alliances in Europe. Their methods, however, were quite distinct from the unforgiving royal absolutism of Louis XIII as fostered by Richelieu, who engaged in foreign wars and destroyed people who hinted at opposition, or drove them away.

Descartes’s hopes depended, then, on a renewal at the top of the kingdom of a universal, loving, and forgiving faith that was rooted in natural law. Like many other reformers of his day, Descartes was trying to change the conversation among the autocrats, overcoming division by seeking demonstrable universalities in nature and the laws of nature. The famous argument of the cogito was meant as a proof against radical doubt, a reassurance of our own existence from which even ordinary attributes of the real world can be known with reasonable certainty. After all, there were people in his day—as there are in our own—who prefer that nothing can be known for certain. But Descartes considered radical doubt puerile or mad, supportive of authoritarianism. He also hated arguments that had no basis in clear and distinct ideas about the material world and its motions. He consequently came to be seen as a herald of Enlightenment Reason.

The mountain in view, then, would seem not to be made from Descartes’s own works so much as from the titanic struggles of his moment, layered on top of even more ancient rock. The underlying geology shifts for many reasons, such as the tectonics of struggles for justice and well-being, security and dominion, and flows of capital. But surface events leave their mark, too. The crag is sometimes identified with his name because he came to be such a good guide to it. From personal experience he well knew the pitfalls and crevices to be avoided on the way up, the places where avalanches threatened, and the exposed rock where few handholds could be found. Having scouted out firm paths, and bringing along the latest pieces of kit for the most difficult passages, he could safely and securely bring parties to the top and down again. But he also observed that the people he was guiding enjoyed speaking about their personal experiences, often more real to them than the views in sight. They were on the mountain because they had been moved to come. What that moving spirit was is not for a guide to say, but every guide will understand that visitors are swayed by it as much as the vistas that arise from the journey itself.

Because the mountain now often bears Descartes’s name, casual visitors continue to confuse his personal identity with the place. People who live near mountains well know the difference, though. Mountains are not people, despite their moods. Nature on a mountainside is seldom kind, and wildernesses attract not only fierce animals but heartless bandits. To survive there requires not only physical competence but a strong will, a quick wit, and an appreciation for local knowledge. The young Descartes had all these, coupled with a desire to make sense of the larger landscape. And while possessed of active survival instincts, he also wanted to be of service. Before we make our own ascent, then, let’s simply stick close by and see what he does.