PART 2 A France of Broken Families

While later in life Descartes became known as a philosopher, he never took a position as a teacher or professor. He came to be well educated and well read and had many friends with whom he could share his keen interest in the latest ideas, but like most other well-heeled young men and women of his time, the young Descartes was often eager to be seen and heard in great houses. He first attempted to rise among the nobility of the sword, although he never quite succeeded. Perhaps he had to make especially energetic efforts because of not having quite the right kind of ancestors in his immediate family, his father being a high-ranking administrator but not of the sword-carrying kind. Descartes was also a kind of orphan, taken in by his mother’s family after she died during his infancy and his father remarried. He seems to have broken altogether with his father when they ended up on opposite sides of a great political conflict associated with the rise of Cardinal Richelieu as the king’s chief adviser.

But he had a chance. Descartes moved in a world that made judgments according to lineage, title, and office, and both sides of his family descended from royal officials who were addressed by rank—lower-ranking noble titles but noble nonetheless—while the family name itself came from an estate obtained by an ancestor as a reward for military service.1 He shared his name with the Great René and would seek an equally elevated place, looking for patronage among the grand nobles, strapping on a sword and learning the art of war and international diplomacy. When he came of age, he also gained an inheritance from his mother, which gave him a title of his own. He therefore often introduced himself as the sieur du Perron: lord of Perron. He came from those who valued merit as well, being sent to excellent schools, including law school, giving him further qualifications for high government service. At the end of his life, the inscription on the tomb that was erected over his grave told the onlooker that he was lord of the manor of Perron and descended from ancient and noble lines of Poitou and Brittany; a funeral oration in his honor reiterated the distinctions, calling him a French noble and lord of Perron.2 When Gerard Edelinck engraved Descartes’s portrait for the 1691 biography about him (shown in figure 1 in part 1), he surrounded his distinguished subject with the words Chevalier (a noble title) and Seigneur du Perron. For added emphasis, below his portrait a coat of arms is prominently displayed, bearing a saltire cross (sometimes also called a Saint Andrew’s cross) and four palm fronds.3 Perhaps the saltire cross echoes the cross of the Valois dukes of Burgundy, since he would later have dealings with members of that august family and places once ruled by them, including Lorraine and the low countries.

The sieur du Perron therefore had sufficient standing to walk among those gathered at princely courts and distinguished assemblies, sometimes gaining the notice of those closer to the center. It was rumored that he was good at the gaming tables, too. Once, he said, he accepted a coin for service as a soldier. As far as is known, however, he took nothing more. Other handsome young chevaliers had risen to favor by serving the great nobles. Playing that game could be dangerous, however, for anyone without personal power walked a tightrope. An awkward gesture might easily cause a fall, and then the cord could be used just as well for throttling. René escaped into exile, where he would begin to write. That Descartes has come to be known as a “philosopher” is perhaps best explained, then, by examining the accidents of his life that foreclosed other options.

Families

When Descartes came into the world, he was granted all the advantages of his family.4 But he quickly became almost an orphan. The adult Descartes had no clear memory of his mother, only a longing, for Jeanne Brochard died following childbirth when René was only a little over thirteen months old. He and his older siblings, Pierre and Jeanne, seem to have been raised in the house where René was born, under the roof of his grandmother. His father, Joachim, remarried and moved on. Understandably, the youngster would come to identify strongly with his mother’s side of the family and as a young adult would distance himself from his father. When he received news of Joachim’s death in October 1640, René did not return to pay his respects. His feelings of abandonment are probably captured by the humble arrangements he made for his own burial: placed in an orphans’ cemetery outside the city walls of Stockholm.5

But although Joachim Descartes may have been an aloof parent, he had a distinguished lineage and undoubtedly knew some of the leaders of France. He traced his family pedigree back into the fourteenth century to people near the Valois king Charles the Wise. Moreover, Joachim’s great-grandfather had been the Great René, a military figure who acquired, among other possessions, a tract of land called Cartes in the commune of Ormes St.-Martin near Vienne (south of Lyons). The Great René’s grandson, Pierre, Joachim’s father, became a distinguished physician but held on to several fiefs, calling himself Pierre “Descartes.”6 Pierre’s son, Joachim, turned to law and rose high in one of the chief decision-making bodies of France. By the time of his son’s birth on March 31, 1596, Joachim Descartes had been a member (conseiller) of the parliament (parlement) of the powerful province of Brittany for more than a decade. The first requirement of government is to be just, and parliaments everywhere in Europe were formal bodies deciding on whether the law, or cases at law, accorded with justice. The French parliaments of the time were more like courts than representative assemblies—that better characterized the occasional Estates-General, which last met in 1614–15. (The young René would visit it, too, in the company of an uncle who sat in it as a representative.) But among the matters on which the French parlements decided were not only questions of taxation, administration, and justice, but also the edicts of the monarch. Over the course of time, Joachim would rise to become the most senior officer in the grand parliament of Brittany, the doyen.

Joachim’s status was bolstered by marrying into other well-connected families. His first wife, Jeanne Brochard—René’s mother—came from a family headed by a distinguished official of the ancient and powerful city of Poitiers (lieutenant general de présidial). When Joachim remarried three years after Jeanne’s death, his second wife, Anne, was also the daughter of a senior government official, Jean-Baptiste Morin, first president of the Chambre des Comtes in Nantes, an important city in Brittany. The new couple soon settled in the administrative capital of that province, Rennes, and raised three boys and a girl of their own.

In other words, Joachim not only came from a distinguished line but also acted as a high-ranking and respected member of the decision-making administration of the kingdom. He was well connected to other people like him in the region and worked closely with the great nobles who served the king directly, someone more than a civil servant but less than a minister. Men like him were among the officeholders who pressed hard to be openly recognized as men of distinguished position (qualité).7 Put another way, he was, according to distinctions that were beginning to be formalized in his lifetime, a noble of the “robe” rather than of the “sword.” Some years later, in 1668, when such things were being regularized by the monarchy, the Descartes family obtained letters of chivalry confirming its noble rank; presumably it was this that allowed the engraver Edelinck to depict René as a chevalier.8

It is even possible that Joachim Descartes had served His Majesty Henri IV in person, taking a part in the unraveling of a spy ring and reporting about it to the king. In 1604, when the incident took place, the personal secretary to the French ambassador in Spain was one “Monsieur Descartes.” As told by the king’s chief minister, the duc de Sully, the Descartes in the story has no first name, but at the time there are no persons other than Joachim Descartes known by that surname. Sully was long the royal governor of Poitou, where the elder Descartes lived at the time, so he may well have remembered the man’s last name. Joachim is likely to be the person mentioned.9

The incident was this: early in the century, French ambassadors had begun to notice that decisions of the king’s council were being conveyed to foreign powers even before they themselves had word. It was later discovered that a clerk who worked for the chief diplomat on the king’s council, the marquis de Villeroy, was spying for the Spaniards. That clerk, Nicolas L’Hote, was uncovered by a turncoat, John de Leyré: De Leyré had gone into exile in Spain after plotting against Henri IV in the civil wars, but he now wished to return to his homeland and so shopped L’Hote to the ambassador in return for a pardon and a pension. When the ambassador sent the news to Paris, though, it traveled by networks familiar to L’Hote, enabling him to learn that he had been discovered, which he hastily brought to the notice of his Spanish contacts; De Leyré in turn quickly found out that he had been compromised and, accompanied by Descartes, he jumped on a horse to make for the French border at a gallop to avoid the Spanish authorities. (One can infer from this account that Descartes had been De Leyré’s handler.) They successfully crossed the border and made their way to the French court, reporting events directly to His Majesty, and Descartes followed up with a personal report to the chief minister, Sully, as well. Hearing that the game was up, L’Hote tried to escape from Paris north to the Spanish Netherlands, but with pursuers hot on his heels, he drowned while trying to swim the Marne.10 If the Descartes in this drama was, as is likely, René’s father, Joachim, then he was personally known to, and trusted by, the chief persons of the kingdom.

Joachim was therefore an influential man, and he was not averse to pulling strings to help his children. René’s elder brother, Pierre, also later became a member of the parlement in Brittany,11 and Joachim even obtained letters from the king himself allowing another of his sons, Joachim II, to succeed him in his office in return for services rendered to the king over the past forty years.12 No doubt there were other occasions when his trusted services were called on, one of which we will soon have occasion to recount. Whether he tried to do very much for René, however, is doubtful, since the youngest son of his first wife chose not to follow in his footsteps.

René had, after all, mainly been raised by his mother’s family. In his infancy and early childhood, Descartes seems to have grown up in the home of his maternal grandmother, who had moved to a pleasant town on the river Creuze. Grandmother Jeanne Sain seems to have been a strong-minded woman who had moved to La Haye after separating from her husband years before. René’s mother came to her mother’s house when childbirth was imminent; there Descartes was born and baptized (in the Catholic rather than the Huguenot church); and there his mother died a year later. The little children were probably living at their grandmother’s when their mother left the earth, and Jeanne Sain probably simply continued to keep them with her and her servants. Perhaps being raised in a household whose head was female helped cause Descartes to listen carefully to women in later years.

As he grew older, Descartes probably also spent time at the home of his paternal granduncle and godfather, Michel Ferrand, in the nearby city of Châtellerault. As the second city of Poitou, it would have had first-rate Latin schools for his early education. Ferrand was an important figure, serving as councilor to the king (a parliamentary office) and lieutenant general of his city (a royal appointment), in a most difficult time. Like much of the rest of Poitou, Châtellerault had come to be more or less equally divided between Protestant and Catholic, and Ferrand was probably involved with passing the local ordinance in 1589 that allowed Protestants the free use of their religion, making the city one of their “villee de sûreté” (safe towns). In any case, as lieutenant general, he oversaw the local negotiations for the Edict of Nantes in 1598 that gave the Huguenots full civil liberties. The edict was a fundamental component of King Henri IV’s strategy to forge civil peace after the wars of religion, a political line continued by his widow, Marie de Medici. (Châtellerault would not send a representative of the Catholic clergy to the Estates-General in 1614, probably indicating its continued religious balance.)13 Ferrand had also been associated with the unorthodox but ecumenical political theorist Jean Bodin.14 Interestingly, too, in the house next door lived Ferrand’s cousin, Gaspard d’Auvergne, who had served as an ambassador from King François I in Italy and translated Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince and Discours into French, two very important works that many commentators termed atheistical but which Descartes later wrote about very knowledgeably.15 Descartes must have grown up with the latest political discussion as a commonplace.

It would appear that his mother’s family saw to his further education. In 1606 or 1607 René and his elder brother were sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche. The Jesuits had been accused of complicity in an attempted assassination of Henri IV in 1594 and were expelled from the kingdom, but following its readmission to France in 1603, the Society of Jesus organized several fine advanced schools for the sons of nobles and gentlemen. For the school that René attended, Henri gave them the château in which he had been conceived, making it known as the “Collège Royale.”16 The rector of the school (Father Charlet) was allied with his mother’s family. Descartes later referred to him as his “second father.”17 Descartes apparently left school about the age of sixteen—entirely in keeping with the customs of the time—for he spent the winter of 1612–13 at his father’s house in Rennes, training in horsemanship and fencing.18 But his mother’s relatives again seem to have organized his further education, at the university in Poitiers, a city where his maternal uncle and godfather, René Brochard, sieur des Fontaines, held the office of councilor to the king. When Descartes took his degree and diploma in law from there in 1616, he dedicated his thesis to Brochard, who also paid his fees.19 Descartes would inherit property in Poitiers from his mother’s estate, too. While all other members of his family claimed association with his father’s Brittany, then, René always identified himself as from the province of Poitiers and Châtellerault: his mother’s Poitou.20

Politiques

In the autumn of 1614 and beginning of 1615, his uncle Brochard and the eighteen-year-old René were in Paris for the important assembly of the Estates-General, where other relatives also sat.21 The Estates-General brought together representatives from throughout the kingdom to help the queen regent, Marie de Medici, settle the realm after a failed insurrection by a group of discontented nobles and princes of the blood. Marie had been particularly concerned with the loyalty of Orléanais—the region represented in part by Descartes’s relatives—but in the end her government managed to find trusted delegates from there.22 Poitiers was particularly deeply split between the politicians and the bishop, who took control of the city in the name of the crown. Poitiers even shut out the malcontented Prince de Condé, who retired to Châtellerault, presumably because that city remained loyal to him.23 Uncle Brochard must have been a remarkably able politician in such circumstances, for when the Estates were called to order he sat for Poitiers (giving his title as ecuyer, or squire, the lowest rank of nobility). A representative for adjoining Touraine was a cousin: Maître René Sain, councilor of the king, treasurer general of France, and mayor of Tours.24 Another cousin, from Descartes’s father’s side, Maître François Ferrand, councilor and lawyer of the king, represented Châtellerrault.25

As representatives of the third estate—the peuple (people)—Descartes’s relatives were among those calling for a stronger but reformed monarchy, along lines that today would be termed secular. Their position was a further move in the loyalist politique program that had emerged in the 1560s and remained important in France during Descartes’s youth. The politiques spoke out in response to the horrors of the French religious wars, arguing that good government should be placed ahead of religious doctrine or other ideologies. Great authors such as Bodin and Montaigne gave it the voice of toleration. Henri IV put it into action by abjuring his Huguenot faith in favor of France’s civic religion, Catholicism, while at the same time allowing others to practice their Protestant faith openly as long as they remained loyal to the state. In the Edict of Nantes, Henri gave the political sphere autonomy, for even while sacralizing the person of the king, the edict did not identify the monarchy with Catholicism alone.26 People such as Jacques Auguste de Thou, a senior member of the parlement of Paris and a royal official, took to print to argue that the rule of law should reign supreme over even the greatest persons.27

The third estate was packed with people who shared the outlook of De Thou, including Descartes’s relatives. Their chief political position was to advocate something even stronger than the politique position, something which has been called “political Gallicanism”: to make the office of King of France sovereign over all persons in the kingdom, whether noble or clerical. The Orléanais, which included Brochard, were among the most vehement advocates of that line.28 (It turned out to be a position stronger than the crown itself wanted.) One can easily imagine that Descartes, too, had come to be sympathetic to this legalist and nonclerical view of sovereignty: he would later argue that even God was not greater than his decrees.29

The strong association of politique views with Henri IV must have already made an impression on Descartes at school, especially during the commotion following the king’s assassination. Many writers commenting on Descartes’s early life have drawn attention to the likely influence on him of that powerful event. It occurred in 1610, when Henri was raising an army in preparation for helping the elector of Brandenburg in a war with the Habsburgs over the succession to the duchies of Cleves-Jülich, which occupied a strategic position on the Rhine. Before Henri’s departure for the Rhineland, as a precaution against a return to civil war should anything go amiss, the king agreed to have his wife, Marie de Medici, crowned as queen of France. The following day he was in a coach with companions traveling through streets in Paris still crowded from the celebrations when congestion forced a halt; a right-wing Catholic fanatic managed to mount the vehicle and stab the king to death. Needless to say, the event provoked shock, anger, and grief throughout the kingdom, along with an extended period of mourning.

The aftermath touched Descartes directly, since Henri’s embalmed heart was sent to La Flèche to be ceremoniously laid in a tomb placed high above the alter of his school’s chapel. Hercule de Rohan, duc de Montbazon, who had been with Henri and was himself wounded during the assassination, commanded the procession from Paris to La Flèche, and oversaw the sacral entombment of the heart. Some of Descartes’s biographers think it likely that René was among the young gentlemen who accompanied the cortege.30 If so, perhaps it began a personal connection between him and Montbazon: Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye, had been acquired as part of the duchy of Montbazon, so it is not improbable that he was recruited for the ceremony as one of Montbazon’s subjects studying at the school.31 The connection seems to have continued, for Montbazon’s daughter, Marie de Rohan, best known by her later title, duchesse de Chevreuse, had a son, the duc de Luynes, who later translated Descartes’s Meditations from Latin into French with Descartes’s help. But perhaps one can find further echoes of the event later in his life, too. The sepulcher in which Henri’s heart was placed was shaped in the form of a pyramid; so was the tomb raised over Descartes’s burial place.32

Breaking with His Father

But the political state of France was fraught, sometimes dividing families. Later in life a distinct coldness is evident between Descartes and his father. Perhaps the break came in 1626 over an incident that had much to do with both the personal and political conflicts within the ruling family of France, echoed in the conflicts in other clans. The episode exposes the frictions within the Descartes family, too.

The just-mentioned Marie de Rohan was the chief mover in a grand intrigue. By that time the younger Descartes had—as we will soon see—gained considerable experience as a gentleman volunteer with various armies in northern and central Europe, with a further period in Italy. In 1625 he had returned from his travels, taking up residence in Paris and deciding his next move. There he lived in the home of a friend of the family, Nicolas Le Vasseur, sieur d’Étioles, yet another high-ranking member of the royal government (receiver general of finances). According to an early biographer, Baillet, Descartes was at the time toying with the idea of taking up an important royal post that had come vacant, that of lieutenant general of Châtellerault, a position that his godfather Ferrand had previously held.

By then René was widely traveled and valiant, and he possessed a law degree and friends in government. All he had to do was to come up with the sum of fifty thousand livres necessary for the purchase of the office and presumably secure his father’s blessing. The first of these he had, having returned from Italy with thirty thousand livres, on top of which he sold some additional properties that summer, and for the rest he had an offer of a loan from a friend. Most of Descartes’s biographers therefore wonder why he did not take the post and settle down to begin a family, as might be expected.33 But perhaps his father balked. The only recorded comment of the father on his son was a much later snide remark about how he had been “bound in calf-skin,” implying that by becoming a writer his son had failed to live up to his expectations.34 René himself later commented that his father thought he was not experienced enough for the office.35 It must have hurt. Or perhaps, in light of what followed, his father’s opinion was a veiled reference to his son’s inability to bend sufficiently with the political winds.

The winds were just then blowing fiercely. In the spring of 1626, the question of the lieutenancy not yet having been decided, Descartes traveled from Paris to Poitiers and Châtellerault together with his relative and landlord, Le Vasseur. Having looked things over, they turned north to Rennes to see his father.36 As it turned out, however, Joachim Descartes was embroiled in one of the great political events of the moment, a rebellion of many of the great nobles stirred by Marie de Rohan that resulted in the show trial of the comte de Chalais. The trial would be organized by Armand Jean du Plessis, bishop of Luçon and now Cardinal Richelieu. By 1626 Richelieu had become the king’s indispensable chief minister, growing into one of the firmest strategists and most supple tacticians of his generation. Previously unnoticed by Descartes’s biographers is the fact that one of the chief judges on the court was Descartes’s father.37 If the younger Descartes had friends among those who were opposed to the cardinal—which, as we will see, seems likely—then his father’s willingness to do Richelieu’s bidding might well have caused the son to separate.

René Descartes would have noticed Richelieu no later than at the Estates-General of 1614, when Bishop du Plessis sat as a representative of the first estate (the clergy) for Descartes’s homeland of Poitou and began his climb into the councils of the crown.38 About a decade older than Descartes, from a somewhat more eminent family and first intended for the life of the sword, Richelieu took over the family bishopric when the elder brother for whom it was intended decided instead to become a monk. Cardinal Richelieu became an active Catholic reformer, following Rome in being the first bishop in France to introduce the decrees of the Council of Trent into his diocese. At the close of the Estates-General he was chosen by the clergy to summarize the first estate’s position, powerfully arguing against the third estate’s position about the sovereignty of the monarch over the church, favoring the Tridentine decrees despite the crown’s firm independence from Rome on this issue, and concluding with personal praise for Marie de Medici.39 He made a name for himself. Within a year, following the marriage of the Spanish princess Anne of Austria to Marie’s son, Louis, he gained the position of Anne’s chief almoner and began to advise Marie de Medici and her favorite, Concino Concini, as well.40

But in the mid-1620s the royal family was quarreling. Not only had the queen mother, Marie de Medici, and her eldest son, King Louis XIII, been at swords drawn, but more recently her younger son, Gaston d’Orléans (see fig. 4), was known to be waiting in the wings to succeed his often seriously ill and childless brother. By 1626, with Gaston now age eighteen, many of the great nobles saw their interests aligned with “Monsieur” but found that Richelieu stood in their way. At Gaston’s death in 1660, his funeral oration was suppressed because of the objections of his nephew Louis XIV, but a summary later found in the archives emphasized that Gaston had worked to “maintain the liberty of the people without damaging the authority of the prince.”41 “The people” indicated the political classes of France, both the discontented nobles and the peuple who sat in the third estate, including Descartes’s relatives.

As a member of “the people,” Descartes was a close observer of various aristocratic types, and what he later wrote might apply to the Gaston–Richelieu conflict. He would comment on how self-esteem is a principal part of wisdom, arising chiefly from generosity of spirit. People who truly possess generosity therefore think well of others, are usually the “most humble,” and “are naturally led to do great deeds,” while at the same time they never undertake what they cannot perform. Armed with an accurate sense of self-worth, they “are always perfectly courteous, gracious and obliging to everyone.” That was the persona of Monsieur. But unfortunately, many of the great fell into the trap of vanity, which “is always a vice.” They did so because “flattery is so common everywhere.”42 It made for viciousness. Such was the view of Richelieu, surrounded only by his subservient creatures, held by the discontented. Since remaining humble and generous in the face of constant flattery was no easy task, the vainglorious often pushed themselves forward and forced events to obtain personal advantage, bringing havoc in their wake.

As long as Gaston remained without a wife, many aristocrats entertained hopes of establishing a dynastic alliance with the royal line through marriage, increasing Monsieur’s ability to build a large network of clients seeking his favor. Richelieu therefore wanted the prince married off to minimize his power as an object for intrigue. The plan, in keeping with Marie de Medici’s desires, was to marry Gaston to the young and wealthy heiress Marie de Bourbon, duchesse de Montpensier; that would also keep the duchesse out of the hands of one of Richelieu’s adversaries, Louis de Bourbon, comte de Soissons, who claimed that he and she had been betrothed. There is a possibility that the younger Descartes himself had some opinion about the matter, for among the duchesse’s titles was Lord of Châtellerault, presumably giving her some interest in the lieutenant general’s post that he was just then considering.

But in response to Richelieu’s plan, a group of the great nobles decided that it was finally time to act against the minister, and they plotted his assassination.43 One of the chief movers in the drama held great estates in Brittany: Marie de Rohan, duchesse de Chevreuse, a distant claimant to the throne herself. Marie de Rohan was not only one of the most brilliant and charismatic women of the time, but she was also the daughter of the eminent Montbazon who had commanded the funeral procession that carried the heart of Henri IV to Descartes’s school. Marie was a confidant of both the queen mother, Marie de Medici, and the queen, Anne of Austria (see fig. 5). Not many years earlier, Marie and one of her lovers, Henry Rich, had arranged a private meeting between the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Anne that allowed Buckingham to pledge his love, causing much public consternation. Then, while in England, Marie so scandalized the court by her behavior that Richelieu let it be known that she was a liability, although her marriage to the duc de Chevreuse meant her person could not be touched; she in turn openly rounded on Richelieu. Marie and her conspirators among the aristocrats now saw an opportunity to do away with the cardinal and perhaps even (it was rumored) depose Louis and wed Gaston to the much-neglected Queen Anne, at last also giving the hand of Marie de Bourbon, duchesse de Montpensier, to Soissons and so generally consolidating the power of the greats over the crown. Some of Marie de Rohan’s adherents included some of the highest-ranking nobles in the land: the half-brothers of Louis, the duc and the chevalier de Vendôme (the latter of whom was the royal governor of Brittany); the ducs de Nevers, Longueville, Condé, and Rohan; and of course the comte de Soissons.

Another plotter and yet another of Marie’s personal conquests, Henri de Talleyrand, the young comte de Chalais and master of the king’s wardrobe, joined rather late in the game. As he was drawn in, he grew frightened at the possible consequences, consulting his uncle, a knight of Malta, who insisted that to save his own life, his nephew had to confess all to Richelieu. He did. Richelieu quickly launched further secret investigations and employed imprisonment and torture to unravel the intended coup, consolidating his own grip on power.

After the plot was discovered, Cardinal Richelieu (see fig. 6) gained the complete support of the king. Gaston’s former preceptor, the great maréchal (marshal) Jean-Baptiste d’Ornano, was arrested on May 3, 1626, and died in the dungeons of Vincennes in the autumn, rumored to have been poisoned; on June 13 the king’s half-brothers Vendôme were also arrested and confined to prison, where one of them, Alexandre, would also die (in early 1629). The king and his court traveled to Brittany for the summer to personally oversee the loyalties of a region that might have risen against them, and it soon appeared that they regained control. But Richelieu discovered that Chalais continued to meet in private with Gaston, suggesting that the cabal continued. On July 8 Chalais, too, was arrested and, threatened with torture, made confessions that implicated other plotters, although he later retracted his testimony, saying that he had given it in return for a pardon. The king subsequently awarded Richelieu a permanent guard of fifty men—setting up the rivalries between various armed units at court that Dumas exploits so well in The Three Musketeers—while Richelieu took the occasion to force the marriage of Gaston and Montpensier (which took place on August 5, in Nantes). Shortly after Chalais’s arrest, Richelieu also established a special tribunal to dispose of the count. It was Richelieu’s first use of a kangaroo court, a method that the cardinal would in the future employ from time to time to spread fear among his enemies.

The special tribunal was staffed by members of the parlement of Brittany, including Joachim Descartes, who was listed as the third most senior member of the eleven-person court.44 They were officially called into session in Nantes on August 5 and sat for the first time on August 11. After taking depositions from various conspirators and deposing Chalais himself, they declared his guilt on August 18. He was to be executed the next day. Some of the comte’s friends made an attempt to preserve him by smuggling the executioner out of town, but another prisoner was promised his liberty if he would do the deed. Then the executioner’s sword disappeared. Another was volunteered from the crowd. But it was apparently not sharp and, coupled with the performance of an amateur, Chalais was left bleeding and screaming in pain, still alive after twenty strokes. His neck was finally struck from his body by repeated hammer blows against a cooper’s adze. Queen Anne herself barely avoided imprisonment or worse.45 Others slipped away. In the case of the duchesse, she fled to the independent duchy of Lorraine, finding refuge in her husband’s family.

We do not know what either Joachim or René thought of the business, but it was nothing if not ugly, and it must have touched them both—especially if the distant son had friends among the nobility who were unhappy with the cardinal, which, as we shall see, was likely.

René returned to Paris and did not pursue the government post. One wonders, too, about whether the event contributed to the father’s resignation of his seat in the parlement a year later in favor of his son, Joachim II.46 But the elder Joachim soon also went to the trouble of obtaining a further letter of honor from the king.47

Aristocratic Paris

It might seem odd that Descartes apparently became loosely associated with the anti-Richelieu faction in the late 1620s. But many great nobles and their followers who were loyal to the monarchy in the 1610s, when Descartes first spent time in Paris, would later oppose the cardinal. In later years, Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637) gives some autobiographical hints about his first encounters with politics, although he is very cautious. His main point is that “as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters.” Instead, he resolved “to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world.” For the rest of his youthful days, then, he spent his time “travelling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situation which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as derive profit from it.”48 Descartes had been a talented student who had earned the ability to read more or less anything in his school’s library,49 and his excellent preparation allowed him to understand and comment on whatever he wished later in life. But for the years following school he paints a youthful rebellion and the search for experience of the world, together with trying to make sense of it all.

He may have been living in Paris as early as 1613, at the age of seventeen, a common enough age to be sent into the world. Beforehand, in Rennes his father had provided him with further training in riding a warhorse and handling weapons, suggesting that—like Dumas’s D’Artagnan—he saw his future among the young noble retainers of one of the great houses.50 The key word in Descartes’s own summary of his earliest activities, then, is courts. According to Baillet, Descartes had wished to join the company (troupes) around the young king.51 But Baillet also apologizes retrospectively for the father’s fault in allowing his son to reside in the city with only a valet (i.e., without a tutor or chaperone), suggesting that he was investing only the minimum in his distant son’s upbringing. Without connections, Descartes would have to work his way into one of the groups around the court by proving his worth. He certainly seems to have found companions. Apparently Descartes was skilled at the gaming tables, and Baillet is clear that the young and handsome Descartes took great pleasure in music and poetry as well. His nights must have been full.

But Baillet also comments that Descartes’s companions became concerned about how he frequently absented himself from their divertissements, making them wonder whether he had a secret life or even worrying that he had returned to Brittany or had gone with the court to Guyenne for the exchange of brides between the French and Spanish kings. One absence might be explained by Descartes serving his uncle Brochard during his time in Paris for the Estates-General. But one might also wonder whether Baillet is hinting about how the young cavalier traveled among the great cloud of courtiers to southwestern France for the royal marriage in late 1615 a few months later. It would have been an opportunity to work his way into circles around the young king. But apparently he had impressed his uncle, too, for on the court’s return to Paris they traveled through Poitiers early in 1616, where Descartes must have stopped for a few months of further study, since the now twenty-year-old Descartes collected his law degree and license in November, dedicating his thesis to Brochard.52 According to Baillet, the young man then returned to Paris during the Christmas season of 1616, when his Parisian friends welcomed him “as merrily as they possibly could.”53

In other words, during his late teens Descartes was most probably acting like others of his kind, busying himself with rounds of visiting and socializing, and perhaps swordplay, looking for the main chance to attach himself to one of the groups around the great persons of the day. He would have been running risks, however. For while the courtly life could be pleasurable for anyone, without the routines of officeholding it could also be exhausting and confrontational. The personal and political were so intertwined as to be indistinguishable at times, as the governing words for proper manners indicated: savoir-vivre and savoir-faire (ways of knowing how to live well) were put into action by politesse (politeness), etymologically related to politique (political). Codes of honor and orders of chivalry were held in high esteem. But authority depended not only on place and rank, and inherited networks of familiarity established over generations, but on personal charisma as well. Prince or Princess “Charming” exercised a kind of magical power over the spirits of those nearby. Conversation was a form of intercourse in which emotional and sexual webs could be woven, loyalties tested, and opinions weighed. Speech required wit and discretion, and dissimulation was an art practiced by most, allowing one to say only what was diverting or, if necessary, words that were truthful but suggestive of agreement when there were differences.54 Power over others could be conveyed by displays of confidence, the studied nonchalance that the Italians called sprezzatura, never seeming to worry but giving with an open hand and laughing at danger and threat, always displaying spirit.

Like others of his kind, Descartes carefully observed in those around him any signs of conflict between authentic feeling and calculation. In his last published work, on the passions, he noted how expressions of the eyes indicate every feeling, although it was almost impossible to describe those slight but meaningful movements. Facial expressions were almost as difficult to scrutinize and control. Some, however, could be managed, such as wrinkling of the forehead or movements of the nose and lips, which with practice could be made voluntary. “In general the soul is able to change facial expressions, as well as the expressions of the eyes, by vividly feigning a passion which is contrary to the one it wishes to conceal. Thus we may use such expressions to hide our passions as well as to reveal them.” The deep responses, which arise from the seat of the passions, the heart, via the blood—such as going pale or blushing, or trembling—were virtually impossible to control even by the most practiced, but with polish, courtiers could act their parts without revealing themselves.55

Even well-placed persons, both men and women, lived with daily frictions. They were surrounded by others from their rising until their retiring, needing to see that subordinates carried out their duties correctly and otherwise working the scene with smiles, scowls, or icy distancing so as to distribute love and fear appropriately. Any perceived slight from an equal had to be confronted immediately and sharply, or else it might become a festering wound assuaged only by innuendo, backstabbing, and poisoned chalices. Given the latter risk, the loyalty of kitchen staff and apothecaries, among others, required constant checks. Peers sometimes also required a slap in the face: hundreds died each year in sword duels, including many of the court favorites. Even a noblewoman, Madame de Saint-Balmont, of Lorraine, became known as an adept at swordplay.56 Louis XIII attempted to prohibit the settling of affairs of honor in such ways by enacting a law in 1626—and by making an example by executing the powerful noble François de Montmorency-Bouteville in 1627 after he dueled on the grounds of the Palace Royale—but with only limited effect. Whether high-ranking or not, then, one had to be constantly on guard. Various authors have commented on Descartes’ thin skin, his quick and vehement responses to any hint of disrespect even from old friends, but in this he was acting like others of his class. Honor and valor demanded it.

There would be daily times for religious observance, too, and for the nobility, at least, further opportunities for hunting, visiting behind doors, engaging in handiwork, and meal taking, together with attendance at weekly concerts and balls. The pleasures of gambling and drinking, and lovemaking, along with lighthearted and witty conversation, certainly focused attention. Those who lived after dark could afford candles and torches, and they decked themselves with jewels that sparkled in reflected light: in the sixteenth century, European jewelers had learned how to cut gems into facets. It is estimated that early in the reign of Louis XIII, the staffing of the royal households (king, queen, and queen mother), with their kitchens, halls, guardrooms, stables and kennels, courtyards, chapels, and rooms public and private employed well over two thousand people.57 Such numbers do not count those serving in the royal government and armed forces, nor guests and visitors. When in the early 1560s the court set out for a long period of traveling through France, more than ten thousand people accompanied the royal family.58 The greater nobles had comparable suites, and comparable governments and troops at arms, according to their rank and wealth. Lesser gentlemen and gentlewomen often attended on the greats at public events or in the public rooms in their households, sharing information and rumor with one another, receiving the hospitality of their hosts and hostesses while also trying to earn their recognition and favor.

Any routines were constantly interrupted by important days of the religious calendar and business year, memorial days such as birthdays and saint’s days, and even by changes in the weather and public events, whether executions or stage shows. Some events were unplanned, as when epidemic disease or armed conflict devastated a community, but others were occasions for lavish celebration. For instance, in 1612 Marie de Medici decided to commemorate the contracted double marriage negotiated between her family and Spain with magnificent gaieties, including jousts held at the Place Royale. Lists (double tracks down which men on horses carrying spears charged at each other) were constructed that stretched more than two hundred and forty feet, surrounded by platforms rising more than 12 feet in height to give spectators (estimated at ten thousand persons) a good view; in the middle stood a pavilion for Their Majesties, draped in the most expensive fabrics. The duc de Guise, the duc de Nevers, and the marquis de Bassompierre organized the action, which was made up of more than five hundred men and two hundred horses, all clothed and caparisoned in silver cloth and scarlet velvet. The jousting continued for three days, from nine in the morning until six in the evening, followed each evening by artillery fire, fireworks, and allegorical processions. It cost each of the sponsors at least fifty thousand crowns: princely sums. The days afterward were occupied by balls, banquets, and tilting at the rings. Then the court moved on to Fontainebleau to receive the Spanish delegation with properly magnificent entertainment there as well.59

Only the very great could sustain expenditures of this kind for long, despite the exploitation of their many estates, without resorting to wartime seizure or profiteering. Consequently, the oppression of ordinary people in the period has become famous, and the “population decline” in many parts of seventeenth-century Europe is simply an abstract way of referring to a collective phenomenon that at a personal level was terrifying, with more children and adults dying miserably than infants surviving. What was once called “the crisis of the seventeenth century” has recently been expanded into a vision of a period of worldwide catastrophe.60 While central Europe would be especially hard-hit by the Thirty Years War, France was traumatized by continued conflict between various nobles and the king, fierce continuing religious warfare, and frequent desperate uprisings.

An example of the consequences of war and disease can be found in a letter from France written by the famous physician and anatomist William Harvey, who late in the summer of 1630 was accompanying one of the English king’s young favorites, the Duke of Lennox, from Dieppe to Aubigny before heading on to Paris. In his letter Harvey makes a dark joke about being unable to find even “a dog, crow, kite, Raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomize” in a bleak landscape. Everything had been eaten up. The sentence continues with a chilling remark: here there were “only some few miserable people, the relics of the war & the plague, where famine had made anatomies before I came.” Cannibalism? (It was known.) Sadly, “It is scarce credible in so rich, populous & plentiful countries as these were that so much misery, desolation & poverty & famine should [occur] in so short a time as we have seen.” He thought that France could not go on in this way, for “it is time to leave fighting when there is nothing to eat, nothing to be kept & gotten,” nothing but robbery.61 Perhaps he exaggerated. But on occasions when Louis XIII was told about the condition of his people, he sometimes fell to weeping. What could he do? The sinews of power, both armies and public display, required coercion and money, his debts were huge, and so his tax farmers had to search under every bed to find every penny. Almost no one lived in ease and comfort, with even the greatest scrambling for the next chance.

In such a world Descartes was unusual in apparently remaining masterless for most of his life. But masterlessness was a rare condition even among lesser nobles, for not serving someone of greater rank or means in person or through officeholding threatened vulnerability and poverty. Descartes’s reported absences from his friends may, then, have to do not only with traveling with the court and taking a law degree in Poitiers—which he kept so close that Baillet did not know of it—but with his attempts to get ahead by cultivating possible patrons. We know that about the time of his return to Paris, Descartes also became close to Claude Mydorge; Baillet says that they were “inseparable.”62 Ten years older than Descartes, Mydorge was one of the royal judges (conseillers) in the high court of the Grand Châtelet. Mydorge’s father held positions in Paris similar to Descartes’s father in Rennes, while his wife, Mademoiselle de la Haye—carrying the same name as the town where Descartes was born—was daughter of one of the most senior civil servants of the crown (a member of the court of auditors) and sister of the French ambassador to Constantinople. Mydorge himself later rose higher into the ranks of monarchical government, but he has come down to posterity as one of the foremost mathematicians of the period. One can well imagine that given their similar social backgrounds, the older judge, Mydorge, was acting as a friend and mentor to the newly graduated lawyer. Perhaps he also stimulated a serious early interest in mathematics in his young companion. Descartes’s absences from his other friends might therefore be well explained by his attentions to Mydorge. If through such personal patronage he also hoped to gain a position in the administration of the realm, that might explain why he was so discreet with his friends about how he was spending his time.

Or perhaps he was quietly making friends in many places. Baillet writes that this was the time that Descartes met the friar Marin Mersenne, with whom he would correspond frequently in later years. There are problems with this, however: Mersenne had also attended La Flèche but, being eight years older, probably had little to do with the younger student at school. Moreover, Mersenne had joined the Minim Friars in 1611 and between 1614 and 1618 was teaching in Nevers, causing later biographers to be doubtful about his meeting Descartes in Paris (although he could have visited from time to time). There is no reason to assume that they became well acquainted during Descartes’s first residence in Paris.

More likely, the period saw the beginning of Descartes’s friendship with Guez de Balzac, later known as an important literary figure and a rare early correspondent of his. Balzac also came from the same social rank as Descartes—a family with claims to nobility but more like gentilhommes (gentlemen) in daily life—had been educated in a Jesuit college (in Poitiers), and was almost exactly the same age.63 They also had friends in common. By the end of the summer of 1615, Balzac had returned to Paris from The Netherlands, where he had gone with the poet and playwright Théophile de Viau after meeting Théophile’s troupe of players. His experience there may also have been what soon encouraged Descartes to head north, too.

While Mydorge understood officeholding Paris well, Balzac would have been a conduit to even higher reaches of society. Balzac’s family was in the service of Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, duc d’Épernon, a powerful nobleman on excellent terms with the queen regent and her allies. D’Épernon is sometimes accused of involvement in a conspiracy leading to Henri IV’s assassination, but he was certainly one of Marie de Medici’s strongest defenders in its aftermath, when she was striving to be accepted as the queen regent. In 1619 he would protect her further by freeing her from house arrest, making negotiations between her and her son possible. Those negotiations were carried out in Angoulême in the residence of the duc’s principal secretary, Balzac’s father. The younger Balzac himself entered the duke’s service in 1618 and would take up his pen on behalf of d’Épernon to paper over the duc’s actions on behalf of the queen mother so as to return him to the good graces of the king.64 Balzac is therefore likely to have been a helpful intermediary to the greats, introducing Descartes to the kind of circles around the queen regent who might have found a use for a discreet and talented young nobleman.

Libertine Paris

Baillet simply refers to Descartes’s friends and their divertissements. But if Descartes was associated with Balzac at the time, as is likely, it would also place the young Descartes in the circle around Marie le Jars de Gournay, Montaigne’s literary executor. She inherited the great Montaigne’s library and in turn left it to François La Mothe Le Vayer, who was not only an advocate in the parlement of Paris but one of the most famous of the libertins érudits (erudite libertines) as well.65 (He in turn married Mydorge’s niece.66) Gournay herself employed her pen on behalf of Henri IV and Marie de Medici, and she would continue to do so for their successors until her death in 1645 at the age of seventy-nine. On many afternoons some of the most distinguished intellectuals of the period would climb the steep and narrow stairs to her third-floor rooms: the informal male academies that were beginning to appear on the scene often met in their hosts’ libraries, whereas the less formally educated women hosted their guests in salons or even in their personal rooms.67 Gournay was on good terms with Théophile, and also with Balzac, who later engaged in a misogynist attack on one of her rivals, Charlotte des Ursins, vicomtesse d’Auchy (the mistress of the writer François de Malherbe).68 There are certainly echoes of Montaigne in Descartes’s later published works, not only in general ways such as his use of doubt and of the first person singular to explore and explain his world (and his refusal to become engaged in controversies about religious doctrine) but also in a passing reference to the cultures of cannibals and of China in his Discours that reminds one of Montaigne’s famous comments on the dignity of other cultures.69 Descartes is known to have been keen on poetry and literature. In later life he also happily accepted women as his intellectual equals. It is very possible, then, that the young Descartes attended Gournay’s salon with Balzac.

Descartes’s connection with Balzac would also place Descartes among the young libertines of Paris. The word libertine meant “freethinker,” although for critics it implied a life free from the strictures of any moral rules other than those for which a natural basis could be found: that is, many observers considered libertines irreligious and immoral. Yet both libertine ideas and behavior were common in Paris at the time. Even the model of courtliness, Amadis of Gaul, is full of knights bashing one another to pieces, secret potions and dark forests, people who turn out to be other than they appear, and beautiful women happy to indulge in mutual delight with their champions; there are many solemn vows, but there is hardly a priest or cross in sight, and no theological discussion. The fondness in the period for classical literature, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s epics, and Virgil’s account of the aftermath of the fall of Troy, also reinforced a sense that virtuous behavior could be found in many people, not only among the right kind of Christians. La Mothe Le Vayer’s Vertu des payens (On the Virtue of the Pagans, 1641) not only refused to condemn Socrates or Plato to the hellfires but expressed admiration for Confucius as well. And for those who were wary of worldly entanglements, neo-Stoic ethics were sweeping through Europe at the time, teaching that the chief goal of life, tranquility of mind (apatheia), could best be achieved by treating good and bad fortune as accidents to be overlooked rather than rewards or punishments to be grasped.70 None of these moral views concerned themselves with the afterlife.

But Descartes himself would later condemn Stoic apatheia as well as the methods used by the Stoics to “conquer” the passions.71 That would seem to place him among the followers of the materialistic philosophy of Epicurus, then flourishing thanks to the profound and wide influence of the great poem of his Roman follower Lucretius, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). Epicureanism taught that full acceptance of the world and its pleasures and pains provided a better model for moral behavior than renunciation.72 Freethinkers sometimes also accepted that it was moral to go beyond dissimulation to pretense, saying what you really wished in private but in public saying and behaving according to who was listening.73 While the opponents of Epicureanism argued that it taught nothing but an immoral pursuit of pleasure, its supporters found in its fundamental concern with the avoidance of pain a naturalistic foundation for ethical discipline and justice.74 Even followers of Aristotle could become powerful advocates of materialism, as at the University of Padua, where the sixteenth-century philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi promoted such views even though they could not offer reasons for the existence of an immortal soul, that problem being something for faith and religion rather than philosophy, he said. One of Pomponazzi’s materialist successors, Cesare Cremonini, openly declared that the soul died with the life of the body. Balzac would write of “le grand Cremonin.”75

Materialism implicitly undermined not only many tenets of Christian doctrine but also occultism and witchcraft. Giambatista della Porta wrote of “natural magic,” but new philosophers like him explained the strange operations of nature as due to hidden or yet unknown causes rather than to the intervention of spirits or demons, much less the devil. Pomponazzi, for instance, condemned the prosecution of witches. Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves, explained that even those people who freely confessed to witchcraft (the lamiae) were suffering from delusions, quoting Erasmus at length on “ecclesiastical gentleness” to advocate healing in such cases rather than punishment.76 The nearby region of The Netherlands would be one of the first to suppress the prosecution of witches.77 Descartes himself seems to have had relationships with the ruling family of the duchy of Lorraine, which was one of the hot spots for witch hunting, but the ducal family seems to have had nothing to do with the persecutions.78

In his own writings Descartes would retain a disciplined and meaningful silence on anything pertaining to belief in the active power of evil. He did famously evoke a “malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” when describing how he might imagine that the things he knew about the world were merely delusions or dreams “devised to ensnare my judgement.” But he makes it plain that this is a kind of literary device, a self-willed investigation of his own mind to explore the limits of doubt, not something that could be real. “In this human life we are often liable to make mistakes about particular things, and we must acknowledge the weakness of our nature.” Yet “the exaggerated doubts” of his exercise “should be dismissed as laughable,” he wrote in his Meditations. The purpose was to show that “no sane person” ever doubted that “there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on,” all derived from God’s creation.79 If God acted according to natural law alone, making the actions of arbitrary or evil spirits inadmissible, then demonic imaginings were due simply to inattention, error, or deliberate fiction. The latter possibility would not amuse many sincere believers, but eventually the refusal of learned judges to consider accusations of witchcraft in their courts would snuff out the imprisonments, brutal tortures, and grisly executions that marked the craze.80

The chief purveyor of ideas for the esprits forts (strong spirits), as they called themselves, was Giulio Cesare Vanini, who spoke for materialist Epicureanism in the France of Descartes’s youth. Vanini had been a priest, was expelled from orders, and was received back into the Catholic Church before fleeing to Lyon and Paris to avoid the Inquisition. Finding refuge in the household of the grand François de Bassompierre—not only a libertine but a good friend of the young king and Marie de Medici—Vanini felt confident enough to publish his two major works, the Amphitheatrum (Amphitheater, 1615) and the even more radical De admirandis naturae (The Marvels of Nature, 1616). By quoting at length from many diverse ancient and Christian authors, ventriloquizing their words to advance his own views—he would, for instance, give in detail an argument of an atheist and then conclude by saying that he had refuted it elsewhere (when he had not)—Vanini raised doubts about the existence of divine providence. That led by implication to the rejection of miracles and the immortality of the soul, even the authority of scripture. Among his further conclusions were that “Nature is God,” that human behavior is environmentally determined so that sin is a product of poor health, and that humans have emerged from nature and are no more than animals responding to the world via their senses.81 To his freethinking friends he was a pitiless enemy of taboos, prejudice, and dogma. Recent studies of Vanini’s life and work insist that he was neither an atheist, nor philosophically innovative, nor even a martyr to philosophy, but that he was a person of great learning with a refined and captivating way of speaking, and one of the more important voices in France of the school of Padua.82

But many considered Vanini and other intellectual libertines to be leading their sheep toward atheism. Even the great Erasmus could be condemned by the conservatives as “a falcon of atheism” for writing about the similarities among religions.83 There were also rumors of a treatise circulating underground called “The Three Impostors,” which argued that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—like some of the pagans before them—had tricked their followers into believing in their religious teachings as a way of seizing worldly power. When the anti-Aristotelian Dominican Tommaso Campanella was imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1595, one of the lines of questioning put to him by his torturers was whether he had authored that infamous work: he replied that it had been circulating for thirty years before he was born (putting it back to before 1540).84 Other rumors associated the work’s origins with the great twelfth-century Andalusian anti-Aristotelian philosopher known in Europe as Averroes (ibn Rušd); or his somewhat younger contemporary, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II; or the fourteenth-century poet, Boccaccio; or the infamous early sixteenth-century Niccolò Machiavelli; or the printer, Étienne Dolet (burned at the stake in Paris in 1546); or the Aragonese Michael Servetius (burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553); or the ex-Capuchin monk, Bernardino Ochino (who died in Moravia in 1564 while fleeing persecution). We only have good evidence for the book’s existence from the later seventeenth century, when the basic premise that religion was simply an empty but necessary political tool came to be associated with such “atheists” as Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. But one of Descartes’s mathematical friends, Claude Hardy, was reported to have held in his hands a printed copy of De Tribus impostoribus sometime earlier.85

At the time of Descartes’s arrival in Paris, then, philosophical libertinism and purported atheism were sweeping through France, upsetting the authoritarians. It was not the kind of movement that agreed on a common set of teachings but instead took critique of received opinion as its most important strategy, coupled with methods of hiding one’s true views because of the dangers of speaking otherwise.86 Because one could speak honestly only with a few trusted friends behind doors, radical free thought often held common opinion in contempt, but in Paris a general libertinism in thought and behavior was common among those of Descartes’s status.87

The mood in Paris would change. Following the seizure of the throne in 1617 by the devout Louis XIII—to which we will come in a moment—a period of powerful cultural reaction set in, with many of the leaders of the libertines being slandered, prohibited from speaking or publishing, or even threatened with their lives and liberty. Mersenne was among the many who wrote against them to bring France back to the true faith, later declaring that Paris was threatened by fifty thousand atheists.88 Vanini himself was arrested in 1618 by the city government of Toulouse and charged with atheism, blasphemy, impieties, and other crimes, one of which was “bringing to light again the book intitled ‘Of the Three Impostors.’”89 His execution on February 9, 1619, proceeded by tying him to the stake, cutting out his tongue, strangling him with a cord, and burning his body so as to scatter his ashes to the winds (to prevent his resurrection at the end-time). Witnesses differed as to whether he died a screaming coward or a self-possessed gentleman, although they all remarked on the unusually strong bellowing he gave out when he refused to offer up his tongue voluntarily and the executioner seized it with tongs and sliced it from his jaw. In 1623, proceedings would also be launched against Balzac’s friend Théophile for obscenity and blasphemy. He would be burned in effigy but later spend two years in prison before living his last under the protection of Henri II, duc de Montmorency, an associate of Gaston d’Orléans.90 In a lesser but important action at the time, Descartes would defend Balzac himself from charges of immorality, acting as his champion.

But that was yet to come. In 1616, no one could see such a turn ahead. Balzac was certainly an Epicurean at the time.91 And Balzac in turn had been close to Théophile, one of the intellectual leaders among the young libertines of the court, who published poetry that verged on the pornographic.92 Descartes himself must have known all about the scandalous poet since not only had Balzac spent several years traveling with him but yet another of Descartes’s intimate friends, the abbé Claude Picot, was close to one of Théophile’s lovers, another poet (and former classmate of Descartes), Jacques Vallée, sieur des Barreaux. Among other matters, Théophile and Barreaux discussed the philosophy of Pietro La Sena, a true atheist.93 Théophile’s Le Cabinet satyrique (The Cabinet of a Satyr, 1618), reprinted five times, would later be pointed out as a prominent example of obscenity and blasphemy. A copy given to Queen Anne by Marie de Rohan was said to have led the former to become a flirt.94 The one passage of poetry quoted by Descartes in his letters is from Théophile.95

For the moment, Descartes lived enjoyably among his friends, many of them libertine, probably visiting Gournay’s salon, consulting with Mydorge, and seeking possible patrons among the rulers of the nation. He was keeping his options open. But in seeking a patron, Descartes was entering the rough and tumble of deadly earnest struggles for power. His hopes would soon be dashed through no fault of his own.

A Political Education

In Baillet’s account, the narrative pauses following his comments about Descartes’s early period in Paris, and he begins a new chapter. He recalls the political struggles of the day, which amounted to a period of continuing struggle for influence. The arrest of the Prince de Condé in September 1616 had been only the most dramatic. According to Baillet, Descartes had to be careful not to appear to be a partisan of the maréchal D’Ancre, who was opposed by a number of the greats.96 Baillet further editorializes that serving among the opponents of the king would have been dishonorable. Descartes therefore thought of taking service with one of the king’s close allies, either the duc de Guise or the comte d’Auvergne, but finally decided on leaving and joined the army of Prince Maurits in the Dutch Republic. What Baillet is gesturing at—somewhat misleadingly by referring to the king—is that the young Descartes was seeking to serve one of the nobles near the heart of the royal court, then led by Her Majesty the Queen Regent, Marie de Medici, ruling in the name of Louis. Marie identified with a former queen of France, Blanche of Castile, who had held the kingdom until her son came of age (he became known as Saint Louis): she had Blanche’s portrait installed in her rooms and stated that her own son would be like that earlier holy king.97 But her son was about to topple her regency in a bloody seizure of power. When he did, Descartes fled.

The identities of the people Baillet mentions place Descartes in or near the governing elite. The person from whom he needed to keep his distance, the maréchal D’Ancre, is better known as Concini, a nobleman of Florence who had come to France with Marie de Medici and risen to great state due to her favors. It was commonly supposed that Concini had secured her patronage by marrying the chief of her suite of ladies-in-waiting, her most intimate confidante since childhood, Leonora Dori (known as Galigaï). Concini had subsequently bought his way into the French nobility by purchasing the marquisate of Ancre, and in 1613 the queen had handed him the baton of a marshal of France (chief military commander), hence the titles by which Baillet names him. Concini had in effect become the regent’s second in command, and possibly her de facto husband as well. Many of the great nobles despised him as an upstart who was ruining the kingdom for his own selfish ends. If Baillet says that Descartes had to be careful not to appear to be one of Concini’s men, he may be suggesting that some people had suspicions that he was one. The implication of Baillet’s report is that in seeking a position with the crown, Descartes had made himself known to some of the powerful, but given the circumstances, he needed to proceed with the utmost caution.

To avoid direct association with Concini, the young Descartes thought of serving with one of the other great nobles. One was the comte d’Auvergne: this would be Charles de Valois, better known by the title of duc d’Angoulême (a title he received later, in 1619). Charles was of royal blood, illegitimate son of King Charles IX and half-brother to Catherine de Balzac d’Entragues, Henri IV’s most powerful mistress. (She had received a written promise of marriage from the king that was set aside for political reasons when Henri wed Marie de Medici in 1600.) Catherine had regained Henri’s intimacy in 1604 and then plotted with her brother to obtain a declaration that one of her sons by Henri would succeed to the kingdom rather than Marie’s eldest son Louis. For this conspiracy Charles was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted by Henri to life in prison. Charles had recently gained his liberty (in June 1616) by obtaining the favor of the queen regent. His and Descartes’s paths would also cross from time to time during the next decade, especially in Germany but also at La Rochelle, where he initially commanded the royal army that the city fired on. Afterwards he continued to serve Richelieu loyally and led the French occupation of Lorraine. It would not be the relationship of a lifetime for Descartes, but in politics, even a few months can be transformative.

The other possibility was serving the duc de Guise, related to the Valois and whose interests seem to run through most of Descartes’s early life. Baillet is strangely ambiguous here—perhaps deliberately—since the title might refer to either of two brothers, sons of the famous duke and great military commander who had headed the Catholic League during the religious wars in France in the later sixteenth century. The numerous members of the Guise family originated from the independent principality of Lorraine, at the time nominally subordinate to the Holy Roman emperor. But from the early sixteenth century the family had also come to serve the neighboring dynasty, the Valois, and had been awarded the French title of duc de Guise by François I. One of them, Marie, married into the royal house of Scotland, and by King James V had a daughter also named Mary; Mary Stuart was in turn raised at the court of France, becoming the wife of King François II and after his early death returning to Scotland to take up her position as Mary Queen of Scots, having a child of her own. Since the king of England descended from her line, the Guises were considered close cousins of both the rulers of France and of England. They were one of the most powerful families of Europe.

Despite the policies of his father, late in the sixteenth century Guise’s eldest son, Charles, had helped secure the French throne for Henri IV in return for a huge sum of money and the governorship of Provence. He came to hold the position of grand master of France—head of the king’s household—and he was a firm supporter of Henri’s widow, Marie, the queen regent. His mother, Catherine of Cleves, was one of Marie de Medici’s most trusted ladies and would later loyally follow her into exile at Blois. Charles also became very friendly with the king’s younger brother, Gaston. But there is no evidence of Descartes’s path deliberately crossing the duke’s, while Charles had been an enemy of Balzac’s patron, d’Epernon, in 1595. So it is unlikely that he is the person meant by Baillet.

More probably, then, Baillet meant to refer to Claude de Guise, also known as Claude de Lorraine, prince of Joinville, more commonly known by the title he was granted by the ten-year-old Louis in 1612, duc de Chevreuse. Chevreuse long continued as one of Louis XIII’s favorites. He also later acted as Charles of England’s proxy at his wedding to Henrietta Maria and headed the delegation that brought her to London, becoming a knight of the garter before his return. In 1622 he accepted the hand of Marie de Rohan in marriage; one of his younger sisters, the Princess de Conti, became another favorite of Queen Anne. Given Baillet’s comment about how Descartes wished to join the king’s troops, and Chevreuse’s close relationship with Louis, he is the most likely candidate. In either case, Baillet associates Descartes with a lineage connected to Lorraine, and to Marie de Rohan, which helps explain some events in his future.

Perhaps a further hint lies in the later report by Descartes’s friend and patron, Le Vasseur, that in the mid-1620s Descartes wore clothes of green taffeta.98 Green was also the color in which Queen Anne of Austria dressed the men of her household, and the color worn by Gaston d’Orléans.99 In the later 1620s, many friends of Descartes would be in the circle around Gaston—and in 1632 Gaston secretly married into the house of Lorraine over his brother’s objections. In later years, after Descartes’s death, the name of Anne, as queen regent of France (and mother of the future king Louis XIV) featured prominently on Descartes’s tomb in Stockholm.100 In 1666 she sent one of her trusted confidants to Stockholm to recover Descartes’s body and bring it back for burial in his beloved Paris: that was done under the watchful eyes of Hugues de Terlon, a knight of Saint John. Anne also avidly collected holy relics, and although Terlon was allowed to keep Descartes’s right index finger, he may have done so to pass it to her, since it does not figure in the register of his possessions at his death.101 If, as is probable, Descartes later came to be a supporter of Anne of Austria or Gaston, that may well have been facilitated by the connection established in 1616–17 when he sought a relationship with one of the ducs de Guise, especially if it were Chevreuse, since his wife, Marie de Rohan, later actively plotted against Richelieu on behalf of her intimates Gaston and Anne. Such connections would explain Descartes’s break with his father at the time of the execution of the comte de Chalais. The house of Lorraine had deep interests in the empire, too, where Descartes would be found in the early 1620s.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Whatever the details—which might one day be recovered—Baillet indicates that Descartes was seeking patronage among some of the great nobles who were close to Marie de Medici and the young Louis, but who were not close to Concini. We also know that Descartes’s first period in Paris came to an end in the spring of 1617. As Baillet delicately puts it, an “accident” occurred at the end of April that dashed Descartes’s hopes for further advancement: Marie de Medici’s son seized power from his mother in a palace coup.

Together with his favorite and lover, Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes, Louis decided to get Concini out of the way. On the morning of April 27, 1617, as Concini was making his way through a crowded room at the palace, the captain of the royal guards, the Baron de Vitry, informed him he was under arrest. When hands were laid on him, Concini shouted for help, at which point he was shot several times in the head and face and run through with swords; the mutilated body was stripped and hidden behind a staircase, and in the night it was secretly buried in a church under the organ. But a “mob” gained knowledge of where it was, broke into the church, dragged the body through Paris, and hung it by the feet on the Pont Neuf (which had been constructed by Henri IV), where they further desecrated the remains. Galigaï, Concini’s wife and Marie de Medici’s childhood friend, was also arrested, imprisoned, accused of sorcery, and beheaded and then burned in the Place de Grève. Marie de Medici’s palace guards were replaced by Vitry’s men. Distraught, and understandably feeling herself at risk, on May 3 the queen mother departed for the Château de Blois, where she would in effect continue under house arrest until fleeing with the help of D’Épernon. For the rest of her life, her relationship with her son would be fraught at best, despite several attempts to patch things up, with eventual death in impoverished exile. All Concini’s rich estates in France and Italy ended up in the hands of the duc de Luynes. Concini’s supporters were attacked by mobs or banished.

In this moment of deadly topsy-turvy, anyone who might be thought to have been a partisan of Concini’s, or even someone who had aimed for patronage from the queen regent and her noble supporters, had to be extremely cautious. A new regime was muscling in. Descartes left Paris immediately, more or less at the same time as the former queen regent. The great nobles who had supported Marie de Medici were out of favor and running for cover, while there was enough of a suggestion about how Descartes had even been one of Concini’s partisans for Baillet to have to deny it. Writing for readers who were living during the reign of Louis XIV, son of Louis XIII, Baillet would not have wished anyone to imagine that his subject had been caused any difficulties by the royal coup. As Baillet noted, that would imply disloyalty. He therefore avoided any discussion of the consequences of the coup for a young man who had been seeking to advance among those around the queen regent. Instead, Baillet insisted that Descartes had already decided to seek service with Maurits of Nassau in The Netherlands and had even collected his baggage in anticipation of departure before the “accident.” The death of Concini simply did not change his resolution. Within a few days he was headed north.102

Dramatic events affect many people at once. Even a young would-be courtier such as Descartes, just turned twenty-one years old, was touched by the coup and would have to seek his fortune elsewhere. Whatever the details of Descartes’s early connections and motivations, we can be sure that he had obtained an excellent education in the dangerous world of the French court. He was good at cards, but the hand he had been dealt would make for no easy game. It would cause him to remain on the move for the rest of his life, mainly abroad.