The Close Friends of Descartes

Among the advantages of life in colleges, one finds the opportunities they offer for forming connections and habits with those who share the same community of studies and daily life.

It is in colleges that the seeds of the strongest and most lasting friendships are sown.

Often even the animosities, jealousies, and enmities of children turn into benevolence and friendship, once reason and the passage of years have corrected what may have been defective in the memory of having lived together.

Descartes made a lot friends at La Flèche.

• But only 2-3 have remained known to us.

1. Chauveau

Descartes writes:

“I once knew” he wrote in a letter of 1641, “a M. Chauveau at La Flèche who was from Melun. I would be glad to know if it is not the same one who teaches mathematics in Paris. But I believe he became a Jesuit, and he and I were very great friends.”

Be that as it may regarding Father Chauveau the Jesuit, of whom we have no knowledge, it can be remarked that M. Descartes was bound by friendship with M. Chauveau the mathematician from the publication of his first works until his death; and he was still speaking of him in 1649 as someone he had conversed with in Paris about various points on which he did not agree with M. de Roberval.

2. Father Marin Mersenne

Father Rapin called him Descartes’s “resident” in Paris.

Mersenne was seven and a half years older than him, having been born on September 8, 1588, in the small village of Oizé in Maine.

He had already made considerable progress in his humanities studies at the college in Le Mans, when the news of the establishment of the college of La Flèche led his parents—who lived only three leagues away—to send him there.

He came to study there almost at the same time as Descartes, and learned rhetoric, philosophy, and mathematics. The difference in age and studies did not allow them, no doubt, to form close ties while at the college; and it is probable that when Mersenne left to study at the Sorbonne, they went quite a long time without hearing from one another. But the friendship they maintained afterward, in a correspondence interrupted only by the death of one of them, had its foundation in their first acquaintance at La Flèche.

3. La Flèche René Le Clerc

He was later bishop of Glandèves, who, like him, was among the first students of the new college.

But he entered already quite advanced in age, like Father Mersenne, and we do not see that Descartes had particular relations with this prelate in later years.

Descartes was in his first year of philosophy when the news of the King’s death suspended the exercises of the college.

This good prince, in giving his house of La Flèche to the Jesuits, had wished that his heart, that of the Queen, and of all his successors should be brought there after death and preserved in their church. Thus, the time that passed between this sad news and the transfer of the King’s heart—about fifteen days—was devoted to public prayers, funeral compositions in verse and prose, and preparations for the reception of this precious deposit.

On Saturday, the 15th of May, the day after the King’s death, Sieur de La Varenne warned Father Coton to come to the Louvre, where the body was being embalmed, in order to take the heart, which Father Jaquinot, superior of the house of Saint-Louis, received from the hands of the Prince de Conti. The heart remained in the private chapel of the Jesuits of Paris for three days; then, on the eve of Ascension, it was displayed to the people in their church, where it stayed until the Monday after Pentecost. On that day, May 31st, Father Armand, the Provincial, accompanied by twenty Jesuits and several lords of the court, transported the heart to La Flèche. There, a large crowd from the surrounding country had assembled to receive it.

According to the ceremonial arrangements made at the college, the provost with his archers went out first to meet the heart. Then followed twelve hundred students of the college, the Recollect fathers, nineteen parishes from outside, followed by that of the town itself. The Jesuits of the royal college, each wearing a surplice and holding a candle, came next. Then Sieur de La Varenne with Baron de Sainte-Suzanne his son, and twenty-four young gentlemen pensioners studying at the college, among whom was Descartes. After them came the officers of justice and the townsmen, all carrying lit white torches. The entire procession went out of the town to meet the heart in a large field. The Paris Jesuits joined those of La Flèche, and Father Armand took the heart, which had been placed until then on a cushion. Preceded by a herald of arms, accompanied by two officers and twelve guards holding pistols, and supported by two men holding his arms, he bore it into the church of Saint Thomas, where the service was held and Father Coton gave the funeral oration.

Afterward, the Duke of Montbazon took the heart from Father Armand and carried it to the Jesuit college, where in the middle of the great courtyard a triumphal arch had been erected, 27 feet high and 26 wide. The entrance was 10 feet wide and 18 high. It led into the great hall draped in velvet, serving as a chapel ever since. The college was entirely draped in mourning, like the town gate and the church of Saint Thomas. In addition to the coats of arms, skulls, tears, and silver fleurs-de-lis, there were emblems, mottoes, and epigrams, to the composition of which it is hard to believe that Descartes, with his talent and inclination for verse, did not contribute.

At the two corners of the altar were two gilded columns, with an arch rising from their capitals to the ceiling, crossed by a cornice, from the middle of which sprang a golden ornament with branches, supporting the King’s heart. The herald, mounted on the platform, received it from the Duke of Montbazon, raised it for the whole assembly to see, and after the triple cry, placed it on the ornament, where it was to remain until the urn, to be set before the high altar of the church, was completed.

This ceremony took place on June 4th, and it was decreed in the town hall of La Flèche that on the same day every year a solemn procession should be held from the church of Saint Thomas to the Jesuits, followed by a solemn service for the King’s soul, and that the day would be treated as a holiday, closing the law courts, college classes, and town shops.

The following Monday, June 7th, classes resumed at the college, and Descartes continued the study of moral philosophy, which his professor had begun dictating in April. Logic, which he had studied throughout the previous winter, was the part of philosophy to which he later testified he had applied himself most in college. One must have acquired as much authority as he later did in the world to make credible the account he gave of his progress in logic. He was not yet fourteen, and already he related everything he studied to his goal of knowing whatever might be useful for life. Even then, he perceived that syllogisms and most of the other lessons of scholastic logic served less to learn the things one wishes to know than to explain to others what one already knows—or even to speak without judgment of what one does not know, which is the effect attributed to the art of Raymond Lully.

He nevertheless recognized in logic many rules that are very true and very good; but he found them mixed with others that he judged harmful or superfluous, and he had as much trouble separating them as a sculptor might have in drawing a Diana or a Minerva out of a block of marble not yet shaped. From all that great number of precepts he received from his teachers, he retained only four rules, which later served as the foundation of his new philosophy:

1. To accept nothing as true that he did not clearly know to be so.
2. To divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible, in order to resolve it better.
3. To conduct his thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest objects to know, and ascending step by step to the more complex.
4. To make thorough enumerations so as to omit nothing.

The moral philosophy he studied at the college was not entirely useless to him later in life. Perhaps it was to the effects of this study that we may attribute the desires he had, in times of hesitation, to devote his whole life to the science of living well with God and with his neighbor, renouncing all other knowledge. At the very least he had learned from it to regard the writings of the ancient pagans as superb palaces built only on sand and mud. He noticed even then that in their moral philosophy, the ancients extolled virtues very highly, making them appear more estimable than anything else in the world; but they did not teach enough how to recognize them, and what they called by so fair a name was often nothing more than insensibility, pride, despair, or even parricide.

Yet we do not know whether it was to the scholastic moral philosophy of his teachers that he owed the four maxims in which he summed up his own. The first was to obey the laws and customs of his country, holding firmly to the religion in which God had made him to be born. The second, to be firm and resolute in his actions, and to follow with constancy even the most doubtful opinions once he had decided on them, as if they were most certain. The third, to strive to conquer himself rather than fortune, to change his desires rather than the order of the world, and to persuade himself that nothing is entirely within our power but our own thoughts. The fourth, to choose, if he could, the best occupation among those that engage men in this life, and to resolve, without blaming others, upon that of cultivating his reason and advancing as much as possible in the knowledge of truth.