Descartes at Breda

Descartes was among troops who seemed to be employed only against the Spanish.

He did not have much part in the movements that were made in the interior of Holland during that time, regarding the religious controversies that arose between the Arminians and the Gomarists.

The Arminians were supported by the states of the particular provinces of Holland, West Friesland, Utrecht, and Overijssel; by several magistrates, and above all by the attorney general Barneveldt, a person of striking merit, whom they intended to have pass for their leader and protector. The Gomarists had for them the states general, Prince Maurice, the nobility, the military, and the common people.

Three months before Descartes arrived in Holland, a popular emotion had risen against the Arminians, whose fury had obliged them to take their securities throughout the course of that year. By a deliberation of the fourth day of August, they raised soldiers in several places in the provinces. These soldiers were called “waiters”, and to make known the intentions of those who wanted to use them, they wore neither the livery of the Prince of Orange on their clothes, nor his arms on their flags.

This enterprise obliged Prince Maurice, who had become Prince of Orange by the death of his brother, which occurred on February 20 of the year 1618, to go with troops from city to city, in the provinces, to remedy these disorders.

Descartes was not so subject to staying in Breda that he could not, in the capacity of a volunteer, follow this prince in all these runs.

But he preferred to stay with the garrison, either because he considered these troubles as a civil war, incapable of bringing him honor, or because he did not believe that it was an honest thing for him to meddle in this prince’s passion against Barneveldt, especially when it was only about the differences of a religion, to the parties of which he had no interest.

He did not abuse his leisure, but he used it to compose various writings during the absence of the Prince of Orange. The best known of these writings, and the only one from that time that has come down to us through the press, is his treatise on music. He wrote it in Latin, following the habit he had of conceiving and writing in this language what came into his mind. However, he worked on it only at the urgent requests of one of his friends who was then in Breda. He has not made this friend known to us; but we know that to give Mr. Beeckman, principal of the college of Dort, proofs of the friendship he had contracted with him the previous year, he was willing to communicate this small treatise to him, all the more willingly as Beeckman showed a particular inclination for music.

He nevertheless entrusted it to him only on the condition that he would not show it to anyone, for fear that it would become public, either by printing or by the multiplication of copies. God did not allow him to have this satisfaction. His enemies, having somehow recovered a rather defective copy several years later, and knowing what his anxiety and delicacy were on this point, wanted to cause him the displeasure of having it printed as they had it, in order to take revenge on him, in the most mortifying way in the world that one can imagine for an author.

But far from finding a matter of triumph in such a cowardly and unworthy conduct, they made it a new subject of mortification for themselves, and worked against their intention for the glory of their adversary, and for their own confusion. For it happened that the publication of this treatise, which they did not dare to expose during his lifetime, far from dishonoring his memory among mathematicians, earned him the admiration of all those who knew that it was the work of a young man.

This enhanced the price of the work, since he was then only 22 years old.

Some authors have written that he was then only twenty years old: but it is for not having known this circumstance; or if they have known it, they believed that the round number favored even more the design they had to make us admire this marvel.

A mathematician, already old and consumed in these kinds of studies, imagining that Mr. Descartes had renounced this work, to the point of letting his original perish, wanted to take advantage of his absence to do himself honor. While the author was on his travels or in Paris, this honest plagiarist showed a copy of the treatise written in his hand in Holland, to insinuate to everyone that he was the author of it; and he wrote about it everywhere with ostentation, as if it were a property that belonged to him.

The plagiarist, not having had enough skill to persuade the public of his assumption, took the side of then admitting that the work was by the young Descartes, but he tried to make people believe that he had a part in this treatise that a master can have in the work of a student who works under his direction. Mr. Descartes believed himself obliged to lower his vanity, to make him feel the wrong he had done by picking up for his own benefit a work that he had been willing to let fall, and to teach him how dishonest it was to want to acquire a reputation to the prejudice of the truth. But it is unfortunate for the memory of Mr. Beeckman that we cannot suspect anyone else of such an odious act. One had to be as disinterested and generous as Mr. Descartes to overlook this trait of ingratitude in a man who had learned from him what he had boasted of having taught him, and to give him back his friendship as before.

As long as Mr. Descartes lived, he was never able to consent to the desire of those who requested the publication of the small treatise. He regarded it only as a raw piece, and as the most imperfect of all the musical summaries.

But as soon as the news of his death was learned, it was put to the press in Utrecht, and a few years later in Amsterdam. It was even translated into English, and it was printed in London, three years after his death. Foreigners were not the only ones who showed curiosity for this work.

Father Poisson of the Oratory judged it appropriate to communicate it to those of our country. It is with this in mind that he translated it into our language, and had it printed in Paris, the year after the translation of Mr. Descartes’s bones to France. This edition is accompanied by some physical clarifications, which the same father had made in Latin, to serve the author’s original.

If it is the benefit of printing that acquires the quality of author for a writer, it is not to the treatise on music that Mr. Descartes owes this quality. Despite the excellence of this work, and the great youth of its author, one can without consequence admit that it is neither the first in merit among his writings, nor the first in rank, either for the time of printing or for that of composition. In this assumption, it was pretended to persuade us that he had already composed other more finished pieces, and even more appropriate to make us judge the greatness of his mind and his knowledge at such a young age. But I apprehend that this opinion has no other foundation than the authority of the French translator of the treatise on music, who makes Mr. Descartes speak as if he wanted to pass off this treatise as an “unformed stump,” alongside some other “more finished pieces” that he would have composed before. Without hurting the respect due to the merit of the translator, one can doubt if he has precisely expressed the thought of his author.

The terms in which Mr. Descartes explained it at the end of the treatise seem to have to persuade us that these so-called pieces are nothing other than what can be found to be good in the treatise on music in relation to what he saw as defective there. “I willingly allow,” he says to the friend who had him make this work, “that this imperfect production of my mind go to you, to make you remember our friendship, and to be a secure pledge of the sincere affection I have for you, it is on the condition, if you please, that you will keep it buried in the back of your study, so as not to expose it to the judgments of others, who, to find matter for criticism, might well stop only on the defective places of the piece, without wanting to cast their eyes on those where I might have engraved more vivid features of my mind.”

“I am persuaded that you will not use it in this way, you who know that this work is only for you, and that it is your consideration alone that made me roughly stitch it together in a guardhouse, where ignorance and idleness reign, and where one is always distracted by other thoughts and other occupations than those of the pen.”

This testimony will perhaps not prevent the admirers of Mr. Descartes’s youth from persisting in the belief that he had composed other works before his treatise on music: but at least it will be sufficient to take away from them the desire to no longer allege Mr. Descartes as their guarantor. One can understand without admiration that he will have made many of these works that are qualified by the name of notebooks or memoirs, such as each one draws up for his private use: but it appears that Mr. Descartes judged them neither more finished nor more excellent than that on music: since neither he, nor his friends, nor his enemies have cared to make them public.