Descartes at the Hague

After a short stay in West Friesland, Descartes came to Holland where he spent a good part of the winter.

In The Hague, he saw 3 different small courts.

1. The court of States General where the affairs of the republic were conducted
2. The court of the Prince of Orange where one always saw a lot of foreign nobility
3. The court of the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia, Electress Palatine

She was just being born, and where the ladies and people of entertainment went to charm away the sorrows and misfortunes of the princess. The Elector Palatine her husband did not have a very sedentary stay with her.

In March, he left her to go to the Palatinate, to try to re-establish his affairs. We have noted that after the fatal day of Prague he had retired to Silesia.

From there he had escaped through the march of Brandenburg, where he remained only as long as it took for the Electress his wife, who had given birth at Custrin on January 12 to their son Maurice, to recover from her confinement.

After that he had gone to Hamburg, then to Siegenberg, to attend the assembly convened by the King of Denmark and the other Protestant princes, in order to consider the means of stopping the progress that Spinola, general of the Spanish and the Flemish, was making in the Palatinate in favor of the emperor.

In the spring he set out with his family and all his train, and he arrived by land in Holland with the help of a considerable escort that had been sent to him by the Prince of Orange Maurice his maternal uncle.

He was lodged in The Hague, and the States assigned him ten thousand florins a month for the maintenance of his person and the rest of his family. In the month of March of the following year, he embarked disguised and without a retinue for Calais, where having taken the post he came to Paris to greet the king incognito, and went through Lorraine to the Palatinate, to act jointly with the Count of Mansfeld, the Bishop of Halberstad, the Marquis of Durlach and the other leaders of his party in the re-establishment of his affairs.

The adventures of the Elector Palatine is necessary to the biography of Descartes.

Descartes:

• got habits while in the house of this prince in The Hague.
• wrote to his daughter Princess Elisabeth
  • She had been born to him a short time before he was elected King of Bohemia.

When Descartes arrived in Holland, it had only been four months since the truce of the States with the Spanish had expired.

The war had been declared on both sides from the third of August, and the Spanish were currently besieging two cities from the Dutch, that of Jülich under the command of the celebrated Spinola, and L’Écluse under that of Borgia, governor of the citadel of Antwerp.

Descartes remained in the United Provinces, awaiting the outcome of these two sieges, which were the subject of everyone’s conversations, and which only ended in January 1622 with a very different success. Spinola took the city and the castle of Jülich from the Dutch;

Borgia lifted the siege of L’Écluse, after having let the greater part of his army be lost by the cold and misery.

Descartes left Holland towards the beginning of the following February. He entered the Spanish Netherlands, and was curious to see the court of Brussels.

The Infanta Isabella governed these provinces alone under the habit of the nuns of Saint Clare, having remained a widow of the Archduke Albert since July 13 of the previous year.

She sustained the war against the Dutch with as much vigor and vigilance as she had sweetness and goodness for her subjects. Mr. Descartes left a few days later to return to France.

But having learned that the city of Paris was not yet delivered from the contagion with which it had been infected for two years, he took his route by Rouen, and from there he went straight to Rennes to his father towards the middle of the month of March. An absence of almost nine years can make one judge of the pleasure he received from his relatives, and of that which he gave them, but particularly to his father, who was already one of the elders of the grand-chambre, and who saw himself the dean of the parliament the following year. Mr. Descartes was then twenty-six years old completed, and his father took the opportunity of his majority to put him in possession of the property of his mother, of which he had already given two-thirds to his elders: one to Mr. de la Bretaillière his brother, and the other to Mrs. du Crevis his sister.

This property consisted of three fiefs or farms, namely “le perron,” of which he bore the name, “la grand-maison,” and “le marchais”; besides a house in the city of Poitiers, and several acres of arable land in the territory of Availle. As all this property was located in Poitou, he was curious to go and recognize it, in order to see what use he could make of it. He left in the month of May to go to this province, and he thought from then on of looking for dealers to sell it, in order to find something to buy a position that could suit him. He spent the greater part of the summer as much in Châtellerault as in Poitiers, and he returned to his father, who during the semester of his rest, stayed much less in Rennes than in his land of Chavagnes in the diocese of Nantes; land that had come to him from his second wife. The year passed without anyone in the family being able to give him good openings on the kind of life he should choose.

The little occupation he found in the paternal house, made him feel the desire to make a trip to Paris towards the beginning of Lent of the following year to see his friends again, and to learn the news of the state and of literature. He arrived in this great city at the end of the month of February. One was beginning to breathe a purer, and healthier air there than one had done for almost three years, that the contagion had corrupted it: and one was enjoying the rest that the King Louis XIII had procured for his people the previous year by the reduction of the rebels. The affairs of the Count Palatine, the raids and expeditions of Mansfeld, and the transfer of the electorate from the Palatine to the Duke of Bavaria declared elector and arch-panetier of the empire in Regensburg on the fifteenth of February, “were then the subject of public conversations.” Mr. Descartes who was better informed than any man in France of the origin and the progress of all these troubles in Germany, had enough to satisfy the curiosity of his friends on this point.

In return they shared with him a news that caused them some sadness, however incredible it seemed to them. It was only a very few days since they had been talking in Paris of the brothers of the Rosicrucian, of whom he had made researches uselessly in Germany during the winter of the year 1619: and they were beginning to spread the rumor that he had enrolled in the brotherhood. Mr. Descartes was all the more surprised by this news, as the thing had little relation to the character of his mind, and to the inclination he had always had, to consider the Rosicrucians as impostors or visionaries. He easily judged that this disadvantageous rumor could only be the invention of some ill-intentioned mind, who would have forged this fiction on some of the letters he had written about it in Paris three years before, to inform his friends of the opinion one had of the Rosicrucians in Germany, and of the pains he had lost in trying to find someone of this sect whom he could know.

A considerable change had occurred from Germany to Paris on the sentiments that the public had of the Rosicrucians. One can say that with the exception of Mr. Descartes and a very small number of chosen minds, one was in 1619 quite favorably prejudiced for the Rosicrucians throughout Germany. But having had the misfortune of having made themselves known in Paris at the same time as the “alumbrados,” or the illuminated ones of Spain, their reputation failed from the start. They were turned into ridicule, and they were qualified with the name of “invisibles”; their history was put into novels; farces were made of them at the Hôtel de Bourgogne; and songs were already being sung about them on the Pont-Neuf, when Mr. Descartes arrived in Paris. He had received the first news of it by a poster that he had read at the corners of the streets and on the public buildings, on his arrival. The poster was from the imagination of some buffoon, and it was conceived in these terms. “We, deputies of the principal college of the brothers of the Rosicrucian, make a visible and invisible stay in this city… we show and teach without books or marks how to speak all kinds of languages of the countries where we live.” On the faith of this poster, several serious people had the ease of believing that a troop of these invisibles had come to settle in Paris. It was published that of 36 deputies that the head of their society had sent throughout Europe, six had come to France; that after having given notice of their arrival by the poster we have just reported, they had lodged in the Marais du Temple; that they had then had a second placard posted bearing these terms. “If anyone gets the urge to come and see us out of curiosity only, he will never communicate with us. But if the will really and in fact leads him to register on the register of our brotherhood, we who judge thoughts, will show him the truth of our promises. So that we do not put the place of our residence, since the thoughts joined to the real will of him who will read this notice, will be capable of making us known to him, and him to us.”

The chance that had made their pretended arrival in Paris coincide with that of Mr. Descartes, would have produced annoying effects for his reputation, if he had sought to hide, or if he had retired into solitude in the middle of the city, as he had done before his travels. But he advantageously confounded those who wanted to use this conjuncture to establish their slander. He made himself visible to everyone, and mainly to his friends, who did not want any other argument to persuade themselves that he was not one of the brothers of the Rosicrucian or of the invisibles: and he used the same reason of their “invisibility,” to excuse himself to the curious, for not having been able to discover any in Germany.

His presence served above all to calm the agitation in which the mind of Father Mersenne, his intimate friend, was, whom this false rumor had saddened all the more easily, as he was less disposed to believe that the Rosicrucians were “invisibles,” or fruits of a chimera, after what several Germans and the English Robert Fludd had written in their favor. This father could not keep secret the joy he had of seeing and embracing Mr. Descartes again. Since they had separated at the end of the year 1614, he had remained at the convent of Nevers where he had taught philosophy for three years, and theology for one year to his religious. At the end of this time he had been withdrawn from this exercise to be made corrector of the same convent. Having finished his “correctoriat” at the end of the year 1619, he had received an obedience from his provincial, who ordered him to come in the capacity of a conventual to live at the convent of Paris near the place royale, where he found himself permanently established for the rest of his days. When Mr. Descartes arrived in Paris, this father was actually running the press on his first volume of commentaries on Genesis, which he dedicated to the first of the archbishops of Paris, taking the opportunity of the new creation of this church into a metropolis, made by a bull of Gregory XV from October 22, 1622, but which was not verified and received at the parliament until August 8 of the year 1623, although the new archbishop had taken the oath from February 19.

Under the general title of “Questions on the first six chapters of Genesis,” Father Mersenne made a thousand things on various subjects enter into his large volume. The affair of the Rosicrucians, found a place there, with a more just title without a doubt than many others who did not so closely regard the relationship of religion with the search for natural things. Mr. Descartes had come early enough to make him take assured measures on what he wanted to insinuate about it: and although he protested that he did not yet know anything certain about the Rosicrucians, he could not deny at least that he was perfectly informed of the rumors that had been spread about them throughout Germany. Father Mersenne who did not need a great detail for his plan, was content to judge of it on the faith of some books that their adversaries and their defenders had published on both sides.

He had read among others the apology published in Leiden from the year 1616 in octavo, by Robert Fludd, an English gentleman, who after having left the profession of arms, had set himself to the study of physics, and had embraced particularly that of medicine, of chemistry, of the cabala, of magic, and of all that can be found mysterious in nature.

The good Father Mersenne believing that there was no need for management with a heretic, had not made much effort to retain his zeal against Fludd. This is what embarrassed Mr. Gassendi in the continuation, when it was a question of defending this father against this Englishman, who did not fail to take foot on some hardness of the father, to render them to him with usury. He made against Father Mersenne, two Latin works, of which he called the first, “the combat of wisdom with folly.” He published the second under the name of Joachim Frisius or rather Fritschius, and under the title of “sovereign good, which is the true subject of magic, of the cabala, of chemistry, and of the study of the brothers of the Rosicrucian.”

If the one who is the strongest in insults and in bitterness of style, was to pass for the victor, one could not deny that Father Mersenne had not been defeated.

The bad treatments he received from Fludd excited the indignation of various authors who took up the pen for his defense. The most zealous were two of his brothers, François de la Nouë, and Jean Durel; the first under the mask of “flaminius,” and the other under that of “Eusebius of Saint Just.”

But no one did it with more advantage than the illustrious Monsieur Gassendi, provost of the church of Digne, and since royal professor of mathematics in Paris.

Gassendi, the first of the philosophers of France after Mr. Descartes was younger than Father Mersenne by three and a half years, older than Descartes by almost four years: and he survived both. The panegyrists of this great man will not be able to raise his merit so high that we cannot conceive it still above all that they will try to express.

Perhaps they will not find a more brilliant and more solid praise for him, than that of having deserved to enter into a parallel with Mr. Descartes; and of having been one of the wisest, of the most moderate, and of the most reasonable of his adversaries. If Robert Fludd did not deceive Mr. Gassendi on the painting that he made of the Rosicrucians in the works that he published in their favor, it is necessary to leave to Mr. Gassendi the glory of having been happier than Descartes, in the discovery and in the knowledge of the Rosicrucians. But if the examination that Mr. Gassendi made of the philosophy of Fludd, is a good censure of the society of the Rosicrucians: one can say that the conduct of Mr. Descartes in his way of living, of studying, and of reasoning, was a perpetual refutation of it.