To the Hermitage (7 page)

But who was the real leader of the great procession? Who was it first brought power and Francophone thought together? The answer is perfectly obvious: it was grand old René Descartes. The year, we may recall, was 1649. The place was Amsterdam, in the Dutch Republic, so long a wet and fishy haven for displaced and unhappy thinkers – the Pilgrim Fathers, the Spinozas, the John Lockes. Its universities were free in spirit, its publishers were plagiaristic but politically open and generous. Descartes was under attack in his French homeland, assaulted by priests, bishops, the Pontiff himself for his speculations on the powers of the human mind. Here, amid rank canals and bustling merchant houses, he could live quietly, nicely. He managed a discreet amour, he even fathered a secret daughter. He conducted small medical experiments on whether animals had souls, supplied with offal by the butcher who lived so conveniently downstairs. Soon he was able to show the human creature was animal too, but a special animal, endowed with reason – a splendid animal who could feel, speak and reason, discern the difference between truth and falsehood, was possessed of the right to know, all thanks to the benevolence of the Great Creator and the splendid workings of the pineal gland.

Like all great thinkers he won many fond admirers, swarms of philosophical groupies. And one was right here, where I am now, in chilly Stockholm. Her name was Queen Christina, twenty-three years old and well into her reign. She was a spendthrift, hirsute, stoop-shouldered well-read lady, who affected the wearing of men’s clothes and combed her hair only once a week. Thanks to the benevolence of the Great Creator and her own pineal gland, she had been granted a devouring need to know. And she was taken by what, thanks to her generous interest, would prove to be René’s last book, the charmingly titled
Passions of the Soul
. No sooner had she read a draft of it than she wrote him a fan-letter, demanding more information, a photo. René, never a sluggard in the matter of correspondence, responded at length. It was a fatal kindness; it so often is. Before he knew it a fine Swedish ship with an admiral on board had appeared in the Amstel harbour to collect him, at royal command, and bear him northward to the Swedish court.

A naturally retiring man, still occupied with dissecting his offals, René declined as politely as he might. As he whispered to friends, he had no wish at all to go to the Land of the Bears. Unfortunately, in Amsterdam, all was no longer going well. Even here, in the great
Aula
s of Amsterdam and Utrecht and Leiden, the winds of a new political correctness were growing. René’s view that man invented God with the reason God had given him was provoking the annoyance of the freshmen. Soon the professors had ceased to speak his name, and before much longer his books were disappearing from the syllabus. René was a wise old thinker, and had seen these warning signs before. He burned many of his papers, made his will. Then he went out, bought an elegant court dress with fine ruffled sleeves. The admiral had left, but he went to the harbour and boarded a ship for Stockholm, setting off after all for the Land of the Bears.

Unfortunately it was no longer the best of seasons; he had left the whole thing much too late. The east winds were blowing, the seas were raging, the voyage unusually took an entire month. This may or may not have been due to the fact that Descartes, ever the scholar, decided to teach the captain the newest arts of navigation, cosmologically invented by himself. ‘The man’s a demi-god,’ declared the awestruck captain, when he finally decanted, or perhaps decarted, the savant on to the Stockholm harbour wall. Then there were other problems. The Queen’s interests had shifted just a little. Now she was out of philosophy and into ballet – the sprightly step, the upsprung toe. What’s more she was busy, due out of town for a while to settle some unfinished diplomatic business left over from the Thirty Years’ War. Left to his own devices in the chilly residence of the French Ambassador – it stood where I am standing, right here in the middle of the Stockholm Old Town – René tried to follow the absent Queen’s instructions. He attempted to write a ballet, but found the idea was something of a contradiction in terms. Instead he wrote a play about two princes who thought they were shepherds – a well-known confusion in all the royal courts of the day.

No wonder. Not all was well at court, as he found when he went in his new ruffled sleeves. In the Queen’s absence, René’s arrival had become a matter of dismay to all courtiers present: the theologians, astrologers, astronomers, mathematicians and medical men who always surrounded the monarchs of the day. It didn’t help that the Queen had asked René to devise a new Swedish Academy, recommending its members, writing its statutes. So jealous was the general envy of the foreign upstart that, eavesdropping on their conversations, he discovered all the courtiers were discussing was whether or how to murder him. René went home and wisely added a clause to the Academy statutes saying no foreigners should be admitted, above all not himself. By now deep winter had come: Nordic winter, chilly and hard. Old men said it was the worst in living memory, as old men always do. Shivering in his room at the ambassadorial mansion, Descartes now deeply regretted his errand. ‘It seems to me men’s thoughts freeze here, just like the water,’ he sadly reported home.

Then, in the darkness of January, the Queen returned to court. She thought again of her philosopher, decided to put him to use. Like another great Snow Queen, Our Lady of the Handbags, three centuries later and in another part of Europe, she needed no more than three hours of sleep a night. She rose at four, and her morning toilette took absolutely no time at all. So, each morning at five, our good philosopher was summoned to the palace for a five-hour seminar on the passions of the soul. He was no normal early riser; in fact he was a well-known slugabed. But each stark morning, long before the sun rose (if in this godforsaken country it ever did), he rose himself, put on his nice new ruffles, and walked in black dark over slippery crunching ice to the Royal Palace, ready for his five-hour session with the hirsute and far from well-bathed queen. By the end of January he was visibly shaking with fever: I think, therefore I freeze. Soon he was bedbound, refusing the aid of the doctors the Queen sent to him, knowing they probably shared the murderous jealousy of their colleagues. When he was young Descartes had had the idea that, by thoughtful endeavours, it was possible for a philosopher to live for ever. It wasn’t true. By February, mind and matter were seriously diverging. ‘Alas, my soul,’ he said to his closest companion, ‘it is time for you and me to part. Try to bear the separation with courage.’ He died before the month was over. Some blamed the poisons of the court physician; others blamed the flu.

And then? Now what happened next? Standing here, in the cold of old Stockholm, I try my hardest to remember. The Queen, I recall, was contrite, and demanded every honour for her thinker: the father of the cogito, the inventor of the passions of the soul. As I recollect it, he was buried with state honours and eulogies somewhere here – surely in the Storkyrkan Cathedral. There were, though, a few small problems. The Queen herself was now in the process of becoming a secret Catholic, and some blamed Descartes. Not long after she abdicated, rode off to Rome in the costumeless costume of an Amazon, and settled in the Vatican. Her monarchical ambitions were by no means over. She sent her royal c.v. to most of the European nations and states; none accepted her well-intentioned offer to rule despotically over them. She took to hanging around the Vatican, quarrelling to the last with the great pontiff, who wanted her out of town. Finally, just as warm-blooded René met a frozen death in the Land of the Bears, the Northern Ice-Lady met a warm one in the Eternal City, arguing to the last with His Everlasting Holiness about those worrying passions of the soul.

That’s all I remember; all I think I remember. But the great philosopher dying of cold in the interests of thought has always managed to move me. Now here I am in Stockholm Old Town: gloomy, at a loose end, a whole afternoon to spare. I decide to track down Descartes’s tomb. For the next several hours, I do just that. I start my quest at the logical place for a state burial, Storkyrkan, which raises its great high-spired bulk at the core of the Old Town. In its noble space I discover royal tombs, fine chandeliers, a quite splendid Saint George and the Dragon. But though I look round everywhere, I see neither hair nor hide of the thinker. I move on and on, from church to church in the Old Town. Soon I’m wandering the whole city, tripping from island to island, going from this high-sided Lutheran church and chapel to that. I gaze on an infinity of cold monuments, a surfeit of funerary inscriptions, a whole handbook full of scan pine-wood pews, stone statues, Latinate mottos, slate-filled boneyards. Between big Swedish gravestones I halt black-robed pastors, skull-faced vergers, Bergman-like widows in eternal weeds. They all long to show me the site of the Swedish Bloodbath. Not one of them knows where to find the resting place of poor René Descartes.

Mystification overtakes me. My instinct for detection grows. My investigative blood runs warm. Walking through an afternoon of drilling rain, I spread my Holmesean net ever wider. I scan maps, hunt clues, follow every hint. I stop perfect strangers, tour guides, American tourists, determined to find out the facts of the case. I’m sent to the Finnish Church. To the German Church. To the Russian Church. To the Kungholm Church, which looks promising, but isn’t. To some church on an island that can only be reached on a little puffing steamer, and holds yet more royal tombs. Remembering France and Catholicism, I go to the Church of Maria Magdalena; not here. For all its liberal morality and sublimated lust, Sweden stays a religious country. And there’s really no end to its churches, graveyards, tombs, effigies, epitaphs, its kindly but uninformative pastors, its weary widows in weeds.

By now the wind’s blowing up, the cold’s coming down. And I’ve seen most of Stockholm: not just Gamla Stan, but the functional modernities, the out-of-town shopping centres, the blank pedestrian precincts that surround it on the hills. The one thing I haven’t seen is a single trace of Descartes. The creator of the metaphysics of human presence, the founder of the great I Am, the prophet of the modern soul, the man who gave us doubt, anxiety, mind over matter, who taught us to question, investigate, observe, is notable only for his uneffacing silent absence. Of the thinker’s thinker, there is neither tomb nor trace, effigy or epitaph, residue nor relic, sign nor signification. I’m confused, I’m engaged, I’m seriously dismayed. Could it be that something a little strange and fantastical happened to the late excellent René Descartes?

T
HIS ALL GOES BACK
ten years now, to another time: the heyday of the great book itself. ‘
ENCYCLOPEDIA
: Noun, feminine gender. The word signifies unity of knowledge,’ our man wrote then. ‘In truth, the aim of an encyclopedia is to collect all knowledge that now lies scattered all over the face of the earth; to make known its general structure to those among whom we live; and to transmit it onward to those who come after us, our Posterity.’ It was the truly grand
projet
, the Book of the Age, the great narrative of all things known and thought, and nothing in the universe mattered more. But writing the book of the age was to prove dirty, ill-paid and bitter work; dangerous and persecuted work too, with court, church and censor rightly suspicious of every tendency, every word, every hidden hint. And if there’s also a sharp-tongued wife who’s always complaining about the condition of literary poverty, and a decent dancing child of a daughter who when she reaches the age of sexual reason will require a handsome dowry, then our dear Denis the Daydreamer will need to do something quite serious to survive . . .

Why not, then: why not let considerate husband and admiring father despoil the philosopher and man of letters? For his richest treasure lies right in front of him – in the grasp of his own two hands, or piled up there on his desk, or stacked round the walls about him. His library – 2,904 leather-bound volumes – is among the finest of the day. In fact it’s nothing less than the library of the
Encyclopedia
– which makes it the library of the Enlightenment itself. He buys all books, he reads everything, he translates many languages. He grabs up every kind of learning, classic and modern, philosophic, medical, mechanical. He accumulates every printed wisdom. He corresponds with everyone of interest. And he’s annotated the books, all of them, in his own small hand, with his own large mind. Some of these volumes contain a brand-new book of their own, an entire supplement written crabbedly into the margins or across the type. And hasn’t he in turn, using the books, himself written the bulk of the book of books, the
Encyclopedia
itself: a work he’s struggled with, suffered with, nearly rotted in jail for? Isn’t it time to put it all to market?

No sooner thought of than done. It’s not so hard to work out who might buy. The notion has only to be mentioned to his dear, dandyish, tuft-hunting old friend Melchior Grimm – fat dapper traveller, visitor to every court in Europe, cultural correspondent to royalty, marriage counsellor to the aristocracy, escort agency, whisperer of secrets, sponsor of little Mr Mozart, patron and critic, supplier of the latest Parisian thoughts and notions to all the finest European gentry – than a deal is dealt. Grimm has only to drop one of his graceful, witty, superbly well-informed notes to his old and no less widely travelled friend, Baron-General Ivan Ivanovitch Betskoi of Sankt Peterburg. He serves the great Tzarina as chamberlain, court adviser, purchase-master, and – at least according to one of the innumerable gross rumours that surround her – her mother’s lover, and he depends for his cunning political insight on the wit and wisdom of Melchior Grimm. Betskoi recommends, of course. ‘Buy,’ he then whispers in the Empress’s ear, ‘it will show you are a lover of reason and everyone will admire you for it. Especially the French.’

But the great lady is, as always, wonderfully clever and ingenious. She does more, far more, than that: more than a chancellor might recommend, a philosopher imagine, a maker of mystifications ever devise. ‘It would be a cruelty to separate a wise man from his books, the objects of his delight, the source of his work, the companions of his leisure,’ she pronounces. She buys his library, for a remarkably generous price (15,000 livres). She also refuses delivery, and instead appoints our man his own librarian, at a salary of 1,000 livres a year. With the graceless consent of King Louis, she even makes our man court librarian to the Hermitage – and all this without him ever leaving his room. And so his books will stay on his walls, support his wisdom, accompany his leisure, require some wifely dusting, for the rest of his mortal days. Only then will they be crated and shipped to their own library in the Little Hermitage; and the deal will fully be done.