Descartes' Bones (18 page)

The Revolution was a fitting milieu for such an idea to arise in, but it was also a dangerous one. A committee of the revolutionary government—the Commission on Weights and Measures—decided that the new base unit, the meter, should be related to the size of the globe, specifically that it should equal one ten-millionth of the meridian passing from the equator through Paris to the North Pole. Calculating this distance meant traversing a portion of it—basically the length of France—with sophisticated equipment for sighting and triangulating in order to obtain accurate measurements of individual stretches of the distance. This was the work that Delambre had undertaken as a younger man, and it was treacherous going. With a war on, he and his team of scientists and assistants—peering through scopes, adjusting sights, scribbling notes—appeared to the roving bands of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries as spies, and Delambre had dodged bullets and suffered imprisonment in fulfilling his mission. It would be some time before the metric system would be generally adopted (the first countries to accept it, the Netherlands and Belgium, would adopt the system just two years after the 1819 reburial of Descartes' bones, and France itself would not do so until 1840), but Delambre had long since achieved international fame for it in the scientific community in addition to his accomplishments in astronomy when he agreed to participate in what he thought would be a pro forma ceremony to rebury the bones of the founder of modernity.

The old astronomer, then, duly oversaw the removal of a wooden casket from the porphyry sarcophagus in which Lenoir had placed the remains of Descartes, then marched in procession the few blocks up the hill from the garden of Lenoir's former museum to the church, where, amid the stony medieval chill, the interior box was opened. What was found inside was remarkable enough that Delambre took notes and even included an account of the burial and contents of the coffin in his
History of Astronomy,
which he was just completing. “On an interior cask was attached a lead plaque,” he wrote, “on which, having cleaned it off, we could read a very simple inscription, carrying the name of Descartes, the date of his birth and that of his death.” Other than this, the officials were surprised to find only a few bones of recognizable shape; the rest was bone fragments and powder. The man who did the unpacking, Delambre added, “took some handfuls of powder to show us.” The assembly then watched as these meager remains were placed in the vault that had been opened to receive them and were sealed behind a heavy stone.

Others who were about to become caught up in the puzzle of Descartes' bones would use words like “religious” and “precious relics” to describe the remains, but Delambre's interest was different. At seventy, he was an old-guard atheist from the heyday of the Revolution and the Enlightenment; he had no truck with religious or spiritual sentiment. His interest was in science and historical accuracy. The contents of the coffin that had been in Alexandre Lenoir's keeping seemed to tell a different story from the one that had been presented to Delambre and others. If the bones had been buried properly they would surely have survived the 169 years since Descartes' death in a better state of preservation. Were these Descartes' bones at all? Had he and the others solemnly buried the wrong remains? If they were in fact Descartes', how did they come to be in such a condition?

But while Delambre's interest was piqued, he didn't pursue the matter further but only went back to his home and jotted down what he had witnessed. He did, however, discuss these observations with some of his fellow scientists, either before or after a meeting of the academy. Several other of these men had also been at the reburial, and as they talked they came back again and again to the skull. A human skull would survive relatively intact even under somewhat adverse conditions. It seemed inconceivable that it would be reduced to powder. The only conclusion was that it had been separated from the rest of the body. Apparently one of the scientists had done some investigating, and he reported hearing a suspicion that the skull had never been among the remains in France—that it had never left Sweden.

Berzelius, the Swede, was party to this learned gossip. He expressed indignation. If, somehow, one of his countrymen had separated the skull of the great Descartes from the rest of the bones—Berzelius didn't shy from religious terminology and called it “certainly a precious relic”—then all Swedes should be reproached for such a “sacrilege.”

And there the matter ended. What else was there to do but remark on the strange facts and then leave them to molder along with the remains? Delambre attended to his duties as permanent secretary of the academy. Berzelius—his period of recuperation over—returned home and took up new duties that mirrored those of Delambre, as the new secretary of the Swedish Academy of Science.

Two years passed. Then one day in March 1821, Berzelius opened a Stockholm newspaper and found his attention caught by an article on the estate of the late Professor Anders Sparrman—the man whom Berzelius had first worked under at the School of Surgery, and whose position he had eventually taken. “Something curious has been noted recently,” the article read. “At the auction following the death of professor and medical doctor Sparrman, the skull of the famous Cartesius was sold. It is said to have been purchased for 17 or 18 riksdaler.”

Berzelius was stunned by the coincidence—that he had been in Paris when it was discovered that the skull of Descartes was missing and that, apparently, it had been in the possession of a man he himself had known. He immediately went to work. He contacted the auction house, and found that the skull had been bought by a casino owner—and evidently a fairly infamous figure—named Arngren. The vogue for maintaining a “cabinet of curiosities”—bones, tusks, fossils, carved artifacts, feathered headdresses, seed pods, fertility charms, butterflies, dried dung: a microcosmic attempt to make order out of the teeming chaos of the natural and anthropological worlds—was then at its height, and Arngren seemed to have thought the skull of the great thinker would make a nice addition to the one on display at his casino. Berzelius went to him, outlined the history of the bones of Descartes, and explained that it had recently been discovered in Paris that the head was missing. To Berzelius's surprise, Arngren agreed to give the object to Berzelius for what he had paid for it.

Berzelius then sat down to write the letter quoted at the start of the chapter, which accompanied the remarkable object itself, the skull of Descartes. His closest associate at the academy in Paris was Berthollet, his fellow chemist, but he thought it best to write to the biologist Georges Cuvier, both because Cuvier had also taken a keen interest in Descartes' bones and because he served alongside Delambre as the second permanent secretary. On receiving the skull, Cuvier decided it would be kept in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, which was part of the Museum of Natural History. But he wasn't about to store it away just yet. It merited special attention.

The skull of Descartes. Across the forehead, in Swedish, is an accusation of a theft in 1666 that began the skull's peregrinations. Above it is a poem in Latin celebrating Descartes' genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.

An eighteenth-century depiction of the court of Queen Christina in Stockholm by Pierre Louis Dumesnil. Descartes is standing to the right; the Queen is seated opposite him.

A seventeenth-century image showing The Dam, the central square in Amsterdam, shortly after the time Descartes lived there.

Anatomical drawings by Descartes illustrating mind and body interactions from his book
Tractatus de Homine
.

Title page of the first edition of Descartes' epoch-making work.

Drawings of Henricus Regius (left), Descartes' first “disciple,“ and Gysbert Voetius, who led the attack on Descartes in the Netherlands in the 1630s.