Descartes by Steven Nadler

Author:Steven Nadler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Record of the baptism of Descartes’ daughter.

Between receiving Descartes’ manuscript of the Meditations in November 1640 and the publication in Paris of the first edition in August 1641, Mersenne took care to invite, collect and forward objections to this metaphysical and epistemological exercise. Descartes, for his part, was occupied with composing responses to them. It was in the midst of these preparations that Descartes was hit with the deepest tragedy of his life.

His daughter, only five years old, died.

While living in Amsterdam, from the spring of 1634 to the spring of 1635, Descartes had rented rooms in the home of Jacob Thomasz Sergeant. Sergeant, an Englishman who lived at 6 Westermarkt, close by the Westerkerk and just behind the present-day Anne Frank House, was a French teacher and bookseller. He had a servant named Helena Jansdr van der Stroom (d. 1683).4 On 19 July 1635, most likely in Deventer, 21-year-old Helena gave birth to a girl. In the record of the baptism, which also took place in Deventer, the father is listed as ‘Reyner Jochems’ (René, Joachim’s son) – that is, Descartes.5 The child’s given name was Fransintge, the Dutch diminutive of Francine. It is unclear how the baptism was arranged, since the Reformed Church typically did not baptize children born out of wedlock.

According to Baillet, Descartes was rather secretive about the whole affair. He says that Descartes refused to acknowledge publicly either his relationship with Helena or his fatherhood, and suggests that perhaps it was out of shame. ‘The marriage of Monsieur Descartes is, for us, one of the most secret mysteries of the hidden life he led outside his country far from his relatives and friends. There is nothing more agreeable with the profession of a philosopher than the freedom of a celibate.’6

Despite Baillet’s reference to a ‘secret marriage’ that was, he says, ‘a stain on his [Descartes’] celibacy’, we know that Descartes and Helena did not marry.7 In fact, she would wed someone else in just a few years – a Jan Jansz van Wel, from Egmond – with Descartes acting as witness and providing a generous dowry of six hundred guilders for her.8 Descartes, Helena and Fransintge do appear at least to have lived together from autumn 1637 until 1639, in Santpoort, near Haarlem. In a letter to an anonymous recipient of 30 August 1637, Descartes, writing from Egmond, says that ‘I spoke yesterday with my hostess to see if she would accommodate my niece [that is, daughter] here and how much she wanted me to pay for that. She told me, without any deliberation, that I should bring her whenever I wanted, and that we could easily come to some agreement as to price, since it was indifferent to her whether she had one child more or less to care for.’ Apparently, he was hoping to bring Helena as well, and was setting up a position for her as servant to his hostess. ‘It should be arranged for Helena to come here as soon as possible.

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