Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto Page A

them—continued to argue that their principles could be put in the service of both the ruling civil and spiritual authorities. Far from being a threat, they claimed, the new philosophy could be the protector of the faith. Descartes himself had taken this line. There were many in power who were intrigued by the idea of this strange and dimly understood new tool actually becoming part of the arsenal of the church or state. The climate alternated between curiosity and fear. The situation of the Cartesians in the late seventeenth century thus mirrors in some way that of the early Christians in the catacombs of ancient Rome. They were alternately tolerated, suspected, then persecuted—and of course eventually triumphant in the spread of their philosophy.
    There were other parallels that existed in the seventeenth century between Descartes and Jesus. Many of the early Cartesians were themselves Catholic priests. In some sense the new philosophy was to be a replacement for Christianity as the foundation of Western culture, and indeed the Cartesians referred to themselves as “disciples of Descartes.” Their physics collided with Catholic views about the body of Christ, and they were about to use the material body of Descartes, or what remained of it, to promote their philosophy. Then there was the fact that during his life Descartes had seemed to believe that he could somehow override death’s dominion—the irony being that his “eternal life” idea rested on scientific rather than religious beliefs.
    Also like the early Christians, the Cartesians believed devoutly in their cause. Some held it in almost mystical regard. They were keepers of a legacy and carriers of a flame that they believed would light the future of the world. They knew that what they were about was dangerous, and that it required knowledge not only of the intricacies of philosophy and science but of how power worked. In order to survive and advance their cause they needed to employ tools of persuasion. And now, at the turning of the year 1667, a new tool was about to arrive.

    I T WAS IN THE COLD of January, three months after they had set out, that the two Frenchmen, l’Epine and du Rocher, arrived at the outskirts of Paris. Long as the journey had been, as with any modern road trip, reaching the metropolis would have meant slowing down further. Paris was still largely a medieval city, with dirt roads that were only beginning to be paved and streets in an irregular tangle. It was bigger, noisier, and dirtier than London, and the large-scale improvements that Louis XIV’s chief adviser, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had recently begun—driving through wide boulevards, clearing away crumbling parts of the old medieval walls, constructing the colonnade of the Louvre—at this stage merely added to the congestion. People complained, but the king stayed mostly at his Versailles palace, visiting Paris only a few times a year and otherwise keeping it out of mind. The most noticable change from the last time Descartes had visited the city in life was visible in the streets. Early in the century, transportation was either on foot or on mule. By now a revolution had occurred: vehicles of every description, thousands of them, from simple rickshawlike contraptions pulled by men known as “baptized mules” to gilt carriages with glass windows and shock absorbers, clogged the streets, so that the wagon carrying Terlon’s parcels, including the remains of the philosopher, would have had to weave a contorted passage. They would have come through one of the two crumbling medieval gates at the north end of the city, the Porte St.-Martin or the Porte St.-Denis, made their way across the fashionable neighborhood of Le Marais, and come to stop, finally, at a stately residence in the midst of bureaucratic Paris, just north of the Seine.
    Soon after the wagon arrived at the home of Pierre d’Alibert, treasurer general of France and