Source:
The Sibyl of the North: The Tale of Christina, Queen of Sweden, pages 47 to 59, by Faith Compton Mackenzie, 1931
The account:
Cartesianism was the fashion in Paris. All the leading lights in literature and society flocked to hear Descartes's new doctrines expounded. Philosophy became a more modish topic than clothes or alchemy. Automatism, geometry, medicine and morals — the dictum, "Je pense; donc, je suis" — were discussed in boudoirs and powder-closets, problems in the higher mathematics were handed round like billets-doux, and, though there was the usual display of brilliant reasoning among the real intellectuals, so much nonsense was talked elsewhere that Molière was driven to write "Les Précieuses Ridicules".
Descartes, "the true liberator of the spirit, the maître des maîtres", had himself abandoned Paris in 1629. City life was inimical to the development of his philosophical apprehension. He found seclusion necessary for the study of man's nature, the soul — and God. He did not so much live life as observe it, and that from a solitary peak. From her Northern eyrie Christina sent the philosopher a question: "When one makes a bad use of love or hate, which of these abuses is the worse?" There followed a lengthy correspondence on the subject of love, which subject she and Pierre Chanut had been fervently discussing. Descartes's contribution to the argument was mainly academic, his own experience of love having been limited to a mild passion for a little girl with a squint, in early childhood. His opinion was that love wrongly used was more dangerous than hate. After a further exchange of letters, the idea that had been at the back of Christina's mind from the first was mooted. Would Descartes visit the Swedish Court, and expound his doctrines to the eager Queen in person?
When the summons came, the philosopher was comfortably established at Edmond, in Holland. Here physics, music, mathematics and flowers occupied him to the almost total exclusion of human contacts. "I take my walk every day through the confusion of a great multitude with as much freedom and quiet as you could find in your rural avenues", he wrote to a friend from Amsterdam. The mass of correspondence that poured in from all Europe was conveyed to him by priests who acted as intermediaries. At Egmond he could practise his religion without interference; he was a Catholic. Here he could preserve his carefully guarded health, unhampered by social obligations. He ate no meat, drank little wine, and the greater part of his thinking was done in bed. His strength was never over-taxed, for he did not believe in laborious study; "a very few hours daily in thoughts which occupy the imagination, and a very few hours yearly in which occupy the understanding — all the rest of my time is given to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the mind."
To control in peace and quiet the thought of Europe, to pursue unchecked his enthralling investigations, this was all he asked of life. His most interesting friendship was with Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the exiled Queen of Bohemia, who lived in semi-state and great melancholy at the Hague. He occupied her mind with delightful and scarcely soluble mathematical problems, and no doubt observed the reactions (though he did not call them that) of his royal pupil to the novelty of his doctrines as keenly as he watched the struggles of the unfortunate animals he vivisected to prove that "no matter thinks; every soul of beast is matter; therefore no beast thinks."
Descartes was not only unwilling to abandon his secret Dutch pleasaunce. He was also suspicious that this invitation might be a plot on the part of his enemies; as a Catholic and the author of a new philosophy he had reason for caution.
It was not until October, 1649, that he was persuaded to move, under the assurances of his friend Chanut and Freinsheim, the Queen's librarian. A ship was sent by Christina to convey him to Sweden, the pilot of which, when questioned by the Queen as to what manner of man he had brought with him, replied:
"Madam, I have not brought you a mere man, but a demigod."
Descartes's appearance was insignificant — he was short, his head was large and covered with untidy black hair, his voice weak, and his habit usually black and unobtrusive. For this journey he had decked himself out with unwonted care; a curled wig, elegant shoes and elaborate embroidered gloves were worn in honour of the Sibyl of the North, but this was not enough to provoke such enthusiasm. His personality must have been impressive indeed.
It was disconcerting to be asked to take part in a ballet on his arrival, but he evaded this by consenting to write some lyrics for it instead. He lodged, not in the Palace, but with his friend Chanut, where he imagined he would be the better able to pursue his own mode of life. After two interviews with Christina, he wrote to the Princess Elizabeth, who strongly disapproved of this visit:
"The generosity and majesty of the Queen in all her actions is combined with such sweetness and goodness as to make everyone her willing slave. She is extremely given to study, though I cannot say what she will think of my philosophy, as she knows nothing of it yet."
Descartes was not in favour of reading. Erudition was all very well for dilettanti and les précieuses, but for the true philosopher the study of nature and human life was what mattered. "These are my books", he once said to a visitor at Egmond, pointing to the bodies of animals he had dissected. The sight of Christina engrossed in the Classics depressed him. Of what use were these dead languages to a new philosophy?
Christina did not relax her studies on Descartes's account, but she showed him many marks of especial favour, even consulting him on matters of State, to the annoyance of her Swedish advisers and of the other philosophers and savants who were already gathering about her. Descartes enjoyed the company of the Queen, and so interesting did she find his philosophy that, though she exempted him from levées, which he disliked, she sought his company in tête-à-tête more and more. Unfortunately, the business of ruling occupied the better part of her day; she was never, even in ill-health, absent from the Senate. Then there were her studies, from which not even Descartes could lure her. So she fixed upon the uncomfortable hour of five in the morning for the exposition of Cartesianism. For any human being this would be a trial, but for Descartes it was a martyrdom. As he drove beside the river, buffeted by freezing Baltic winds in the bleak darkness long before dawn, he must have sighed for his Dutch retreat and the warm inviting bed from which he never stirred till midday. No wonder he wrote to the Princess Elizabeth, to her great delight:
"After all, in spite of my great veneration for Her Majesty, I do not think I am likely to be detained in this country after next summer."
He was not detained as long as that. His friend Chanut fell ill of inflammation of the lungs, and Descartes nursed him back to health, but himself developed the malady, and, weakened by unwonted exposure to the severe climate and the unnatural hours he had been obliged to keep, he died on February 1, 1650.
His death stirred Europe. Christina was blamed for it, and indeed by her lack of consideration for a delicate man, she could be called indirectly responsible. Madame de Motteville said: "Instead of making men die of love for her, she makes them die of shame and despair. She caused the death of Descartes by disapproving of his philosophy." This is only one of Madame's usual exaggerations. Descartes was not the kind of person to die either of shame or despair, though Christina may have hinted that all his theories were not original, and quoted Plato.
Mademoiselle Descartes, a noted précieuse, friend of Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame de Sevigné, was moved to write a long "Relation de la Morte de M. Descartes" in prose and verse, which ends with the appearance of the philosopher to Mademoiselle de la Vigne:
"Merveille de nos jours, jeune et sage Heroine,
Qui, sous les doux appas d'une beauté divine
Cachez tant de vertu, d'esprit et de sçavoir,
Ne vous étonnez pas qu'un Mort vous vienne voir.
Si je pus autrefois, pour une jeune Reine
Dont je connoissais peu l'âme inégale et vaine,
Abandonner les lieux si fleuris et si verde,
Pour aller la chercher au pays des hivers;
Je devois bien pour vous quitter ces climats sombres
Où, loins de la lumière, errent les pales ombres."
Descartes was buried with great simplicity among the graves of children and orphans at Stockholm, and Christina erected a monument to his memory. The Abbé Huet wrote, that he visited the spot and found that the monument, instead of being of marble, as it appeared, was of painted wood. Someone had mockingly changed the inscription "Sub hoc lapide" to "Sub hoc ligneo". Seventeen years later the body of Descartes was moved to S. Genevieve, Paris.
Descartes may be said to have inaugurated the reign of philosophers and savants at the Swedish Court. Everyone who had the slightest pretension to learning was bidden by the Queen, "avide de sçavoir", as Mademoiselle Descartes describes her. From all parts they came, good and bad. Rewards were heaped upon them, gold chains, copper, and pensions without end. As a house with a chalked sign attracts tramps, so the Swedish Court became the Mecca for all sorts and conditions of scholars.
Among the really distinguished was Vossius, who came from Holland and was the greatest Greek scholar of his time. It was with him that Descartes sorrowfully observed Christina persisting in her daily classical studies. Vossius had an interesting career and was eventually made Canon of Windsor by Charles II, mainly, it was said, because he professed to believe in everything except the Bible. He was one of the worst thieves in the whole of Christina's entourage, and was believed to have stolen the priceless Codex Argenteus, a manuscript of the Gothic translation of the four Gospels made in the fourth century. This wonderful treasure was painted in silver or gold. It was originally found in the Benedictine abbey of Werden, Westphalia, and transferred to Prague, where it was seized by Königsmark and sent to Christina as a present. Vossius somehow got possessed of it, and at this death Magnus de la Gardie bought it and gave it to the University of Upsala, one of the few actions that can be recorded to his credit.
Nicholas Heinsius, who did not rob Christina's library, though he had ample opportunity, was sent to Italy in search of manuscripts and books. Christina urged him with encouraging letters. "You know I am curious. Satisfy my curiosity. You will be well rewarded."
Heinsius wrote from Italy: "The Italians are beginning to complain that ships are laden with the spoils of their libraries, and that all their best aids to learning are being carried away from them to the remotest North."
But Christina was insatiable. Vossius, scouring the Low Countries, France and Germany, bought on her behalf the Petau library, which Saumaise called the marrow of the manuscripts of France, for forty thousand livres. Cardinal Mazarin's library was for sale when Vossius was in Paris. He bought the best of this, and the pick of half a dozen others. The nucleus of Christina's library was a vast collection of treasures, the spoils of her father's conquests in Germany, and the final enrichment was Vossius's own library which he sold her for twenty thousand florins, on condition that he was made librarian at five thousand florins a year, with his board and lodging at Court. An admirable arrangement this, for him, of which he took full advantage, a vast quantity of Christina's books and manuscripts being found in his possession at his death.
"The royal library", wrote Huet in 1654, "is stuffed full. Four large rooms won't hold it." It was the most remarkable private library in the world. Christina's passion for owning books was matched by her love of collecting works of art of all kinds. Her taste was wide if not impeccable, and her emissaries were searching Europe for objets d'art of all descriptions: sculpture, pictures, engravings, medals of gold and silver, for which she had a special predilection, ivory, amber, clocks, mirrors and every possible kind of furniture came pouring in from all parts. All the noted craftsmen were bidden to the Palace; enamel-workers, engravers, wax-modellers and their like brought their wares, and went away handsomely rewarded. Dancers, singers, actors were engaged from the other end of Europe if Christina heard good reports of them. Such lavish and reckless expenditure had seldom been known, and as the Palace groaned under the cumbering masses of booty forever accumulating, Christina must have glanced apprehensively at the dwindling exchequer. How long would it last? She had enough sense to know that it could not last forever. A wild extravagance was upon her. For her honour she must spend — spend — more than any monarch had spent before her. To outshine Solomon in wisdom and glory, to have the world crying, "Great is Christina of the North!"
It was not enough to be a great ruler. That was born in her — a gift passed on from great Gustavus I, and handed on bright and shining through her father to herself. She had proved that, since at sixteen she had sat and directed her Ministers in the Senate. They listened to her, not from deference to her sex and youth, but because she was wise in statecraft and nearly always right.
The strangest and perhaps the most interesting among Christina's collection of savants was Saumaise (Salmatius), "a man of enormous reading and no judgment", who was lured away from the University of Leyden and lodged in the Palace. He was an exceedingly tiresome person among his fellows, domineering and arrogant. Bayle says of him, "He plunged his pen into bile of the bitterest." Maussac and Gaulmin (who presented Christina with his Oriental collection and received a gift of thirty thousand crowns in return) were once with him in the royal library in Paris, and Gaulmin said:
"I think we three could hold up our heads against all the learning in Europe", to which Saumaise replied:
"Add yourself and Maussac to the rest and I will hold my own with the lot of you."
This arrogant remark, however, may have been prompted by the extreme complacence of Gaulmin.
Christina had a genuine affection and admiration for Saumaise. She was perfectly aware that he was intolerable in his behaviour to her other guests.
"Monsieur Saumaise knows the word for 'chair' in every language, but he hasn't learnt how to sit down on one", she said.
Doubtless he was not alone among her guests in lack of social gifts, and his learning outweighed his other shortcomings. Besides, in spite of his overbearing ways, the other side of what might be called his dual existence roused, especially in Christina, a deep, if somewhat amused pity. For if in the library he was a bitterly hated tyrant, in his home he was the victim of a subjugation most humiliating. His wife, Anne Mercier, was a dragon, a shrew, a horrible ambitious creature who by sheer malignity reduced him to a state of wretched acquiescence. So outrageous was her conduct that the whole world knew of it. Huet writes of her thus:
"I should not tell you anything of the imperious temper of Madame Saumaise if it were not already well known, and if Milton had not already written about it. She was so afraid of people putting her husband against her that she could not bear to allow anyone to see him privately. In my own experience when I have been with him at some rendezvous fixed by him at a certain hour away from his home so that we could converse at our leisure, his wife has never failed to arrive and break up the conversation, haughtily carrying off to the common sitting-room her poor husband, who does not dare to say a word in his defence, and contents himself with shrugging his shoulders and lifting his eyes to heaven."
Time had taught him to shrug his shoulders, merely — to lift his eyes to heaven — for peace's sake — to shut himself secure within himself from the nagging of Anne and the noise of his children. He used to work in the little common sitting-room — himself the centre of a raging whirlpool. It was not surprising that bile gathered in his pen and that his outlook was jaundiced. Ménage says of him that he was the most sociable of men, and evidently found much to like in him, but this was in early days before the poison had done its work.
To stay with such a woman, to endure for a moment, much less a lifetime, the humiliation of her odious tyranny, would seem to argue weakness of character. Domestic storms that sweep beyond the doors and windows of what is called home are apt to interfere with financial security. Professors must at all costs guard their home-lives from open scandal, and the University of Leyden, which prized Saumaise so dearly that when he had been in Stockholm a year Christina was told that in depriving it of him she was depriving it of the sun, would have been shocked at any deliberate change in his condition. So it was just part of life, but a very big part. When he escaped from that part of it and took up his quarters in the Palace of Stockholm, he was not allowed to forget his Anne when he donned the dreadful scarlet trappings she had designed specially for his visit to royalty. Even this horrid humiliation he did not resist, to the amusement of his sober-suited colleagues.
The Queen betook herself to his quarters at all hours, and when he was ill she delighted to "nurse" him, which consisted chiefly, from all accounts, of warming his bed — presumably with a warming-pan. Her heart must have gone out to this victim of the marriage tie, who with all his wisdom could not smooth its painful knots.
Anne was soon to follow her husband to Sweden, but he did not waste the short emancipation he enjoyed before her arrival.
One evening during his illness he was lying in bed deep in a new book reputed to be by François Beroalde, Canon of Tours, "Le Moyen de Parvenir", a lively volume of which all Paris was talking. Whilst thus engaged he was surprised by a visit from the Queen, accompanied by Ebba Sparre. Hastily, but not hastily enough, he hid the book. Christina, ever alert, demanded its name.
"A book of somewhat risky tales, Your Majesty", he whispered, "which I was reading to while away the tedium of convalescence."
The Queen, delighted, seized the book and began reading it under her breath. Putting it into Ebba's hand, she said:
"Come, Sparre, here's a pretty book of devotions. Read this page aloud."
Ebba read a few words, then stopped short, confused.
"Go on, go on!" cried the Queen. "Read to the end!"
Ebba had to obey, while the Queen, holding her sides, watched the blushes of her favourite maid-of-honour. That much-discussed book had probably never been read under more piquant circumstances.
Christina enjoyed bizarre jokes. When she was entertaining her friends she would sometimes send for her little chorus of girls and make them sing French part-songs of outrageous impropriety, all given with artless innocence, because the singers were under the impression that they were singing devotional chants, Christina and her friends writhing with suppressed laughter.
While Saumaise was at Christina's Court his famous battle of Latin words with Milton was in full swing. The tightly-bound Saumaise must have contrasted his own lot with that of the poet, whose domestic situation, in spite of what the Italians considered his offensively strict morality, was not without inspiring variety. His wife was immediately bored by a dull home, and he discovered that she was stupid, so they separated for a time, during which Milton wrote a treatise on divorce and cast his eye over other possible helpmeets, at the end of which time his wife went on her knees and begged to be taken back. If only Anne could be brought to her knees even for a moment!
Saumaise wrote a defence of Charles I at the instance of Charles II, who was then at the Hague. Milton replied with a "Defence of the People of England", in which, by the way, he eulogized Christina, declaring her fit to govern not only Europe, but the whole world. Since the brochure appeared while Saumaise was at Stockholm, Christina read it and was naturally enchanted by this appreciation, as no doubt Milton meant she should be, and she did not fail to let Saumaise know her high opinion of the "Defence". Milton lost his sight after he had finished this work, and Saumaise died before he could publish his "Responsio". When Milton heard that his enemy had boasted of making him lose his sight, he said:
"And I have made him lose his life."
Which shows how vindictive even an academic quarrel can make the soberest of men.
Saumaise prepared unwillingly to return to Leyden and take up once more the drudgery of his home-life. He resented the continual arrival of philosophers and savants at the Palace. He knew how much most of them were worth. There was no end to them. They flocked like birds of prey round the throne of the Sibyl, hovering about her, fighting for her favours, pouring out panegyrics with sickening ease, croaking Latin and Greek. Christina was certainly too kind to these vultures, much too indiscriminate. There were only a few men in Europe worthy of her patronage, and he, Saumaise, was the most important of them, and he was forced to leave the scene of action. Something must be done to stop the too-generous a flow of her favours.
Nothing kills like ridicule, and Saumaise found a way.
Above: Kristina.
Above: René Descartes.
Note: It is likely that Descartes did not write the 1649 ballet "La Naissance de la Paix".
No comments:
Post a Comment