Sieur de Chandoux

Descartes, in the middle of Holland, enjoyed a perfect solitude.

Sieur de Chandoux, of whom we have had occasion to speak elsewhere, did not make such an innocent use of his own. The ostentation with which we have seen that he produced his novelties only ended in smoke; and the event of his fortune served not a little to justify the judgment that Mr. Descartes had made of his philosophy.

Chandoux, since the famous day when he had discoursed with so much éclat before Cardinal de Bérulle, the nuncio of Bagni, and several scholars, had thrown himself into the exercises of chemistry, but a chemistry that, by the alteration and falsification of metals, tended to put disorder in the commerce of life.

France was then filled with people who had wanted to take advantage of the troubles of the kingdom, to ruin the policy of the laws that concerned the manufacture and use of money; and impunity had introduced there a license that was going to the ruin of the state. King Louis 13, to repress it, was obliged to establish in the arsenal in Paris a sovereign chamber which was called the “chamber of justice”, by letters patent given at Saint-Germain on June 14, 1631.

Chandoux was accused and convicted there of having made false money with several others, and he was condemned to be hanged in the Place de Grève.

Descartes, although very sensitive to the goods and evils of his homeland, only knew of its movements and its troubles what his friends were willing to tell him about them.

But they rarely entertained him with public affairs. Some only thought of proposing mathematical problems to him and talking to him about physical observations.

The others only cared to congratulate him on the happiness of his solitude and to show him the jealousy they had of it. Mr. de Balzac was one of the latter.

He had returned to Paris around Lent, after a retreat of eighteen months he had made at his estate of Balzac near Angoulême: and Descartes had always delayed writing back to him, in the thought that he would soon be back in the city or at court, as he had made him hope.

Having learned of his return to Paris through Father Mersenne, he gave him news of himself: and to show that he was not ignorant of the art of complimenting a friend who was a great master of it, he asked him for his share of the time he had resolved to waste in the conversation of those who were to go visit him in Paris, and he made him believe that for two years that he had left this city, he had not been tempted a single time to return there, except since he had been told that he was there. Mr. de Balzac knew well how to outdo this compliment. He wrote back to him on April 25, 1631, and told him that he no longer lived but on the hope of going to see him in Amsterdam, “and to embrace this dear head so full of reason and intelligence.” He even went so far as to make him hope to choose for the love of him the place of his dwelling in Holland, and to live with him in the same solitude. “Do not think,” he told him, “that I am making this proposal to you at random. I speak very seriously: and for a little that you remain in the place where you are, I am a Dutchman as well as you; and gentlemen the States will not have a better citizen than me, and who has more passion for liberty. Although I love the sky of Italy extremely, and the land that bears the orange trees, your virtue would be capable of attracting me to the shores of the frozen sea and to the bottom of the north. It has been three years that my imagination is looking for you, and that I am dying of desire to reunite with you, in order never to separate from you.” Etc.

It must be admitted that Mr. de Balzac spoke to his friends almost only in figures, particularly in his letters; and Mr. Descartes, who had known him for a long time by his conversations and by his writings, could not but be accustomed to his hyperboles. But after the protestation he had made to him on this occasion of speaking to him “very seriously”, it is to be believed that there were other obstacles than his will, which opposed the execution of his design. Mr. de Ville-Bressieux, a doctor from Grenoble, more easily overcame those who could have prevented him from going to find Mr. Descartes. His distance had only served to increase the passion he had conceived for his philosophy, especially after having heard him reason in the assembly which had been held on the subject of Sieur de Chandoux. Since that time he had not ceased to consider himself as his disciple: and his presence was all the more pleasant in Holland to Mr. Descartes, as he knew in him with a great ease of mind a lot of genius for mechanics, and a lot of inclination for chemistry.

He first stayed with him for a period of a few years, and he wanted to be the companion of his travels, his studies, and his experiences. He then returned to France, and the advantages he had received from Mr. Descartes made him return near him at the end of a few years, until the first trip that Mr. Descartes made to France, where he left him when he resumed the road to Holland.

For a long time, a more fatal year than that of 1632 had not been seen, for the large number of princes, lords, generals of armies, and famous men who died in different positions.

But we know of none who had the slightest relation with Mr. Descartes, if we do not except two princes, with whose daughters providence destined him to have habits for philosophy, and especially for the knowledge of the sovereign good, and that of nature. The first of these princes was the king of Sweden, who was killed on the day of Lützen, in the combat he had given to the imperials on the sixteenth day of November. His only daughter and heiress Christine was then only six years old. The other was the unfortunate Count Palatine of the Rhine, king of Bohemia, father of the illustrious philosopher and Princess Elizabeth. His death followed that of the king of Sweden quite closely. He was on the point of re-entering the possession of his states, when he was stopped in Mainz by the contagion with which he was struck. They had nevertheless succeeded in expelling the venom, and he had put himself in a state to recover. But the news of the death of the king of Sweden touched him and so disheartened him, that it made him fall back, and put him in the tomb on the twenty-ninth day of November, being two years younger than the king of Sweden.

Mr. Descartes was then in a suspension of study which lasted the rest of the year, and which kept him away from his books and his papers for nearly four months. To get back to it, he judged it appropriate to change his dwelling towards the spring of the following year, and he chose the city of Deventer in Overijssel, perhaps because Mr. Reneri had praised the stay to him. This man had left some time before the preceptorship he had in Leiden, and he had recently gone to settle in Deventer, where he had been called to teach philosophy. Mr. Descartes told Father Mersenne five or six days after this news, as a thing quite advantageous to their common friend. To better persuade him of the advantage of this new “condition,” he told him that the university or college of Deventer is an academy little renowned in truth, but where the professors have more wages, and live more comfortably than in Leiden or in Franeker, where Mr. Reneri could have had a place before, if he had not refused or neglected it.

Mr. Descartes being in Deventer got back to studying very seriously, and resumed the care of continuing various works he had interrupted, and particularly his Dioptrics and his treatise on the world. He applied himself all over again to the knowledge of celestial things, in order to acquit himself with even more exactitude: and he asked Father Mersenne to send him what was said that Father Scheiner was having printed concerning the parhelia he had observed in Rome, on the subject of which this author was to treat of various other phenomena. It is true that this father was actually working on this work: but he brought so many delays to its publication, that he still left it in manuscript at his death, which occurred five months after that of Mr. Descartes.

After a few months of particular application to astronomical observations, he noticed the necessity of studying the nature of comets thoroughly, and he wrote to Father Mersenne to tell him that if he knew any author who had particularly collected the various observations that had been made of comets until then, he would oblige him to give him notice of it. “For for two or three months,” he says, “I have been very deeply engaged in the sky; and after having satisfied myself concerning its nature and that of the stars that we see there, and several other things that I would not have even dared to hope for a few years ago: I have become so bold, that I now dare to seek the cause of the situation of each fixed star. For although they appear very irregularly scattered here and there in the sky, I nevertheless do not doubt that there is a natural order among them which is regular and determined. The knowledge of this order is the key and the foundation of the highest and most perfect science that men can have concerning material things, inasmuch as by its means one could know a priori all the various forms and essences of terrestrial bodies; whereas without it we must be content to guess them a posteriori, and by their effects. Now I do not find anything that could help me so much to reach the knowledge of this order, as the observation of several comets. That is why as I have no books, and that when I had some, I would regret the time that it would be necessary to employ to read them, I would be very happy to find someone, who had collected all at once what I would not know how to draw without a lot of trouble from particular authors, of whom each has only written of one or two comets only.”

Descartes took occasion from this kind of study to make Father Mersenne the plan of a history of celestial appearances such as he conceived it, on what this father had told him that he knew people who were pleased to work for the advancement of the sciences, even to wanting to do all kinds of experiments at their expense. “If someone of this humor,” he says, “wanted to undertake to write the history of celestial appearances according to the method of Verulam, and that without putting any reasons or hypotheses he described to us exactly the sky as it appears now; what situation each fixed star has with respect to its neighbors; what difference, either of size, or of color, or of clarity, or of the more or less sparkling, etc. Moreover, if that corresponds to what the ancient astronomers have written about it, and what difference is found there; for I do not doubt that the stars do not always change a little in situation among themselves, although they are considered fixed. After that, that he added there the observations of the comets, putting a small table of the course of each one, as Tycho Brahe has done of three or four that he observed; and finally the variations of the ecliptic, and of the apogees of the planets: it would be a work that would be more useful to the public than it perhaps seems at first, and which would relieve me of a lot of trouble. But I do not hope that it will be done, as I also do not hope to find what I am looking for at present concerning the stars. I believe that it is a science that passes the reach of the human mind: and yet I am so little wise that I would not know how to keep myself from dreaming about it, although I judge that it will only serve to make me lose time, as it has already happened to me for two months that I have not advanced in my treatise on the world, which I will not fail to finish before the term that I told you.”