Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto Page A

granting royal authority for the translation of the remains. Not content with this, Terlon also personally disguised the copper reliquary, giving it “the appearance of a bundle of rocks.” The ship then set out from Stockholm bound for its first port of call, Copenhagen.
    It’s unlikely that any pilgrim has ever retraced the translation route of this particular collection of relics. From Copenhagen, the party, which from here would be led by the two members of Terlon’s staff, set out on a morning in early October, heading south. They made an uneventful passage through the wilds of northern Europe—Jutland bogs, North Sea coastal marshes, fog bound villages of Lower Saxony, through heath and forest and ultimately into the flat expanse of Flanders—until they reached the northern French town of Péronne. Here, customs officials took an interest in the train; finding the curious package and discovering that its outward appearance belied a bright copper interior, they demanded that the knights open it, making it clear that they suspected contraband. L’Epine and du Rocher affected official indignation; they produced a letter that Terlon had given them from no less an official than Pierre d’Alibert, the treasurer general of France; they pointed to the ambassadorial seal that Terlon had affixed to the box. But the officials wanted it opened, the strong iron bands that Terlon had taken the precaution of wrapping around the box perhaps increasing their suspicion. In the presence of witnesses, the bands were snapped, the box was opened, the officials peered inside . . . and it was as they had been told, maybe even less noteworthy, for, due to the rotting of the original coffin, parts of the skeleton were reduced to fragments, on which individual bones now rested. Presumably, however, they didn’t sift or perform even a perfunctory inventory, because there was a striking observation to be made, and nobody made it. A vital bone—the most obvious part of a skeleton—was missing.
    The box was resealed, horses were retethered, and off they went again, headed, without further interruption, for Paris.

    E VERY W EDNESDAY EVENING IN the late 1650s and through most of the 1660s, a cross-section of French society could be found packed into a house on a narrow alley in Paris known as the rue Quincampoix, a few steps from the raucous and reeking market of Les Halles. The mix was atypical for the time, almost scandal-worthy. Women and men, both single and married, were thrown together, high government officials alongside uncouth provincials, as well as princes and prostitutes and canons of the church—a profusion of frilled collars, puffed sleeves, and flowing, curled hair filling all three floors of the home. Today the narrow building lies just a few steps from the pedestrian-only rue Rambuteau, lined with kebab sellers, piercing booths, and shops selling paté sandwiches and the ubiquitous Robert Doisneau photos of Paris in the 1950s. The upper floors of the house remain residential; the street level is a karaoke bar. Three and a half centuries ago, as the home of Jacques and Geneviève Rohault, the building was well furnished, ornamented with tapestries and paintings, but, more remarkably, strategically littered with beakers, tubes, syringes, microscopes, prisms, compasses, magnets, and lenses of various shapes and sizes, as well as such curiosities as an “artificial eye” and a large mirror affixed to the floor.
    The visitors to
les mercredis,
as these weekly happenings became known, included some of the most famous names of the century, among them France’s supreme playwright, Molière, the socialite Madame de Sévigné, and the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock, discovered celestial bodies, and helped develop calculus. They all came to see Rohault, a physicist who was known as the greatest living Cartesian. This description in itself