Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

promiscuity.‘One may fear that Mr. Descartes, in the depths of what he

claimed was solitude, had provided the evidence to show to similar solitary

people that not every hidden life is always innocent.’Gustave Cohen,

bycontrast, explained Descartes’ ambiguous relations with women by

the loss of his mother in infancy. He compared him to another famous

contemporary, Blaise Pascal, who was similarly reared ‘without maternal

tenderness.’ Cohen thought that both philosophers exhibited a certain

‘austerity and unease’ in their relations with women, and that they were

endowed with a ‘soul that was not readily open to emotions which are not

intellectual.’

These biographers approach the question by trying to explain how a

man of such outstanding virtue could have succumbed to the allure of

a mere servant girl. However, it is probably a mistake to scrutinize the

psychology of Descartes or the possibility of a clandestine marriage. It

was more likely that he simply took advantage of a relatively young and

inexperienced servant, a practice that was so common in the seventeenth

century that Samuel Pepys used coded language in his famous diary to

acknowledge frequent similar episodes.The same practices appear in

the diary of his contemporary Robert Hooke. Servants constituted a sig-

nificant percentage of the total population in seventeenth-century Dutch

society, in which betweenandpercent of all households had at least

oneservant.Their duties involved all the lowliest tasks in the house,

including cleaning and cooking. Since maidservants were poorly paid,

they had to depend completely on their employers even for basic food

and accommodations, and their only alternative, if they were mistreated

or dissatisfied, was to move to another household in the same servile

role.

Many Dutch housemaids became pregnant in the households in which

they worked. When that happened, there was strong social pressure on

pregnant unmarried women to marry the father of the child, but only if

the two people had the same social status. If the man refused to marry,

it was even possible for unmarried women to sue the father for financial

support. However, if the woman was socially inferior, her chances of legal

redress or official marriage were minimal. It would therefore have been

most unlikely, for both social and religious reasons, that Helena Jans could

have persuaded Descartes to regularize her situation. That assumes, of

course, that Descartes was as attracted to young women as Pepys and

Hooke evidently were. If not, one is tempted to take Baillet’s tantalizing