Descartes: A Biography

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ALawyer’s Education 

some years after his death, which was intended to link her famous uncle

with her own family in Brittany. She claimed that he had been ‘conceived

among the Bretons, and born in Touraine.’In fact, Descartes’ connection

with Brittany was very much a retrospective recovery by his family, which

had removed from Touraine to the former duchy of Brittany after his

birth.

Rene Descartes was born on ́ March, the third surviving child

of Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard.He was born into a bourgeois

legal family that had begun to consolidate its social position by service

to the French crown. The circumstances of his birth and early childhood

seem to have made a deep and lasting impression on Rene. Within fourteen ́

months of his birth, the young Descartes was effectively an orphan, due

to his mother’s death and his father’s lengthy absences from home.

The Descartes family was originally from the Poitou region of France,

where many of its members had held royal appointments as tax collectors

or members of provincialparlements, and where the philosopher’s par-

ents had established their impressive home on the Grand’rue in central

Chatellerault. However, Joachim Descartes had been appointed to a postˆ

as counsellor in theparlementof Brittany inand had taken up his

post in February.Given its somewhat marginal status, the Brittany

parlementmet each year for only one three-month session, which was

extended into six months. Thus Descartes’ father spent part of the

year at home in Chˆatellerault and the remainder at Rennes,kilometres

away.Jeanne Brochard’s confinement coincided with her husband’s annual

absence in Brittany. Accordingly, she went to stay with her own mother,

Jeanne Sain, at the small town of La Haye, aboutkilometres from her

home. Descartes’ grandmother Sain had been widowed since, and she

provided a welcome haven for her grandson’s delivery. Fourteen months

after Ren ́e’s birth, onMay, Descartes’ mother died, three days

after the birth of her fifth child (who also died at birth).She left behind

afamily of three young children: Pierre (age six), Jeanne (age four), and

Rene( ́ ageone).

Descartes was evidently confused or not accurately informed by his

family about the details of his mother’s death, because he wrote to Princess

Elizabeth almost fifty years later that his mother had died a few days after

his own birth. ‘My mother died a few days after my birth from a disease

of the lung caused by distress. I inherited from her a dry cough and a

pale complexion which stayed with me until I was more than twenty, so

that all the doctors who saw me up to that time condemned me to die