c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

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Descartes and Princess

Elizabeth

The very friendly letter, which showed that you were thinking of me, is the

most precious thing that I could receive in this country.

(Descartes to Elizabeth)

T

people who were most influential in Descartes’ early life were

all women. His mother died when he was one year old. That might

have provided a context in which he could have formed close family ties

with his two siblings, Pierre and Jeanne, or with his father, Joachim. Apart

from Jeanne, however, he seems to have been estranged from his imme-

diate family and to have directed his affections from infancy toward oth-

ers. The first person with whom he bonded closely was his nurse, with

whom he maintained a residual emotional link for the rest of his life.

According to his niece, Catherine, Descartes specifically asked as he was

dying that those who managed his estate ‘take care of the living expenses

of his nurse, whom he had always cared for when he was alive’.This

final token of gratitude should not be exaggerated. It probably indicates

a redirected love for his mother rather than a deep, authentic love for

someone whom he had not seen for more than fifty years.The other peo-

ple most closely involved in Descartes’ early life were his grandmothers.

Since his father, Joachim, worked in Rennes for part of each year from

to– when he remarried and moved permanently in Brittany –

Descartes was effectively cared for until he went to college by his two

grandmothers, Jeanne Sain and Claude Ferrand. The evidence of later

years suggests that he was also close to his sister, Jeanne, from his infancy.

One has to think of Descartes, therefore, in the first five or six years of

his life as playing with his older sister, in the care of his grandmothers,

and devoted to his nurse, who occupied the role of a mother for the first

few years of his life. Neither his father nor his brother seems to have

