c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Once More into Battle having made me promise, that I would also go with him to spend next winter in France.
It is only that promise and a few other special considerations that will make me return
to Paris within a few months, without being obliged by anything that I promised the
king and without having decided to spend the rest of my days there....It is true that
the person who informed me about the royal pension added that I might expect other
favours if I agreed to live in France. Although that is not a decisive factor with me,
I think it would be unreasonable if I did not prefer to be in the country where I was
born, and in which they provide testimony of their respect for me, than to remain in
another country where I have been unable for nineteen years to obtain the status of a
freeman [bourgeois] and in which, in order to avoid oppression, I am forced to appeal
onevery occasion to our ambassador. That does not prevent me from thinking that I
have some special friends here whom I honour and cherish very much. However, my
relations with them are almost exclusively by letter, something that I could continue
if I were in Paris more easily than I can at Egmond, and to which I would still hope to
return. (v.–)Descartes is obviously exploiting Huygens’ unwavering friendship over
many years to pressurize him here, once again, into providing a defence
against the Leiden theologians. When the Jesuits in Paris seemed to crit-
icize Descartes in,hecontrasted their negative response with the
favourable support of Regius at Utrecht. When Regius became critical
some years later, Descartes contrasted his disloyalty with the esteem and
friendship he then found in Paris. Now that he had been promised a French
royal pension, he is back to his old tricks of threatening to leave Holland,
possibly permanently, to live among those in his native country who appre-
ciate his contributions to philosophy and who confirm their appreciation
with financial support.
Descartes’ strong desire for public recognition of his work was encour-
aged by a further request from Queen Christina, who asked Chanut to get
his comments about the supreme good.His reply reworked themes that
he had mentioned on previous occasions, when he distinguished between
(a) goods of the body and of the soul, and (b) those that depend on luck or
nature and those that are under the control of each individual. Since we can
dispose absolutely only of the will, he argued, it follows that the supreme
good for each individual ‘consists only in a firm will to do what is good
and in the contentment which that produces’ (v.). The argument that
the most satisfactory contentment results from virtuous action had echoes
of the thesis that had attracted charges of Pelagianism from Leiden. ‘Free
will is in itself the most noble thing that we can have insofar as it makes
us, in some way, equal to God and seems to exempt us from being His