Descartes: A Biography

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ALawyer’s Education 

queen, Marie de Medicis, who would be regent during the minority of ́

Louis XIII.

OnJune, following the principal religious ceremonies in Paris, the

king’s heart was carried on a three-day funeral journey to the town of

La Fleche, accompanied by nobles, soldiers, and the Provincial of the`

Jesuits in Paris, Father Armand.Since the college chapel had not yet

been built, the ceremonies took place at the local parish church of St.

Thomas, at which Father Armand preached a lengthy sermon in praise

of the deceased monarch. Every year subsequently until the eighteenth

century, beginning onJune, the college held a three-day commemoration

of these events, in which the school pupils and the staff of the college

participated. This included a public procession carrying the king’s heart

from the Church of St. Thomas to the college chapel, philosophical and

academic disputations, and, on the third day, a theatrical presentation that

honoured the memory of the late king.

The ceremonies for the first anniversary were published at La Fleche`

under the title:Forthe Anniversary of the Death of Henry the Great: the

Tears of the College of La Fl`eche, directed by the Society of Jesus.This

is no small pamphlet. It is a book of over four hundred pages, which

includes poems written by the staff and students in Latin, Greek, and

French, together with the text of the anniversary funeral oration.The

commemorative oration begins with the words: ‘Gentlemen: if this dis-

course, washed away by tears as soon as it emerges from the mind and

the pen, is interrupted by sighs, accept it as conceived and formed in a

heart that it broken by grief.’The unrelenting rhetoric of sorrow and

copious tears makes it appear as if the preacher had just lost his most

intimate friend: ‘How many times during this past year have tears welled

up in my eyes as I passed by the places and pathways of your tender

youth, of which these woods, these houses and gardens remind me every

day.’

Among the relatively few verses written in French inThe Tears, there

is a sonnet about the death of the king and the discovery, by Galileo, of

the moons of Jupiter. The fact that this is the very same year in which

Galileo’s discoveries were published indicates that the sonnet’s author

was well informed about recent developments in astronomy. The sonnet

contrasts the flood of tears that had been shed in France for the death of

the king, a deluge that was in danger of flooding the whole country and its

neighbouring provinces, with the benefits derived from the bright guiding