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people’s eyes. And here he lay, in this remote, cold, stony world, a veritable tomb.
    Finally Descartes agreed to let the physician Wullens see him again. But he remained cantankerous, so that Wullens was baleful in his Latin follow-up report, calling his patient
homo obstinatus
and complaining afterward that Descartes had told him “that if he had to die, he would die with more contentment if he did not have to see me.”
    Then came the final indignity, which Descartes not only relented to but, in ultimate capitulation, asked for out of the extremity of his desperation: to be bled. Three times his arm was opened; the blood that pulsed out, Chanut’s secretary noted, was “oily.” Rather than improvement, Wullens reported, there came “the death-rattle, black sputum, uncertain breathing, wandering eyes.” When death arrived, it was seemingly with spite on its breath.

    N OW THIS WAS AWKWARD . Chanut and Christina had lured the great man to them, they had taken him under their protection, and then they had, well, killed him. Christina could let his death wash off her royal personage, but Chanut, as both friend and diplomat, felt the full brunt of guilt. Much as he would have liked to avoid them, there were responsibilities to perform: he had to break the news. His letters fanned out across Europe, beginning the day after the death. To the comte de Lo-ménie, the former French secretary of state, he lamented: “We are afflicted in this house by the death of M. Descartes, . . . a rare man of the century.” Perhaps to deflect responsibility, he went on to explain that the philosopher had been in Sweden because “the Queen of Sweden had desired to see him with a passion.” To Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who had become close friends with Descartes, Chanut bowed low in anguish: “I . . . say to you, Madame, with an incredible pain, that we have lost Monsieur Descartes.” While to Claude Saumaise, a French linguist whom Christina had invited to her court, he wrote, “Mr. Descartes, who gave us the method and the design, will not have the pleasure to see the beginning of it”—meaning, presumably, that Descartes would not live to see the full flowering of science. And here Chanut tried to assuage his guilt a bit by noting that Descartes had died after an illness “in which he did not want to avail himself of the assistance of the Doctors.”
    The news of the death spread and, oddly enough, caused some bewilderment. The idea that Descartes would end disease and dramatically lengthen life had become so widely held in certain circles that some intellectuals refused to believe he could be dead. “Impossible,” wrote the French abbé Claude Picot, who said he had been convinced that Descartes “would have lived five hundred years, after having found the art of living several centuries.” How could the chief investigator of longevity die so young? There had to be a sinister explanation, something that, as Picot said, “deranged his machine.” A rumor sprang up, which circulated for decades, that he had been poisoned.
    Meanwhile, there was the matter of the body. Christina announced that she wanted to bury the great philosopher in Stockholm. If in life he hadn’t been the ornament to her court that she had wanted, perhaps in death he could add some luster. Chanut’s position would logically have impelled him to insist that the body be returned to France, but then again that would draw another, greater round of attention to the awkward fact that the man had died here, under his watch. He acquiesced.
    But where to bury him? There was no question in Christina’s mind. He would be given a full ceremony and laid to rest in the Riddarholm Church, the ancient resting place of Swedish kings, whose number included her father. Chanut was appreciative of the high honor offered to a countryman, but he definitely did not want this and set