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himself obsequiously to convincing the queen to rethink her decision. He sent his secretary, an especially pious man named Belin, to the castle to explain that his reasons for desiring other arrangements had to do with religion. Descartes was a Catholic; France was a Catholic nation, which wouldn’t appreciate one of its native sons being buried in a Lutheran setting. Plus, there had already been whispers at Christina’s court that Descartes and Chanut together were trying to convert the queen from Swedish Lutheranism. Perhaps Her Majesty could appreciate, Belin offered, that burial in the state church might be . . . undiplomatic?
    Christina relented, and if Chanut’s deep objective was to keep the whole thing as quiet as possible, he achieved it. The place, time, and circumstances of burial might have served for a plague victim. At four o’clock on a winter morning, barely twenty-four hours after the death, a small procession traveled a mile north of the center of Stockholm, wagon wheels creaking in the frozen ruts, and turned into a lonely little cemetery whose charges were mostly orphans. Apparently Chanut had made some inquiries and concluded that because children who had not attained “the age of reason” were not considered to be outside the graces of the Catholic Church, such burial ground, if not exactly sanctified, could not be said to be unholy. Theologically, it would do. Better still, it was remote.
    Four men—one of them Chanut’s seventeen-year-old son—carried the coffin to the waiting grave. A small group of people gathered around it in the frozen darkness, their faces lit by flickering torches. Beneath the icy swirl of the indifferent heavens, the sole priest invoked the name of God. Dirt skittered on the coffin lid. Then everyone went home.

         

    Banquet of Bones
    EATH,” THE PHILOSOPHER L UDWIG W ITTGENSTEIN once wrote, “is not an event in life.” He meant, maybe (for it’s hard to be sure—Wittgenstein was rather titanically cryptic), that being dead is not something we actually experience and that since we aren’t conscious of a nonliving state it is literally meaningless, so instead of spending our lives worrying about the future we should look at each instant as an eternity. We should live in the moment.
    Perhaps this is true, and wise, but in an ordinary sense Wittgenstein was completely wrong. Death is
the
event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we butter up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here.
    Death comes most squarely into our lives at the places where we leave those who have died. In this respect, there is a noteworthy difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. A cemetery is a universe unto itself, an ocean of memories, each of which is always inexorably being carried further out to sea. A cemetery’s vastness restricts the activity that takes place in it: the only reason to go there is to bury loved ones or pay respects. Graveyards, however, usually attached to old churches, are wedged into a human landscape, and everyday life has a tendency to wrap itself around them. Wander into an urban churchyard on a sunny day and you will probably find other people: kids playing tag, a homeless man sipping soup, people strolling, taking stock of their lives. This mingling in of ordinariness seems an unspoken nod to mortality, an acceptance—partial, anyway—of the fact that we, too, will actually die.
    The Adolf Fredriks churchyard, in north-central Stockholm, is today an urban sanctuary rimmed by office buildings and shops. Tombstones scattered across the grass run a gamut of eras and funereal styles. There are tilting, centuries-old mini-obelisks, almost druidic in the angular cut of their tops, their faces