Quite beyond that, a search for answers of the sort I’ve been conducting is itself utterly Cartesian, is it not? The Cartesian method lies beneath not only the scientific method but other modern modes of inquiry. We are a probing, analytical culture. Of course, a certain amount of baggage comes with this. The American philosopher John Dewey characterized the modern mind since Descartes as being caught up in a hopeless “quest for certainty”—hopeless because certainty does not exist in the real world. In absorbing Descartes’ mind-body dualism, we have set up our understanding of knowledge this way: there is a fixed world of objects that is “out there,” and there is a mind “in here.” Knowledge is what happens when the mind reaches out to that fixed world. Dewey called this view a “spectator theory of knowledge.” A thing is real, we think, if we can see it and hold it, if it can be associated with a particular time and place, if it happened in history. But according to current thinking in philosophy and science, this is not how reality works. We are supposed to understand that things that seem to be hard and clear and certain are in fact floating on a sea of probability. Contingency—whether in nuclear physics or in morality or in our personal relationships—is a governing principle. Like children outgrowing fantasies, we are supposed to realize ultimately that there is no such thing as certainty.
But we want it anyway. We probe the world and our past. Were the American founding fathers heroes or slave drivers? Who was Jesus and how do intelligent Christians square his supposed miracles with our understanding of the physical world? We are all part-time historians, genealogists, doctors, investigators. We demand information about our child’s illness; we hire private detectives to check up on our spouse; we haul that piece of furniture that has been in the family for generations to an appraiser to learn its value; we have difficult conversations with parents about the circumstances of our birth. The archetypal modern figure may not be Descartes or Galileo or Einstein but Sherlock Holmes. The success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories was in no small part due to their capturing the modern fascination with inquiry that was part of Victorian society—the idea of applying observation and analysis to the ordinary world and revealing the hidden structure of things. We are all detectives. Sifting clues and making deductions is in our blood—or perhaps better to say in our brains.
And we crave closure. What actually happened to the “body” of Descartes’ bones is a mystery, but we like mysteries when they come paired with solutions. So here is mine.
I AM STANDING ON A wide plaza—the highest point in Paris—looking at one church but seeing two. I’m holding a postcard of an ink drawing of the scene before me as it existed four centuries ago. The real-life church in front of me, with its somberly busy façade mixing elements of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, is nearly exactly as it appears on the postcard. But where, on the postcard, immediately to the right of it—wall to wall, in fact—stands a church with a sedate Gothic brick façade, there is now a gap, a narrow street that connects this plaza, the place du Panthéon, to the street behind (the rue Descartes, no less) and the warren of Latin Quarter streets that descend to the Seine. By squinting and folding the postcard in half I can replace the missing church, relocating it up against the wall of the existing one.
The church on my right—the one that isn’t there anymore—was Ste.-Geneviève. Here, on an early summer’s evening in 1667, friends and followers of Descartes, having orchestrated the disinterment and transfer of his remains from Stockholm, laid them to rest on French soil, near the relics of the city’s patron saint, Gene-viève herself. Here the bones of Descartes remained for more than a century until, in 1792, anti-Catholic mobs threatened the church, so that its abbot begged the keeper of the revolutionary government’s dépôt des monuments to come and save what could be saved.
Alexandre Lenoir—that sepulchrally dashing rescuer of artifacts—took official charge of the situation and went to work. He took sculpted figures, columns, plaques, and markers. He took the tabernacle. He took coffins and sarcophaguses. He took bones. But he did not take the remains of René Descartes. It was a time of chaos and violence, of roving gangs, makeshift roadblocks, burning buildings. For Lenoir, given his business, it was an intensely busy moment, as he sent his small team of assistants to retrieve objects from every part of the city. Speaking specifically of the moment when he supposedly retrieved the remains of Descartes from Ste.-Geneviève, Lenoir wrote four years later that “the circumstances of that time were not happy ones for me.” We have no way of knowing what this personal source of unhappiness was, but his suggestion is that he was distracted.
Though he was trained as a painter, Lenoir’s skill was not in art; he fancied himself a scholar of architecture, but he made basic mistakes in his descriptions of buildings and their features. However, as his biographer has said, Lenoir was a registrar of the first order: his records of his holdings are unparalleled, and an important database of French art and architecture; his renderings of the tombs in the church of Ste.-Geneviève are meticulous. And yet he made no record of recovering the remains of Descartes.
Decades later, long after Lenoir’s beloved Museum of French Monuments was closed, and after Berzelius discovered the skull purported to be Descartes’ in the collection of a casino operator in Stockholm, Georges Cuvier, seeking to unravel the tangle of threads surrounding Descartes’ bones, wrote to Lenoir at his home in Paris. There was a considerable disparity between the two men: Lenoir was at this point more or less relegated to obscurity, while Cuvier, as permanent secretary of the academy, was one of France’s great figures. The letter was written under the seal of the Academy of Sciences and carried the weight of authority:
I pray you, Monsieur, to be so kind as to tell me what you know regarding a fact that can contribute to confirm or deny the authenticity of the head that was sent latterly from Stockholm to Paris and that passed in Sweden as being that of Descartes.
We need to know if, while the remains of this philosopher were being carried to the Petits-Augustins [the convent on the Seine that Lenoir turned into the Museum of French Monuments], there was a head or some part of the head.
Monsieur Berzelius, who was in Paris during the burying of these remains at St.-Germain-des-Prés, heard it told by one of the persons who had been present at the ceremony that the head was not found there and that it was believed to remain in Sweden; Monsieur Delambre, who saw and examined these remains, assures also that there was no recognizable fragment of the head.
And yet Monsieur de Terlon, minister of France to Sweden, who occupied himself in 1666 with the return of this store to France, seems to have taken the greatest precautions to assure its integrity; he would had to have been deceived by the persons whom he had charged with the packing . . .
Cuvier’s focus was on the skull, and his tone formally polite, but he was clearly suggesting some mishandling of the remains between the time Terlon packed them in Sweden and Delambre and others saw them. And the man most associated with them during that time—who had supposedly retrieved them from Ste.-Geneviève and then held them in his keeping for twenty-seven years—was Lenoir.
Lenoir wrote back at once. He didn’t even bother to pick up a fresh sheet of paper but scrawled his reply on the back of Cuvier’s letter:
Paris, the 16th of May 1821
To Monsieur le baron Cuvier
Monsieur le Baron,
I hasten to respond to the letter that you did the honor to write me, relative to the mortal remains of René Descartes. . . . Messieurs the abbé Saint-Léger, Le Blond, and I took ourselves to the church to make a search for the body of Descartes; and we dug the earth around the pillar to the right of the entrance, where a medallion in terra cotta was attached and where graven inscriptions on white marble marked the mausoleum of Descartes. At a very little depth in the earth, we found the remains of a coffin of porous wood and some very disappointing bits of bone in very small quantity, which is to say, a portion of a tibia, of a femur, and some fragments of a radius and a cubitus.
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Please note, Monsieur, that these fragments, of which there would have been twice as many had the body been laid there in its entirety, were alone and isolated from other parts of the skeleton, which were missing . . .
He went on to say that he had found one small piece of bone plate that could have been a skull fragment; it was this that he had cut into circles and distributed to friends as rings.
But two years before Cuvier’s letter Lenoir had also been asked about the transfer of Descartes’ remains, and on that earlier occasion he had given a somewhat different answer. In the immediate aftermath of the reburial in the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, and perhaps in response to questions from Delambre, the city’s conservator of public monuments had wanted to look at the records from the time when Lenoir dug up the bones, but he couldn’t locate any reference. “You will not have found, Monsieur, the record of the exhumation of Descartes in the archives of the museum,” Lenoir informed him, “because none was written up.” The reason, Lenoir said, was that “this operation was conducted revolutionarily”—that is, during the chaos of the Revolution. It took place, he went on, “in the presence of the police commissioner of that section of the quarter” and “at the request of Messieurs the abbé Saint-Léger and Le Blond,” who were both members of the Monuments Commission. “They are both dead now,” he added, then noted that “the remains . . . were brought to the Petits-Augustins by a commissioner whom I paid.”
Lenoir appears to be suggesting that he himself was not present when the remains were dug up. “At their arrival at the museum, I placed [the remains] in an antique porphyry tomb,” he continues, painting a picture of others as having not only dug in the church but carried what they found to the grounds of the museum, where he received the remains and put them into the ancient sarcophagus. The seemingly superfluous note that Saint-Léger and Le Blond had both since died—and were thus not available to corroborate his account—also sounds like a reflexive covering up of an awkward or embarrassing fact.
The awkward fact, it seems to me, is that Lenoir failed to get the remains of Descartes. It was an unhappy time, there was the chaos of the Revolution, he sent others—as indeed he often did. Then there is the evidence. Lenoir says that what he—or his assistants—found was “the remains of a coffin of porous wood” and some meager fragments. But there was no wooden coffin. The burial ceremony of 1667 had been a grand affair—recall that the Cartesians had pulled every string in order to have the translation and reburial of their great hero treated as an officially sanctioned event—and the copper coffin in which Terlon had originally packed the remains was accompanied by a copper sword on which Claude Clerselier, the editor of Descartes’ papers, inscribed an account of the translation and the names of those taking part. This work was done, in the words of Baillet, “in the presence of these friends.”
So where was the copper coffin? Where was the copper sword? What’s more, Lenoir had believed that one of the larger bone fragments—from which he had made his rings—was a piece of skull. A portion of skull is precisely what should not have been found, the skull being the one piece of the skeleton that has the best documentary reason for not being among the remains.
But the most decisive point against Lenoir is found in his letter to Cuvier. He says that he and two others “took ourselves to the church to make a search for the body of Descartes; and we dug the earth around the pillar to the right of the entrance, where a medallion in terra cotta was attached.” Such a plaque to the memory of Descartes may well have been placed on a pillar to the right of the church entrance, but that was not the location of the tomb. Records of those who participated in the burial at Ste.-Geneviève are clear in stating that when the prayers and songs were finished the coffin was carried “to the southern end of the nave and put against the great wall, between two confessionals, into a vault that had been intended for it, between the chapel of the titular Saint Geneviève and that of Saint François.” Descartes’ resting place was not the spot under the floor of the church where Lenoir and/or his assistants dug but a vault along the southern wall.
All of this points to Lenoir as the man responsible for breaking the historical chain—for losing the bones. He must at first have thought that he had gotten the genuine remains of Descartes from the church, for we know how he cherished the remains of great men and women as secular relics, and he went to the trouble of turning these particular bones into jewelry. But in time he seems to have come to realize what had happened, and begun making excuses. The remains—presumably a more or less complete skeleton with the exception of its skull—would probably have been dealt with by revolutionary ransackers. If the vandals had somehow overlooked them, Descartes’ bones would have been churned up when the ruined church was finally destroyed in 1807 to make way for the road.
The Cartesian tendency of favoring mind over matter—mind over body—thus has a metaphorical cap. The skull—the representation of mind—having been subjected to repeated and increasingly sophisticated scientific study and judged to be authentic, sits enshrined in a science museum, the Musée de l’homme, or Museum of Man, which was formed in 1937 from older collections of anthropological artifacts. Indeed, as I write, it is part of a special exhibition at the Musée de l’homme entitled Man Exposed, sitting beside a Cro-Magnon skull to demonstrate the breadth of human thought and accomplishment over the millennia, once again serving as the very representation of “modern.” As for the body, the trail ends abruptly, veering sharply into oblivion. And that is perhaps as it should be. Dust to dust. In secula seculorum.
A Modern Face
OMETIME AROUND 1985, A JAPANESE TELECOMMUNICATIONS engineer named Hiroshi Harashima was trying to develop a practical videophone when his thinking suddenly jumped from the technical to the philosophical. He describes his normal work as “how to connect terminals such as a telephone set,” but, he came to wonder, “are not the true terminals human beings rather than telephone sets?” The prime difficulty researchers had found with video phones was not technical. It had to do with the human face. Faces, Harashima realized, convey emotional rather than practical information. Researchers had discovered that people were used to the narrower emotional space of telephone communication and didn’t feel comfortable with the deeper level of opening up involved in showing their faces. As Harashima explored the implications of this finding, his usual network of colleagues expanded. He was soon in touch with psychologists, forensic scientists, makeup artists, anthropologists, even mask collectors. He formulated the idea that everything he had formerly been involved in was contributing to the development of what he called “line humanity,” a society built around stream-lined high-tech communications that flattened information. The face, in contrast, was the oldest communication technology yet a deeply sophisticated one in which we expose a range of meanings, including many—making promises, asking for trust—that knit the culture together. “It is not too much to say that [the face] is the basis of social order,” he wrote. He perceived dangers in this faceless society that was developing.
In 1995 Harashima and Hisao Baba, an anthropologist and anatomist who was also a curator at the National Science Museum in Tokyo, cofounded the Japan Academy of Facial Studies. Their intention was to bring together experts in fields as diverse as orthodontics, cosmetology, biology, dentistry, and drama in an evolving project to explore ways to keep one of humanity’s most basic communication technologies relevant in a digital world. Projects associated with the Academy of Facial Studies have analyzed wrinkles and aging, studied how people remember facial expressions, and described brain responses to emoticons.
In 1999, the academy and the museum intended to hold a vast exposition entitled the Great Exhibition of the Face. It so happened that before the exposition was planned Baba was in Paris visiting the world-renowned collection of Neanderthal skulls at the Musée de l’homme. While showing him around, Philippe Mennecier, the museum’s director of conservation, happened to mention that the museum possessed the skull of D
escartes. Baba was “thrilled” to behold the curious object, and as the plans for the exhibition on the face were being drawn up, he had an idea.
Some months later, Mennecier received at the museum a representative of the firm of André Chenue, a company that began its life in 1760 as transporter of the personal belongings of Marie Antoinette and is today one of Europe’s leading shippers of fine art. The representative carried a custom-built box—of smooth-grained blond wood with elegant hasps—that was not much larger than a human head. When the representative left the museum, still carrying the box—now packed with cargo—he was in the company of André Langaney, the director of the museum’s laboratory of biological anthropology. Later, Langaney boarded a flight for Tokyo and took a seat in business class. His carry-on luggage was the box. Memories of the debacle during the flood of 1910 died hard; the agreement to send the skull of Descartes to Tokyo—the first time it had been out of the museum since 1912, when it spent two hours on display at the Academy of Sciences—came with the condition that it be treated as an object of inestimable value. “It seemed to us out of the question to leave the skull in the luggage hold,” Mennecier told me.
At the time, Baba knew nothing of the skull’s history. His interest was not in authentication. The exhibition in Tokyo would feature images of fashion models and Papua New Guinea tribesmen, dental surgery demonstrations, Rembrandt portraits, Noh theater masks, computer-assisted facial reconstructions, Abraham Lincoln’s death mask, cartoon caricatures, tapes of Japanese actresses of the 1950s, and Photoshopped Mona Lisas with frowns and grins. It was to be a compendium of facial data, but also a demonstration of human technologies and of one of the current trends in science, the interdisciplinary approach. Baba’s idea was that the exhibit should have an introductory piece that set up its historical and intellectual features. He himself was an anatomist who had performed many autopsies. He wanted to apply his skills to the skull of Descartes to give the facial exhibition a face. The skull would be both an introduction to the exposition and, as he said, “a symbol of homo sapiens, a symbol of human intelligence, the symbolic face of modern man.”
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