Free Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto

weather-blasted of all records of the life that once occupied the remains beneath. There are art deco pink marble slabs, and rectilinear blocks with spare, geometric 1950s simplicity, neatly etched with crosses and the sans-serifed names of the departed: Johansson, Baggström, Thordal, Köpman. The yard is quietly busy; office workers come with lunches to sit among the graves. The most visited site is a raw, smooth, twisting monolith whose only marking is the swirl of a signature. In 1986, on the street that runs along the east side of the churchyard, Olof Palme, Sweden’s outspoken leftist prime minister, was shot to death. The unassuming character of his gravesite suits a country famed for its spare design sense, and it remains a place of continual, understated pilgrimage.
    Three and a half centuries ago, this was a forlorn little graveyard in the countryside, the out-of-the-way place Pierre Chanut chose for his illustrious friend’s final rest. Christina ordered an imposing monument and had its four sides covered with Latin inscriptions, written by Chanut, extolling the epochal wisdom of the deceased and containing the names of both herself and Chanut.
    The tomb is gone today, and so are the remains. In the spring of the year 1666—the first of May, in fact—with a strengthening sun warming the top layer of soil, coaxing life out of the dead land, a shovel bit into the precise spot of earth where, sixteen years earlier, a ceremony of supposedly permanent interment had taken place. Much had changed in those sixteen years. Most convulsively for Sweden, Christina was gone. Her enthusiasm for Greek esoterica had been short-lived, but the gossip about her interest in Roman Catholicism had proven to be on the mark. In 1654, four years after Descartes’ death, she abdicated her throne, converted to Catholicism (in the staunchly Lutheran nation that Sweden had become since the Reformation it was insupportable that the monarch be a Catholic), and moved to Rome. There, as the most famous woman in the world and now either the most notorious or the most revered, depending on one’s religious perspective, she had created an altogether new persona.
    Christina’s dramatic transformation—from enlightened monarch to religious convert of dubious sincerity (in Rome she continually flouted Catholic observances)—sparked incredulous speculation as the events unfolded, and the speculation has never ceased. Almost immediately people blamed—or credited—Descartes, whose commitment to his faith was well known, despite the charges of atheism that dogged him. But the contact between the queen and the philosopher had been limited and strained, so that, despite indications from Christina herself that Descartes had had a hand in her conversion, her biographers have looked elsewhere for sources of influence. Most have found it within her own nature: a deep, quixotic restlessness, a hungry, almost angry search for answers, for certainty. This, perhaps, was where she and Descartes had truly intersected.
    Chanut, too, was gone. He had returned to Paris the year after Descartes’ death and himself had died in 1662. The current French ambassador to Sweden, who watched as the shovel dug deeper and slowly revealed the coffin lid, was a very different sort of man. Where Chanut had been an enthusiastic promoter of science, a futurist who believed in the real-world possibilities of Cartesianism, Hugues de Terlon stood frankly with one foot in the past. He was a knight of St. John, a member of the chivalrous order based on Malta, whose glory dated to the First Crusade. Terlon was an imposing man of fifty-four, with a patrician nose, a thin, curling moustache, and eyes that had seen battle among northern European foes from Lübeck to Piotrków. He maintained an archaic and militaristic form of Catholicism. He was not only a warrior and a diplomat but also a member of a religious order that mandated a vow of