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An extract from the book me’s still reading .... here..

Part III Promise her anything but give her K-23

..... Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married. Descartes, architect of the Age of Reason, fled Paris, the City of Romance, in 1628 to “escape its distractions”. He settled in Holland, studied and wrote about Mathematics and logic. Late in the year of 1649, he was invited to visit Stockholm to instruct Queen Christina in philosophy. Descartes accepted at once. Perhaps the pay was good. There would have been a reason.

Queen Christina took her lessons lying down. Frequently she was nude. That is hardly the worst of it. The court of Sweden, like everyplace else in seventeenth-century Europe, was infested with fleas. Christina had had her craftsmen fashion for her a tiny cannon of silver and gold. As she lay about on her cushions, she fired the little canon at the fleas on her body. That was why she was nude. It is said she was a fair to good shot.

The daily sight of Her Majesty thus amusing herself while he, Descartes, in dark Dutch birches, undertook to explain the underlying perfection of an indubitable sphere of Being, was more than his rational bias could bear. He grew rapidly nervous and pale. On February 11, 1650, only a few months after his arrival in Stockholm, Descartes, fifty-four, fell dead. Christina lived thirty-nine years longer and knocked off a good many more fleas.

In 1666- little harm love could do to him then- Descartes’s body was taken to Paris for reburial. At the funeral, a disagreeable odor filled the churchyard. “It was as if a goatherd had driven his flock through our midst,” said one of Descartes’s followers. No logical explanation was offered.

(the author is grateful to Jessica Maxwell, whose ancestor once owned a perfume shop in New Orleans, and who traded him that shop for a flying conch shell)