Some years earlier, when he had been focusing his work on medicine, Descartes had written that he thought he could live to be a hundred. Perhaps he had even done something, symbolically, for his own lifespan. If death was, as the following century liked to call it, "suspended animation," then Descartes, in animating this doll, had defied mortality and resurrected his daughter. Unable to mourn her, he constructs a simulacrum of the girl, gives it the power of motion, names it after her. Seen from this angle, the Descartes of the story comes across, not as the reasoning philosopher, but as a fallible human being, distraught, nine years later, by the death of his child. But the events on the ship read like a too-perfect fable-about science falling prey to the God-fearing crowd, about the threatening, uncanny power of machines, about the rational philosopher who has an almost superstitious relation to the product of his own mind: he names it, he calls it his daughter-and whether or not the story is made up of literal facts, it must, in a sense, be true to some metaphorical purpose: what is the use of telling it? (It has been told many times since Descartes's death). He had, in fact, attempted to build some automata earlier in his life (one of his correspondents reported that Descartes had plans for "a dancing man, a flying pigeon, and a spaniel that chased a pheasant"), and he continued to be interested in mechanical toys. Descartes did go to Sweden, and did, as he had feared, die there, six months later. On the captain's orders, Descartes's "daughter" was thrown overboard. When the ship's captain was shown the moving marvel, he was convinced, in his shock, that it was some instrument of dark magic, responsible for the weather that had hampered their journey.
It was indeed his progeny, but not the kind the sailors had imagined: Francine was a machine.
Descartes, it transpired, had constructed the android himself, out of pieces of metal and clockwork. As soon as they had opened it, they jumped back in horror: inside the box was a doll-a living doll, they thought, which moved and behaved exactly like a human being. There was no one there, but on leaving the room, they stopped in front of a mysterious box. Overcome with curiosity, they crept into Descartes's quarters. Everything was out of place they could find neither the philosopher nor the girl.
He was travelling, he told his companions, with his young daughter Francine but the sailors had never seen her, and, thinking this strange, they decided to seek her out one day, in the midst of a terrible storm. Filled with foreboding, he packed his bags, taking all of his manuscripts with him. He even feared, he wrote to a friend, "a shipwreck which will cost me my life." But Christina's whim was his command. He felt, he said, that "thoughts as well as waters" would freeze over in Sweden and, since that winter was particularly harsh, he believed he would not survive the season. The philosopher ReneĢ Descartes had been summoned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted to know his views on love, hatred, and the passions of the soul but although he was happy to correspond with the Queen, Descartes was loath to become part of her court.