"Descartes Explains Geometry to Queen Christina of Sweden" is a congratulatory painting created by Domenier for the completion of the Palace of Versailles, which promotes the boundlessness of French culture. The picture takes the living room of the palace as the background, and a group of courtiers stand or sit and listen carefully. In the lower right corner of the painting is a long table covered with red flannel, on which manuscript paper is spread, and Descartes is standing on the table, explaining the rectangular coordinates for the sitting queen, and between the two is the queen's same-sex lover, Countess Eba Speer.
Descartes Explains Geometry to Queen Christina of Sweden, original by French painter Louis Michel Domenier, copied by American painter Nils forsberg, originally created in 1710 and stored in the Palace of Versailles, France.
Advertisements for mineral water in Centennial Mountain are often attached to the story of descartes and the Swedish princess Christina's year-old love story.
Legend has it that the elderly Descartes, fleeing the Black Death, fled to Sweden, met the Swedish princess Christina, and became her governess. One teaching and one learning, the two have a love.
But when the king found out, he forcibly broke them up. Descartes, impoverished and sick, wrote a letter to the princess on his deathbed with an equation: r =a(1-sinθ).
Neither the king nor the ministers could understand the meaning of the letter, but the princess wept with joy after reading it. She built a coordinate system on paper, and with a pen she traced the points of the equation on the coordinates, which was a heart-shaped pattern, a piece of Descartes' affection. Later, when the king died and Christina succeeded to the throne, she immediately sent someone to find her sweetheart, but Descartes had already died, leaving eternal regrets...
Oh, how mournful, how poignant, how sentimental. Huang Xi asked: Is it true? The answer is: partial reality, local fiction.
There are three realities: first, Descartes and Christina did have a relationship, the former served as the latter's tutor; second, Descartes and Christina are indeed very different in age, the former was born in 1596, the latter was born in 1626, the age difference between grandchildren and father and daughter; third, Descartes and Christina were never married. This article expands the space for fiction.
There are three fictions: first, when Christina met Descartes, she was not a princess but a queen of Sweden; second, when Christina was six years old, her father Gustav II died at the Battle of Lützen (1632). Therefore, he could not interfere in his daughter's marriage, even if the daughter wanted to marry Dorgon on a whim, he was powerless to stop it, unless to dream; third, there was no teacher-student relationship between Descartes and Christina. The two are a perfect pair of teachers and students, the most knowledgeable teachers and the best students. But it is precisely because of these two "most" that descartes' life is taken.
What's the situation? Let's start with Christina. There is no doubt that if Christina had not relinquished the throne (1654), she would have been a "great female emperor" of the same rank as Catherine and Victoria. But even so, there are still many things worth remembering during her reign. She founded the world's oldest newspaper, The National Post (the print edition was published until 2007), and she made the prestigious Uppsala University truly achieve national enrollment, and she established Sweden's status as a European power with her talent and courage.
The above belongs to Christina's "ruling the country and the world", and the real topicality lies in her "self-cultivation". Christina is the chief female scholar of the past and the present, and it is said that she is fluent in almost all continental languages, including English, French and German, she is familiar with all humanities, including literature, history and philosophy, and she also understands the military. She had a nickname, "Athena of Sweden".
Hungry for knowledge, the average teacher could not stop Christina. Thus, another protagonist of the story appears. Notice the string of titles hanging behind Descartes' name: father of analytic geometry, father of modern philosophy, father of modern science, man who shaped the world of reason with a spirit of skepticism... Of course, there is no doubt that at the level of Descartes, teaching female students is more than enough.
In 1647, she established correspondence with Descartes through the introduction of Pierre Chagne, the French ambassador to Sweden. In 1649, Descartes sent a new book to the female scholar, On the Passion of the Soul (unlisted, a sample book).
The female school bully was very excited and invited Descartes in the Netherlands to Come to Sweden. At first, Descartes began by his "birth in the garden of Touraine, how could he go to a place where bears haunt the rocks and snow" (in retrospect, it wasn't a snort). The Queen's enthusiasm and sincerity were irresistible, and on September 1 of that year, Descartes set off for the north, on a warship sent by the Queen, arrived in October, and classes began in November. In the early morning of winter in Stockholm, clusters of speculative sparks flash in the Queen's Bedchamber.
wait! Why early morning? Let's start with Christina's routine. The Queen is not only a bully, but also an energetic to perverted bully. She slept only four hours a day, and five o'clock in the morning was the time when her thinking was clearest and her memory was the best. In order to cater to the queen, Descartes had to get up in the middle of the night and walk through the palace square in the cold to teach the queen.
Descartes was a cold-phobic physique, and he developed the habit of lying in bed, which is said to be for contemplation. Descartes was miserable by his defiance, and he wrote to a friend complaining: I have lost peace and tranquility, and even the most powerful monarch cannot compensate me. In fact, Descartes lost not only peace and tranquility, but also life. In the early morning of February 1, 1650, Descartes fell ill with a cold, which soon turned into pneumonia, and died 10 days later at the age of 54. The Queen was deeply saddened by this.
"Descartes Explains Geometry to Queen Christina of Sweden" is a congratulatory painting created by Domenier for the completion of the Palace of Versailles, which promotes the boundlessness of French culture. The picture is set in the living room of the royal palace, and a group of courtiers stand or sit and listen carefully. In the lower right corner of the painting is a long table covered with red flannel, on which manuscript paper is spread, and Descartes is standing on the table, explaining the rectangular coordinates for the sitting queen, and between the two is the queen's same-sex lover, Countess Eba Speer.
Anyone with a discerning eye can see that the painting does not match the scene of Descartes' teaching. Whether Christina is lesbian or not, historians have always been inconsistent. More importantly, what Descartes taught Christina was not mathematics, but philosophy, or rather, deep and esoteric spiritual problems. This curriculum directly led to Christina abandoning Protestantism and converting to Catholicism, which in turn led to Christina having to give up the throne later.
It is well documented that Descartes was one of the few Catholics Christina could reach at the time. Apparently, in the cold winter of Stockholm, Descartes really played the role of a Catholic missionary. A bit of a yin and yang error? It's a drop. Descartes even wrote a comedy script for his trip to Sweden, about "well-intentioned misunderstandings."
Source: The Paper
Author: Yang Jian
Original title: Another version of the story of Centennial Mountain
Editor: Aero
Typography: Nanshan
Audit: Yongfang
Artist/vi: Xiao Zhou
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