“Anti-Cartesian rascals”

One of the loopier moments in Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827) comes in a long discussion of the murder of philosophers, a discussion undertaken, De Quincey says, “chiefly by way of showing my own learning.” The context: René Descartes was aboard a boat sailing to West Friesland. The crew, taking the philosopher for a wealthy merchant, planned to rob and kill him. De Quincey is quoting in translation from Adrien Baillet’s La vie de monsieur Descartes (1691):


What language were these Anti-Cartesian rascals speaking? De Quincey doesn’t say. I will guess Dutch, with which Descartes had some familiarity. Here’s something like what De Quincey quotes, from page 46 of the 1693 translation of Baillet’s biography at archive.org:

Monsieur Des Cartes seeing they were in earnest, starts up all on a suddain, puts on another Countenance, draws his Sword with that stearness they little expected, speaks to them in their own Tongue, but with such a Tone, that frightned them out of their Wits; and withal, threatning to run them through, if they durst but hold up a finger against him.

And here’s something about the incident from an ancient Encyclopedia Britannica, recounting a period of travel in 1621 and 1622:

The sole incident recorded of this excursion is his danger, when crossing in a small boat to Dutch Friesland, from the cupidity of the crew, who had taken him for a rich merchant, but at once abandoned their murderous designs when they saw him rise with drawn sword, in all the dignity of a French gentleman.

De Quincey allows that it's a good thing that Descartes wasn’t murdered: “if these Friezland hounds had been ‘game,’ we should have no Cartesian philosophy; and how we could have done without that, considering the world of books it has produced, I leave to any respectable trunk-maker to declare.”

On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts is no. 4 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series.

On a semi-related note, see this totally true story of a conversation between two young women who didn’t realize that the young man in the elevator also spoke Turkish.

[Funk: De Quincey glosses it as meaning “horrid panic.”]