Cogito, Ergo Sum: What About Helena Jans, René Descartes' Maid

A A. C. Grayling, ‘Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius ‘,2006:

“.....Descartes was without question a man of scientific bent. On Sunday 15 October 1634 he wrote in the flyleaf of a book that on that day he had conceived a child with the serving maid Helena Jans in the room he rented in the house of an Englishman called Thomas Sargent in Amsterdam's Westerkirkstraat. The confidence of this announcement—it proved true-—is striking. Baillet was in a dilemma, having thus to report his hero's commission of the sin of fornication with a maidservant, and not just that but the subsequent production of a bastard child; so he ascribed the aberration— as he thus implied it to be—to Descartes' scientific interest in anatomy.

In the register of baptisms in the Reformed Church at Deventer (no Catholic church being available), on 7 August 1635, the arrival was recorded of Francine, daughter to Helena Jans and "Rener Jochems" (Rener son of Jochems). There is no evidence, documentary or circumstantial, that Descartes married Helena Jans, but later enemies who were Catholics accused him of apostasy because he had married a Calvinist in a Protestant church, the claim doubtless being a fabrication from the fact that he had his child baptised in such a church.

And as it happens, Francine was not an illegitimate child despite the fact that Descartes did not marry her mother, for the law of the United Provinces stated that it was enough for children to be legitimate that their fathers acknowledged them....

..... Glimpses of Descartes as a family man are few but tantalising, and in respect of Helena Jans a little ambiguous. In a letter written in August 1637 he set out arrangements for Helena and Francine to join him in new lodgings. His hostess was, he wrote, perfectly happy to have the little girl (Descartes referred to her as "my niece") to come and live with him, "and that we would easily agree on the price because it was indifferent to her whether she had one child more or less to take care of" As Descartes' hostess was in need of a servant he also suggested that Helena hasten to leave her present employment "before St. Victor's Day," this being the traditional date for hiring and firing servants, and to come to work where he was lodging.

What this suggests is that Descartes and Helena did not live as a couple, although they liked to be together if they could, and that he was fond of his little daughter and wished to have her with him. If Helena worked as a maid in the house where Descartes and his "niece" lived, Helena could be near her daughter and she and Descartes could continue to engage, pace Clerselier's pieties, in anatomical experiments, without marrying or openly living in sin....”

 

“’Cogito, ergo sum’ is all very well for you, but what about me?”  

 
Artist: James Stevenson, The New Yorker, March 2017