Haye (la), Haga , small French town in Touraine on the Creuse, at the border of Poitou, two leagues from La Guerche, four from Châtelleraut, ten from Tours, 54 southwest of Paris; longitude 18.20, latitude 47.2 . [1]

This small town can glory in the fact that it gave birth to Descartes, one of the most wonderful geniuses of the last century, and the greatest mathematician of his era; he solved problems in the midst of sieges; because in his youth he embraced the party of arms and served with considerable honor in Germany and Hungary; but the desire to philosophize peacefully in liberty caused him to seek the repose of which he had need in the solitude of Holland, and which he ought to have found there unalloyed. It was in the village of Egmont-by-the-Sea, Egmont-opzec , [2] that he began his career of studying nature, and where he got lost in himself; however, his Meditations and his discourse on Method are still valued, while his physics no longer has any followers, because it is not based on experience. [3] He spent almost his entire life outside the kingdom; and it was not until after being asked many times that he came to Paris in 1647. Cardinal Mazarin obtained a pension of three thousand pounds for him from the king, for which he paid the fee without drawing on it at all; which made him say, laughing, that never had parchment cost him so much. For several years Queen Christine [of Sweden] had asked him insistently to come and join her court, he obeyed; but he died in Stockholm not long after, in 1650, at the age of only 54. Read in the Preliminary Discourse of the Encyclopédie , pages 25 and 26, the judgment given there on the merit of this rare man. Baillet wrote his biography, and M. Perrault could not forget to include his eulogy in the illustrious men of the 17 ^th century. [4]

1. In 1802 the town was renamed La Haye-Descartes ; in 1967 the name was shortened simply to Descartes , which is what it is called today.

2. Three villages, Egmond aan den Hoef, Egmond aan Zee, and Egmond-Binnen merged at some point to form Egmond, which in 2001 merged with two other municipalites to form what is today the municipality of Bergen in northwest Netherlands on the North Sea.

3. Expérience means both “experience” and “experiment.” Thus, one could say that it was not based on experiments.

4. Adrien Baillet (1649-1706), La vie de monsieur Des-Cartes , 2 vols. (Paris, 1691); the following year an abridged edition in one volume appeared. Here is the third edition of Charles Perrault (1628-1703), Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant le XVII siècle (Paris, 1701).