Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [67]
In 1637, after less than ten years of contented marriage, Susanna Huygens died, leaving Huygens a widower with four small sons and a newborn daughter. Three stark entries in his diary for that year capture his grief:
10 May: She [Susanna] rendered her spirit to God 30 minutes after the fifth evening hour. Woe! My bliss. Woe my soul.
16 May: Her body has been committed to the earth with a huge crowd in attendance.
17 May: Moved into the new house. Alas! Without my turtle dove.5
Perhaps it was just as well that the demands of the court allowed Huygens little time for private grief: two days later his diary records him back on secretarial duty at the side of Frederik Hendrik. He never remarried. Shortly after Susanna’s death, her sister’s unmarried daughter, Catherina Sweerts, moved into the new house to take care of the five motherless children. Huygens never liked her, but tolerated her for the children’s sake. When she died in 1680 he could find nothing better to say about her contribution to his household than that ‘she hawked and harped and meddled and died’.6
After Susanna’s death, Huygens referred to her as his precious companion, his equal and his helpmate (from early on in their courtship he referred to her affectionately as ‘Stella’, his ‘star’), whose loss had cast a permanent shadow across his life. In his most famous poem, ‘Daghwerck’ (The Day’s Work), begun during Susanna’s lifetime as a celebration of their domestic life together, and broken off unfinished when she died, Huygens characterises their relationship as one of harmonious reasonableness: ‘Stella, by that reason guided/Which I always see in you’; ‘If I find my burden easy,/So light, that had Stella wished it,/It could well have been avoided/Or by reason overcome.’7 Their life together was, he writes, one of shared intellectual activity:
How shall I stand my trial in the court of the world,
Without you, Stella, the sharer and guide of my pen?
Without you my quill is no wing, wing wet with salt of my tears
Which flew the empyrean before, and followed your train in the skies.8
He and his wife were, he writes in another poem, ‘two minds joined in a single mind’ (‘una mens mentes duae’). In spite of their emotional intensity as elegies for and reminiscences of a lost love, though, these poetic glimpses are bound to seem to us largely conventional, and offer few real clues as to the woman behind her bereaved husband’s lasting regret.9
The real-life Susanna can be glimpsed in Huygens’s correspondence with the French philosopher and long-term resident of the United Provinces, René Descartes, just a few months before her death in May 1637. Susanna was, it seems, understood by those close to her and her family circle to be both highly intelligent and capable of independent discernment in intellectual matters. The letters concern the printing and publication of Descartes’ recently completed Discours de la méthode.
Writing to Huygens in early March 1637, Descartes asks him if he will kindly read the proof sheets of the Discours carefully, as he had promised when last they were last together, and annotate them with his own corrections. For the time being he is sending the two preliminary sections of the Discours (the ‘Dioptrique’ and ‘Meteores’):
You would oblige me enormously, if you were prepared to take the trouble to read them, to mark or have marked in the margin your corrections, and then to let me see them.
He expressly asks that Susanna should be included in this