M. Descartes had found the way to have his conjectures and fictions taken for truths. And to those who read his Principles of Philosophy something happened like that which happens to those who read novels which please and make the same impression as true stories. The novelty of the images of his little particles and vortices are most agreeable. When I read the book… the first time, it seemed to me that everything proceeded perfectly; and when I found some difficulty, I believe it was my fault in not fully understanding his thought… But since then, having discovered in it from time to time things that are obviously false and others that are very improbable, I have rid myself entirely of the prepossession I had conceived, and I now find almost nothing in all his physics that I can accept as true…
–HUYGENS, P. 186 OFWESTFALL’S 1971
The Concept of Force in Newton’s Physics:
The Science of Dynamics in
the Seventeenth Century
CHRISTIAANHUYGENS SATat the head of the table, the perihelion of the ellipse, and Daniel Waterhouse sat at the opposite end, the aphelion. Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers and Eliza sat across from each other in between. A dinner of roast goose, ham, and winter vegetables was served up by various members of a family that had long been servants in this house. Eliza was the author of the seating plan. Huygens and Waterhouse must not sit next to each other or they’d fuse together and never say a word to the others. This way was better: Fatio would only want to talk to Waterhouse, who would only want to talk to Eliza, who would pretend she had ears only for Huygens, and so the guests would pursue each other round the table clockwise, and with a bit of luck, an actual conversation might eventuate.
It was near the time of the solstice, the sun had gone down in the middle of the afternoon, and their faces, lit up by a still-life of candles thrust into wax-crusted bottles, hung in the darkness like Moons of Jupiter. The ticking of Huygens’s clock-work at the other end of the room was distracting at first, but later became part of the fabric of space; like the beating of their hearts, they could hear it if they wanted to, its steady process reassured them that all was well while reminding them that time was moving onwards. It was difficult to be uncivilized in the company of so many clocks.
Daniel Waterhouse had arrived first and had immediately apologized to Eliza for having taken her for a house-servant earlier. But he had not dropped the other shoe and asked what she really was. She’d accepted his apology with tart amusement and then declined to offer any explanation. This was light flirtation of the most routine sort-at Versailles it would have elicited a roll of the eyes from anyone who had bothered to notice it. But it had been more than enough to plunge Waterhouse into utter consternation. Eliza found this slightly alarming.
He had tried again: “Mademoiselle, I would be less than…”
“Oh, speak English!” she’d said, in English. This had practically left him senseless: first, with surprise that she could speak English at all, then with alarm that she’d overheard his entire conversation with William Penn. “Now, what was it you were saying?”
He scrambled to remember what he had been saying. In a man half his age, to’ve been so flustered would have been adorable. As it stood, she was dismayed, wondering what would happen to this man the first time some French-trained countess got her talons into him. William had been right. Daniel Waterhouse was a Hazard to Navigation.
“Err… I’d be less than honest if, er…” he winced. “It sounded gallant in French. Pompous in English. I was wondering… the state of international relations being so troublous and relations ‘tween the sexes more so, and etiquette being an area in which I am weak… whether there was any pretext at all under which I might converse with you, or send letters, without giving offense.”
“Isn’t this dinner good enough?” she’d asked, flirtatiously mock-offended, and just then Fatio had arrived. In truth, she’d seen him coming across the Plein, and adjusted her timing accordingly. Waterhouse was obliged to stand off to one side and stew and draw up a great mental accompt of his failures and shortcomings while Eliza and Fatio enacted a greeting-ritual straight out of the Salon of Apollo at Versailles. This had much in common with a courtly dance, but with overtones of a duel; Eliza and Fatio were probing each other, emanating signals coded in dress, gesture, inflection, and emphasis, and watching with the brilliant alertness of sword-fighters to see whether the other had noticed, and how they’d respond. As one who’d lately come from the Court of the Sun King, Eliza held the high ground; the question was, what level of esteem should she accord Fatio? If he’d been Catholic, and French, and titled, this would have been settled before he came in the door. But he was Protestant, Swiss, and came from a gentle family of no particular rank. He was in his early twenties, Eliza guessed, though he tried to make himself older by wearing very good French clothes. He was not a handsome man: he had giant blue eyes below a high domelike forehead, but the lower half of his face was too small, his nose stuck out like a beak, and in general he had the exhausting intensity of a trapped bird.
At some point Fatio had to tear those eyes away from Eliza and begin the same sort of dance- cum-duel with Waterhouse. Again, if Fatio had been a Fellow of the Royal Society, or a Doctor at some university, Waterhouse would have had some idea what to make of him; as it was, Fatio had to conjure his credentials and bona fides out of thin air, as it were, by dropping names and scattering references to books he’d read, problems he’d solved, inflated reputations he had punctured, experiments he had performed, creatures he had seen. “I had half expected to see Mr. Enoch Root here,” he said at one point, looking about, “for a (ahem) gentleman of my acquaintance here, an amateur of (ahem) chymical studies, has shared with me a rumor-only a rumor, mind you-that a man owning Root’s description was observed, the other day, debarking from a canal-ship from Brussels.” As Fatio stretched this patch of news thinner and thinner, he flinched his huge eyes several times at Waterhouse. Certain French nobles would have winked or stroked their moustaches interestedly; Waterhouse offered up nothing but a basilisk-stare.
That was the last time Fatio had anything to say concerning Alchemy; from that point onwards it was strictly mathematics, and the new work by Newton. Eliza had heard from both Leibniz and Huygens that this Newton had written some sort of discourse that had left all of the other Natural Philosophers holding their heads between their knees, and quite dried up the ink in their quills, and so she was able to follow Fatio’s drift here. Though from time to time he would turn his attention to Eliza and revert to courtly posturing for a few moments. Fatio prosecuted all of these uphill strugglings with little apparent effort, which spoke well of his training, and of the overall balance of his humours. At the same time it made her tired just to watch him. From the moment he came in the door he controlled the conversation; everyone spent the rest of the evening reacting to Fatio. That suited Eliza’s purposes well enough; it kept Daniel Waterhouse frustrated, which was how she liked him, and gave her leisure to observe. All the same, she wondered what supplied the energy to keep a Fatio going; he was the loudest and fastest clock in the room, and must have an internal spring keyed up very tight. He had no sexual interest whatever in Eliza, and that was a relief, for she could tell that he would be relentless and probably tiresome in wooing.
Why didn’t they just eject Fatio and have a peaceful dinner? Because he had genuine merit. Confronted by a nobody so desperate to establish his reputation, Eliza’s first impulse (and Waterhouse’s, too, she inferred) was to assume he was a poseur. But he was not. Once he figured out that Eliza wasn’t Catholic he had interesting things to say concerning religion and the state of French society. Once he figured out that Waterhouse was no alchemist, he began to discourse of mathematical functions in a way that snapped the Englishman awake. And Huygens, when he finally woke up and came downstairs, made it obvious by his treatment of Fatio that he rated him as an equal-or as close to equal as a man like Huygens could ever have.