For centuries it was believed Descartes died of a pneumonia while tutoring Queen Christina in his philosophies of love. The twenty-three-year-old queen personally invited Descartes to Stockholm in 1649, impressed by his treatise Passions of the Soul. But once he had arrived, it turned out the two couldn’t stand each other. She became exasperated by his pedantic manner and he by her romantic fascination with ancient Greece. The classic odd-couple set-up for a rom-com.

Descartes shirked his duties, visiting Christina’s draughty castle only a handful of times that winter, choosing instead to spend time with his friend Pierre Chanut, a French ambassador living in Sweden, at whose house he was staying a few blocks away. Together the pair made readings with one of the first-ever barometers to determine whether atmospheric pressure could, in fact, be used to forecast the weather. But unbeknownst to Descartes, other storms he couldn’t predict were amassing. At the time, in 1650, it was expected in upper circles that Queen Christina, ruler of Protestant Sweden, would soon be converting to Catholicism. To ensure that plan wasn’t derailed, a French missionary based in Stockholm named Jacques Viogué is believed to have offered Descartes an arsenic-laced communion wafer. Ironically (or perhaps symbolically), the major sticking point for Stockholm’s colluding cadre of Catholics was the supposed incompatibility of Descartes’s theories with the belief of transubstantiation. Descartes’s doctor attributed the philosopher’s death to his inability to adjust to the Nordic chill, somehow discounting the blood in his urine — a symptom associated with poisoning, not pneumonia — and the fact that Descartes, well versed in medicine and likely realizing he had been poisoned, asked for an emetic to induce vomiting. I wonder if, in these final hours, Descartes still believed in the controvertible existence of his body.