ABSTRACT
In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden became interested in Descartes's work and prevailed upon him to come to Stockholm. Years and years agone, the author cautioned Meister Descartes about the dangerous, young woman, the notorious Queen Christina and, to his credit, he did heed the author's monitions the first time she sent one of her warships to fetch him to Sweden. Notwithstanding his misgivings about Queen Christina and moving to Sweden, the author suspects she saw her offer in terms of his present troubles with the Church. She hoped the founder of analytic geometry, the creator of Cartesian coordinates, and the man who revolutionized optics by discovering the law of refraction, would help her create in her country an Academy of Sciences that would rival anything in Paris. Christina planned to make him a naturalized Swedish citizen, bring him into the Swedish aristocracy, and give him an estate on German lands she had conquered.
