"Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," he mutters to himself--his favorite motto, his mantra against the worldly. He removes himself in thought from the noise and confusion of the tavern. Ordinarily, his meditations would have concerned one of the plethora of intellectual problems he faces as his Meditations on First Philosophy is readied for publication, but today his reflections are personal. Only two weeks ago his five year old daughter died of scarletina, and it is Francine of whom he thinks.

She had been the illegitimate product of a liaison with a Protestant chambermaid, a servant of a schoolmaster friend in Amsterdam with whom he had stayed.

Her procreation at a time when he was embarked on a careful study of the development of the human embryo had been, he recalled, in some part inspired by scientific curiosity, but he had in his own way come to love his bastard, arranging with his landlady for both her and her mother to stay with him when living at Daventer, having his "niece" baptized (despite strict Dutch legal prohibitions against births outside of marriage), even planning her future education in France.

He had told friends that her death had brought him the greatest sorrow he had ever known, but his sorrow was, he found, difficult to sustain. "It would be barbarous," he told himself, "to feel no sorrow whatsoever when one has sufficient cause, but it would be cowardly to abandon oneself completely to one's grief."