Francine

Francine was the illegitimate daughter of René Descartes and Helena Jans van der Strom, a bookseller’s maid. At the age of five Francine died from scarlet fever. Descartes was devastated. Just two years later, he provided Helena with a dowry so she might marry a tavern owner, and one year after that he remained so obsessed with Francine that he created an automaton resembling her. Automatons were something in the air at the time, and they fascinated Europe with flute-playing and harp-plucking homunculi. Descartes carried this automaton around with him for four additional years, but when he loaded his “Francine” onto a boat that underwent a long and terrific storm, the sailors connected “Francine” with witchcraft and threw the automaton overboard. Taylor’s imagining is that she had been covertly alive, and that her sinking into the sea and her seeming death by drowning offered her freedom to live many centuries until our present time.