The original post: /r/history by /u/Alternative_Hat_6840 on 2024-12-15 18:54:59.

(Some) excerpts:

Elisabeth writes on 6.v.1643

When I heard that you had planned to visit me a few days ago, I was elated by your kind willingness to share yourself with an ignorant and headstrong person, and saddened by the misfortune of missing such a profitable conversation. When M. Pollot [a friend of Descartes and of the Princess] took me through the solutions you had given him for some obscurities in Regius’s physics, that increased my regret at missing you, because I’d have learned them better from you directly. And direct contact would have given me something else. When Professor Regius was here in The Hague, I put to him a question that he said would be better answered by you.

Descartes writes on 21.v.1643

[He starts by praising the Princess’s favour of writing to him. When they have met, he says, he has been so dazzled by her combination of intelligence and beauty that he couldn’t converse well… ]

Descartes writes in Latin in vii. 1644

I’m right to use the word ‘incomparable’: yours is the only intellect I have encountered that finds everything equally clear. [He adds some praise of the princess’s youth and beauty.]