User:Hyperion0210/Catherine Descartes

Lead
Catherine Descartes was the niece of Rene Descartes, and on of only four female descendants of the Descartes family

Death of Rene Descartes
After the death of Rene Descartes, a biographer by the name of Adrien Baillet started work on the biography of Rene Descartes. Baillet, seeking information on his life, started interviewing his nephews and niece. Catherine Descartes was the only of the four Descartes sisters to assist Baillet. Baillet made comments on Catherine Descartes's mental fortitude, saying it upheld her uncles renown. '''The death of Rene Descartes was also something of a topic of speculation. A book published a year after Baillet's biography written by Pierre-Daniel Huet, attempts to say that Descartes death was entirely faked. Huet did not believe that Rene Descartes had passed and instead a log was in the coffin not Descartes.'''

The Death of The Philosopher
'''About 2 years after Baillet's 2nd volume of the biography of Rene Descartes was published, Catherine Descartes published her part of the story in a book called "The Death of the Philosopher". This book was mainly a collection of poems, but the poems told an overarching story of Rene Descartes death. '''

'''In the beginning of The Death of the Philosopher, Catherine Descartes speaks about a pastor from Stockholm. She talks about how after figuring out she was the niece of Rene Descartes, the pastor told her that he was in Stockholm when her uncle passed. The pastor told Catherine Descartes a great many details on the death of her uncle. From these discussions she got enough information to generate her own report which is The Death of the Philosopher'''.

After publishing her works, Catherine Descartes kept in contact with another women, Madeleine de Scudéry, via letter. In these letters, Catherine and Madeleine exchange poems and other literature works with each other, of which a Catherine went further into her poem on her uncle's death.

Peer review response
I do plan on adding more detail describing the article in the intro/lead. We will be finishing the main article first so that the lead can be molded to the article and there isn't any extraneous information.

For the second paragraph, since we are writing an article from scratch, we will not be able to cite every single sentence or else our article would be only 3 sentences long. So we will do our best to summarize information from sources over the course of multiple sentences and then cite it overall.

While I don't think we will fully reword the paragraph, we will break up the information into better paragraphs once we add more information.

We will be adding in the name of the pastor into the article to give him more importance, but it was because of all these things that she was able to get an actual recount of her uncles death. So while she was able to publish because of others accounts, she was important as she was the one that published them counter to what has been said by other "more important men".

While we do not have any sources that show proof that they interacted before his death. She was his niece and so it could most likely be assumed that they had some interactions.

We do have no idea what the poems are as we are trying to find her work "The death of the philosopher" in English and it has been very difficult so far.

We will be adding more context to Madeleine de Scudery. We just found her name so we threw her into the sandbox so she could be expanded upon later.

We will be getting more sources, but a lot are in French so it is difficult.

We fixed the messed up reference by correcting the date. And are currently working on obtaining more sources, however most sources talking about Catherine Descartes are in French.