The great event during the Descartes brothers’ years at La Flèche was the interment of Henri IV’s heart in the school chapel in 1610. Henri IV had been assassinated by a Catholic religious fanatic named Ravillac, who was incensed at Henri IV’s plan to invade Germany to help Protestants against the Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire. Ravillac leaped into the king’s carriage and stuck a knife into the very heart that was now being ceremoniously delivered to the college church.
So the Jesuits and the Catholic League (who never forgot that Henri IV was formerly the Protestant king of Navarre) finally got Henri IV, who wanted to go to war with holy Spain. The view that the Jesuits and the Catholic League instigated the assassination, however, is not a very popular way of stating the matter among Catholic historians. What happened is that a student from the Jesuit college at Clermont in Paris had tried to assassinate Henri IV in 1596 and failed. Then Ravillac, another Catholic student, got him.
It is classic. The Jesuits had been teaching the perfidy of Henri IV for years. This or that priest had told his students that France would be better off if Henri IV was dead: Will no one rid us of this man? As has happened more than once in such circumstances, some dedicated young man decided to do the deed in the name of God. He acted alone. The Jesuits were not to blame.
—from Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (2002), by Richard Watson
Coda
Despite the Jesuits’ hatred of Henri, his heart was interred, according to his wishes, at the collège he had founded, and was joined later by the heart of his queen, Marie de Medici. In 1793, during the Revolution, when Jesuits, Bourbon monarchs, and foreigner queens were equally despised, both hearts were burned in the public square.
So it goes.