In 1610, Étienne Pascal bought his way into an office, a common enough practice, and served as a lawyer on the généralité, one of the less prominent tax boards. Cardinal Richelieu had recently become the first minister to King Louis XIII, and he would soon raise the crown over all other powers in France. As public servants, the Pascals would be part of this conquest and would benefit from it. In 1624, the year after Blaise’s birth, Étienne became second president of the Cour des Aides, a court dedicated to collecting often burdensome taxes for a series of spendthrift kings, and to settling any disputes that might follow. If the Pascals could have held this position for three generations, they would have been permanently ennobled and become part of the noblesse de robe, the nobility by virtue of governmental service—as opposed to the noblesse d’épée, the old aristocracy, the nobility by virtue of the sword. Étienne was therefore a representative of the crown, a bureaucrat administering royal power, and although this was not too great a problem in the Auvergne, the region of Clermont-Ferrand, it would later become a dangerous business when Cardinal Richelieu transferred Étienne to Rouen, which was in revolt over the weight of the king’s taxes.
By all accounts, Étienne Pascal was a man of the world more than he was a man of the faith, a man of science and of philosophy more than religion. He was an amateur mathematician, one of the most eminent in France, who loved the life of the mind. He came from that class of men whom the Jansenists, including his own son, Blaise, would later accuse of being laxists, of being soft on sin and soft on sinners. This was the same crowd that would eventually produce the libertins érudits, the scoffers and doubters, who would later become Deists and agnostics—that class of men who would eventually lead the Enlightenment and, finally, the French Revolution. In Étienne’s day, however, most of the intellectuals of France were not willing to criticize the church, except as humanists might—as loyal participants in Christianity who criticized the church only as a means of helping her find her true self. They were therefore the heirs of the tradition founded by Erasmus and Thomas More a century earlier.
In 1616, Étienne Pascal married Antoinette Begon, who was twenty, the daughter of a Clermont merchant. They had four children: Gilberte, born in 1620; Blaise, born in 1623; Jacqueline, born in 1625; and another child, Anthonia, who did not survive. In 1626, when Blaise was three years old and Jacqueline only a toddler, Antoinette died. No one knows how or why she died—probably from one of the many bouts of plague that brawled through the city. Little is known about her; little has been said. The only testimony we have of Antoinette’s life is from Gilberte’s daughter Marguerite, who noted that her grandmother was a pious young woman devoted to charitable works. Sadly, Antoinette died while her children were still young enough to have only an impression of her, and not much memory.
We can only guess how the mother’s death altered the relationships between the bereaved father and his three remaining children, but we do know that Étienne was transformed by the loss from an ordinary careerist in the French bureaucracy into a man utterly dedicated to the education of his children. The children relied more and more on a father who grew ever more protective, especially of his son, Blaise, whom he would not allow to grow to become an independent adult.
Perhaps Étienne’s resolve to retire from his career and dedicate himself to his children was the only possible answer. Perhaps, for an honorable bureaucrat, it was the greater sacrifice. To place them in the care of a nanny and then distance himself from their lives for the sake of his work—that would have been the normal thing to do. But at this point, Étienne Pascal did something unusual for the time: he refused to remarry. Perhaps his grief at Antoinette’s death was still too great. Whatever the reason, a year later Étienne gathered his children and moved them all to Paris. Whether he did so to flee his own grief or to pursue a new life for himself and his children, he left all that he had ever known behind. He separated his children from the day-to-day life of their cousins and aunts and uncles, isolating them even more from family and friends, binding them even closer to him. Such a move would have been from grief to isolation, from a provincial city where everyone knew everyone else’s business to the great city where no one really knew anyone. It is not surprising, then, that toward the end of his life, Blaise would write in his Pensées: “We want truth and find only uncertainty in ourselves. We search for happiness and find only wretchedness and death.”3
All things considered, Blaise Pascal was born into a dangerous and changing world, be that the world of the Auvergne or of Paris. His birthday was June 19, 1623, the feast of St. Romuald, a Benedictine monk and founder of the Camaldolese order of hermits, a man who fought the devil all his life. There were plenty of devils afoot, even in Pascal’s day, Protestant and Catholic alike, and uncertainty was king. Copernicus had turned the universe inside out, and scientists were trumpeting this all over Europe. France had not yet recovered from the Huguenot wars—where Catholic and Protestant took arms against each other. Though victorious, Catholic France was wounded, hobbling through the early seventeenth century on the stump of victory. The Edict of Nantes had ended that phase of the religious wars, but it was only twenty-five years old, and people were still alive who remembered the massacres and the streets that flowed with blood. The Catholic world that Blaise Pascal knew was anxious, uneasy, troubled.
After the earthquakes of Luther and Calvin, French society, like much of the rest of Europe, had split in two. Une foi, un loi, un roi—one faith, one law, one king. This was the cry. And yet, with the coming of the Reformers, the medieval unity quickly broke down, and the nation broke with it. There were seven Huguenot wars in total, short but vicious, running from 1562 until 1580, years marked by assassinations and massacres. The worst of these occurred on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Some of the old people in Étienne Pascal’s circle may have been there; some may have participated.
The Catholics and the Huguenots had already fought two wars, followed by the Peace of St. Germain, when the aristocracy kissed and made up, and offered their sons and daughters to one another in marriage to cement the deal. Catherine de Médicis had worked tirelessly to bring the two sides together. Jeanne d’Albret, the queen of Navarre, offered her daughter Marguerite to the Huguenot Henri de Navarre, and even Elizabeth I of England contemplated marrying a younger brother of the Catholic King Charles of France. They were all ready to make peace, but no one included the common folk in their plans.
While the aristocrats sent envoys to each other, the tension on the streets multiplied. Huguenot sermons started calling for civil disobedience against the Catholic king. Even Jean (or John) Calvin, who traditionally advised his followers to obey the king, changed his mind and preached that because the Catholic King Charles and his court were disobeying God by remaining Catholic, no good Calvinist owed them his allegiance.
Rumors of a mythical constitution of the ancient Franks, revealing how the old kings were chosen by a vote of the people and ruled by their advice and consent, appeared in a popular tract, Francogallia, by François Hotman. Thus, in the minds of the Catholic French commoners, the Protestants had begun preaching republicanism—treason to the crown—to add to their treason against God. The Huguenots were now destroyers, spoilers, revolutionaries against the harmony that had once been France. The fact that this unity the Catholics looked to was as mythical as the old Frankish constitution never came up. Then France fell into a recession, and once-prosperous people found themselves hungry.
On a hot summer night, when riot was buzzing in the taverns and the hotels, someone took a shot at Admiral de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenot military. He was wounded and nearly killed, but not quite. The Huguenots demanded justice and appealed to the king. When justice did not arrive at once, they threatened to riot. But the king, Charles IX, and his court, which included Catherine de Médicis and Henri, the duc d’Anjou, struck first. The king had been uncertain initially, fearing, quite justly, the general slaughter that might follow, but the others pressured him
until he agreed. They met in secret on August 23 and decided to assassinate Coligny. Charles waffled even then, but after some discussion he finally surrendered, saying, “Well, then, kill them all, so that no one will be around to reproach me after.”
Early that morning, a Sunday morning, the duc de Guise led several troops of Swiss mercenaries and a few French regulars to the admiral’s home. It was the king’s will and God’s will that they should take their vengeance on the traitors and rebels who had fallen into their power, he told his men. Since the soldiers were not in uniform, they identified themselves with a white armband on their left arms and a white cross stuck in their hats. They had all agreed that once the admiral was killed, the signal for the massacre would be given: a quick toll of the palace bell.
At gaining entry into the admiral’s house, the soldiers rushed in, slaughtering the servants as they passed. They came upon the admiral in his room. Still believing he had the king’s favor, he had refused to leave the city and had been awakened in the belief that what he was hearing in the street was another quick uprising among the people, something that the king’s soldiers would quickly put down. Fully awake, he had left his bed and was praying when the soldiers rushed into his room, dragged him from his prayers, and stabbed him over and over. The duc de Guise, who was waiting below in the courtyard, called to the men in the house to find out if the deed had been done. “It is done,” one of the captains called down, and threw the body out the window. Several of the men, including the chevalier d’Angoulême, backed away in disgust at the butchery, but the duke laughed at them, repeatedly kicked Coligny’s dead body in the face and in the groin, and said to the chevalier that he and the men should cheer up. Since the king had commanded it, they should do the deed thoroughly.
The duke then ordered that they give the signal, that their fellow in the palace should ring the bell. All around them, voices cried out in the night, “Alarm! To arms!” The soldiers then dragged the admiral’s body to a nearby stable and tossed it inside, where they decapitated and then eviscerated it, spitting on the parts and kicking the head around the stable like a football. Later, a mob of children came upon the body and tried to throw it into the Seine, but others stopped them and instead hung the headless admiral from the gibbet of Montfaucon.
Faster than light, news of the murder spread throughout the city. The local militia rose up, followed by the populace, who, in imitation of the soldiers, stuck white crosses in their hats to identify themselves as Catholic, and turned on the Protestants. Neighbor slaughtered neighbor, and all the bile of religious hatred poured out onto the streets to mix with blood. The killing continued for three days. It spread like plague from the city out to the surrounding towns and villages, out to the provinces, to the wineries, to the little dairy farms, to the fields of lavender. Many people believed that they had been ordered by the king to kill all the Protestants, and they set out to do just that. By the end of the third day, over seventy thousand people had been slaughtered.
Though the Huguenot wars had ended with the Edict of Nantes, the religious wars carried on. Twenty-five years later, in 1623, the year Blaise entered hungry into the world, the second phase of the Thirty Years’ War ended. The Dutch once again fought the Spanish for their independence, and lost. That same year Pope Urban VIII, the pope who would command the inquisition of Galileo, would be elected to the throne of St. Peter; the Safavid Turks would conquer Baghdad; and “erotomania”—the delusion that a person, usually of a higher social station, is secretly in love with the delusional person—would officially be defined as a mental illness in Jacques Ferrand’s Maladie d’amour ou mélancolie érotique. Wilhelm Schickard would build the first calculating clock that year, and the Plymouth Colony would celebrate its second Thanksgiving.
Two years later, in 1625, the year of Blaise’s childhood malnutrition, the third phase, the Danish phase, of the Thirty Years’ War would begin. Nations opposed to the Hapsburgs—the French, under the command of Cardinal Richelieu, because he feared Hapsburg power and the power of Spain; the English; and the Dutch—formed a league and handed over control of their armies to the Danish king, Christian IV, who held vast sections of northern Germany. The Danes invaded, but the Catholic League, under the command of the ambitious, and ruthless, General Albrecht Wallenstein, the patron of Johannes Kepler, crushed them irrevocably.4
In such a world, average French citizens lived as if by the roll of the dice every day. Would some king or his general fall on them that day and slaughter them all in the name of God? Would the crop be adequate in that harvest, the weather indulgent? Would God let them and their children live one more day? How could anyone understand, let alone live with, such uncertainty?
[1631–1635]
A Thinking Reed
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living,
and your belief will help create the fact.
—WILLIAM JAMES
To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
—PIERRE CORNEILLE
Man is but a reed,” wrote Blaise Pascal in his last work, the Pensées, “the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.”5
Certainly it was a risk, an act of belief, perhaps even faith, for Étienne Pascal to cart his children all the way to Paris, so far from their family and friends. Likely, his main reason for doing so was to introduce them to the more cultured life of Paris, to the circle of great intellectuals, and possibly to a new life at court, where the intellectual world of a provincial tax judge could expand beyond expectations. There is some evidence that Étienne, seeing some intellectual promise in his son, Blaise, had developed a master plan to turn the boy into one of the great minds of the day. He succeeded in this, even though Blaise himself later rejected that life and embraced the rigors of Jansenism. Blaise was by Gilberte’s account a precocious little boy who asked questions far beyond his years and held conversations that would seem appropriate to an adult. This, of course, may be more mythology than fact, for it was common in seventeenth-century France to describe saints in their youth in biblical terms, like Jesus sitting among the doctors of the law in the Temple of Jerusalem, astounding them by the acuity of his questions. Thus, sanctity and genius were intertwined. In Gilberte’s way of thinking, if Blaise had already become a great man by the time of the writing of her biography of him, then, like the saints who as toddlers wanted to listen only to the wisdom of old men, he would certainly have shown that same kind of supernatural promise, that divine gift, early in his life.
Étienne set about the task of educating his children, and along the way created an innovative regimen of homeschooling. He proved to be quite a capable teacher, a man who was ahead of his time in understanding the psychology of education. It was his maxim, according to Gilberte, that he would always keep his lessons at a level just above the level of the work his students were capable of. Thus his children had to strive to understand that which was in sight but which was just beyond their grasp. In this way, Étienne built up the confidence of his children by giving them problems that they could solve, but only with sweat. Each solution then became another triumph and allowed their minds to grow, leaving them secure in the knowledge that they could solve whatever puzzles were laid before them.
Homeschooling, however, had its drawbacks, for Blaise was never allowed to attend school and thus never learned the art of fine negotiation that most children learn on the playground. Thus he remained ignorant, at least experientially, of many of the subtleties of human life. He never attended school or matriculat
ed at a university. He never married or even seriously courted. Although Étienne introduced his children to the intellectual life in a profound way, he failed to give them the kind of emotional training one needs to live a fully human life. Had Antoinette been alive, that might have been different.
One source of Étienne’s pedagogical method was his own experience of mathematics—how it could become an all-consuming fascination that could distract the mathematician from other kinds of study. He was also concerned that, given Blaise’s fragility, he not tax his son’s strength. He therefore refused to allow Blaise to study mathematics until he was sixteen. He did not want him to be caught by this great passion too early, until he had been firmly grounded in grammar and in languages, especially the classics and classical literature. Instead, he presented his children with little problems in natural science. At the dinner table one evening someone struck a porcelain plate with a fork, and Blaise asked why the plate hummed. What was the cause of the sound? Why did the sound stop when you put your hand to the plate? After dinner, Blaise went about the house striking dishes with various kinds of silverware and found that different plates made different sounds, each with its individual pitch and timbre. In this one moment, Étienne introduced his son to experimental science, and encouraged him at each step. The problem, however, was that Blaise was in fact as precocious a child as Gilberte indicated. He was curious and, when given a boundary by his father, could not help but try to jump over it.
Pascal's Wager Page 3