Pascal's Wager (22 page)

This was the last battle of Blaise Pascal. In the coming months, his health declined precipitously. Gilberte and Florin Perier had moved to Paris just before Jacqueline’s death—to care for their daughters, who had just been released from the school, and to see to the health of Blaise and Jacqueline. Sadly, they arrived in town on the day Jacqueline died. All they could do at that point was to sit by Blaise’s bed and watch him slowly die. His fight with the leaders of the Jansenist movement had taken the last of his energy.

Meanwhile, the nuns of Port-Royal signed the second formulary on November 28 and 29, 1661, while appending a short profession of faith that Antoine Arnauld had written for them. That didn’t suit the king or the Parisian vicars general, so they sent a representative to the convent and announced to the sisters that they would have to sign one more document, acknowledging the heretical nature of the five propositions found in the works of Jansen. But even this wasn’t enough. On June 30, 1662, the King’s Council ordered that all those required to sign the formulary agree to it “simply, and without restriction or addition.” The Jansenists were finally caught. But not destroyed.

I
n the late summer of 1658, Blaise Pascal had a toothache. For most people, a toothache signifies little except the need to go to a dentist, but for Pascal, a toothache was like a dark storm cloud forming over a distant horizon. His old illnesses were returning. The pain was severe enough that it kept him awake at night, so instead of sitting and doing nothing in the late-night hours, Pascal decided to make use of his time by studying a complicated mathematical puzzle called the cycloid, or, in French,
la roulette
. Galileo had studied it, as had other great mathematicians, because its properties were peculiar and thus led to a set of difficult but interesting problems.

Essentially, if you take a point on a circle and draw a radius between that point and the center of the circle, and then roll the circle along a plane, as one would roll a wheel across the ground, the curve traced out by that point as it rolls looks like a series of arches and is called a cycloid. It was first studied by Nicholas of Cusa, who was eventually burned at the stake for heresy—but not for his work on the cycloid. Later, Galileo studied it and then gave the curve its name in 1599. When he tried to find the area underneath the curve, he failed to do so by using pure mathematics, so he eyeballed it by cutting pieces of metal to fit under the curve and then weighing the pieces of metal.

Père Mersenne took up the work in 1628 and tried to find the area under the curve by using integration but failed in his attempt, and passed the problem on to Roberval, who succeeded, though Descartes belittled his solution and then challenged him to construct a tangent to the cycloid. (Descartes had already succeeded at this.) Roberval failed, but Fermat soon succeeded. Descartes was both happy and sad. This is where Pascal entered the picture some years later, wide-awake with toothache. He developed a method for calculating the area of any segment under the cycloid, and then found how to calculate the center of gravity of any segment. After this, he showed how to discover the volume and surface area of the solid of rotation that is formed by rotating the cycloid around the x-axis.

Flushed from his success, he wanted to publish his findings but then had a sudden prick of conscience about his inherent worldliness and cancelled the entire affair. But then, as Gilberte pointed out, the duc de Roannez met with him and told him that he should publish his work because it would give extra credibility to his refutations of the unbelievers if he could also demonstrate the power of his logic by publicly solving some important problems in geometry, and thus give glory to God. Who could argue with that? Pascal took the duke’s advice and published his work in October and December 1658. Afterward, also on the duke’s advice, he announced a challenge to all mathematicians to submit their own solutions to the problems. Here, however, his scruples got the better of him and he issued the challenge under an assumed name, one Monsieur Detton-
ville. According to the announcement, there would be monetary prizes for successful solutions. Sadly, the contest flopped, because only two people entered it, John Wallis and Antoine Lalouvère, and neither of them succeeded. A number of other mathematicians, including Pierre Fermat, Christopher Huygens, and Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, passed their own solutions along without entering the contest; they probably didn’t need the money. The whole thing was rather dodgy, however, because Pascal had already solved some of these issues himself, and he was also the one who had set up the board to judge the entries. Of all the backdoor solutions, Pascal most enjoyed Christopher Wren’s method for calculating arc lengths, and he published it along with his own work. The only drawback to this new round of mathematical accomplishments, however, was that the purists at Port-Royal began to eye him with suspicion once again, and to chide him about being a man of the world.

All that ended as his illness deepened. In truth, he had been preparing for death ever since the night of his conversion. After the night of fire, friends and acquaintances of his often came around seeking his advice on religious matters, and they rarely went away unsatisfied. By 1658 and the return of the toothache, he had taken to wearing a belt with iron prickles under his clothes, next to his skin, in order to supercharge his penance. Any time he had a prideful thought, or felt pulled toward some diversion, he pushed on the girdle with his elbow, driving the points into his flesh, sharply reminding himself what his life was about. He wore that girdle until the day he died.

Sloth. The idle mind is the devil’s workshop—that’s what concerned him in his last years. He renounced all pleasure and all superfluity. Vain thoughts and desires were not for him, so he used his iron belt to keep himself on track. One by one, he removed the hangings in his room, turning his quarters into a bare monastic cell. He ate less than ever, and what he did eat was spare and simple. Only when under a doctor’s orders did he force down anything heartier than broth. What’s more, he recommended this same practice to others, not that many of them took him up on it. He often told people to abandon their desire for the best of everything, for
things that were made by the best artisans out of the best material. Such things were useless, for Christ had called everyone to a holy poverty.

As he had in the past after an intense period of intellectual activity, Pascal took to his bed, for the old illnesses were bubbling back, but this time worse than ever. By the beginning of 1659, his digestive troubles had flared up, as had the headaches, along with the nausea and blurred vision. The symptoms of these headaches seem to indicate that they were migraines of a particularly nasty type, the kind of migraine that makes you sensitive to light, along with causing dizziness and vomitous nausea. Once again, the doctors circled around him giving him medicines that made him almost as sick as the diseases had, and with little salubrious effect. By March 1659, word got around among his circle of friends about the collapse of his health. His exhaustion was so great that he could barely rise from his bed, and it was a rare day when he could sit at his desk and organize a thought. The doctors trooped in and out, prescribing soup and, of all things, donkey’s milk, which he forced down as a penance. Pain wracked him every day, and all the simple joys of his life flew from him.

Nevertheless, he had achieved a true detachment from the physical pleasures of the world, for, of the little money he still possessed after giving Jacqueline her dowry, he passed a great percentage on to the poor, either through charitable ministries in Clermont or by direct contact with the poor of Paris. Even in his reduced physical state, he often climbed out of bed and, following the example of St. Vincent de Paul, walked among the poorest of the poor in Paris and gave them what money he had.

Gilberte tells the following story: One day when he was coming home from Mass at the parish of Saint-Sulpice, he came upon a pretty little girl of fifteen who was passing among the people walking on the street, begging for money. He asked her how she had come to be begging, and she told him that she was from the country but that after her family had moved to the city, her father died. Her mother had been taken to the Hôtel-Dieu that very day. She was not expected to live. Blaise led her back to the rectory and provided the priest there with enough money to care for the girl and begged him to help her find a secure place in life off the streets of Paris. The priest agreed, and Pascal, before leaving, said that he
would send someone to check on the girl. Then he disappeared into the evening, a stranger who never gave his name. Several days later, he sent a woman servant to the parish with more money. The priest asked her to tell him, for the sake of the girl, the name of her benefactor, but the woman responded that she had promised to keep his name a secret, so the girl never did find out who had been so kind to her that day.

Moreover, in the winter of 1662, still ferociously ill and close to death, he met a homeless family in the streets and invited them back to his house. He then assigned rooms to them to be their own and ordered them fed. And so they quickly joined the cobbled-together family that he had assembled for himself on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

Every day he drew a little closer to death, but somehow, like a meteor, he burned all the brighter. He had a brainstorm late one night that if he could only get a few investors to join him, he could set up a series of coaches that would take people from one part of the city to another for only five copper coins. This would allow the poor, who did not have their own coaches, to be able to move about more freely. Of course, the duc de Roannez was one of his investors, as were other members of Pascal’s circle. In March 1662, the first coaches began to move between Porte Saint-Antoine and the Luxembourg Palace. Thus, Pascal’s
carrosses à cinq sols
became the first public transportation system in the world. Of course, Blaise intended that any profits he made from this venture be given to the poor.

For some years, he had become increasingly isolated, and his illness only made his isolation worse. With Jacqueline in the convent, he had no one to look after his care as she had done, and although his servants were loyal, it wasn’t the same. The loneliness, which had flattened him after Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, was still with him, but by now it had become a spirituality. “No one deserves to be loved,” he told the gentlemen of the barns in one of his conferences. In his own mind, his isolation was no longer an empty, meaningless hunger for love; rather, it had been transmogrified into a purification of his soul, so that he could focus strictly on God. With
the Pascal family scattered, and Blaise having no wife or children of his own, his servants had become his only family, and he was retreating even from them into the silence of his room, for, in bearing his pain in silence, he believed, he was preparing himself to see God. In these long months, sometime between 1659 and 1661, he wrote a heartfelt prayer, “A Prayer to Ask God to Make Good Use of Illness.” One can almost hear his voice in it, crying from the depths:

Sadly, the dark Jansenist spirituality that so informed his life would not allow him to see the natural suffering and decline of the body as anything but a punishment for sin. Sadly, too, while Blaise’s health gradually faded, the peace that Port-Royal enjoyed after the Miracle of the Thorn was shattered.

Meanwhile, Blaise lay dying, surrounded by all of his papers, his unfinished projects, especially his sheaves of notes on his apology for the Christian faith. Close to the end of 1662, after his sister and brother-in-law had transferred their family to Paris, Blaise surrendered his independence and moved in with them. His illnesses had become nearly intolerable, his pain a constant companion. On July 4, he asked his sister to send for the priest.

The Perier house lay in the parish of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, near the monastery of St. Geneviève. The pastor there was a man named Paul Beurrier, who was known to be a good priest without ideological bias. Gilberte sent a note asking him to come by to hear her brother’s confession, and one day in July he stopped by and administered the sacrament. Over the next six weeks, Père Beurrier visited on several occasions
and held long conversations with the ailing Pascal, hearing his confession more than a few times. Pascal greatly appreciated these conversations, for they gave him comfort; Père Beurrier’s simple spirituality and deep piety were a balm for his soul. For his own part, the priest remarked about how patient Pascal was in dealing with his infirmities. “He is so humble, he is submissive as an infant,” he told Gilberte.
⁷⁹

By this time, news was getting around that Pascal had confessed his sins, and his friends began to appear at the Periers’ doorstep to mournfully say good-bye. Soon, Pascal asked Père Beurrier to bring him the Eucharist, but his doctors protested, possibly out of the old superstition that once a sick person had received the last anointing, they were doomed to die. The doctors told Gilberte that the excitement of receiving the Eucharist might be too much for Blaise, and this irritated him, but he went along with them anyway, seeing how much of a disturbance his request was causing. After all, the followers of the abbé de Saint-Cyran took Communion only rarely, fearing that their sinfulness might pollute the sacrament, and so many of them held off receiving the Eucharist until just before they died.

In spite of everything his doctors tried, Pascal’s condition quickly deteriorated. His life was burning away, and although he had his good days when he could visit with his friends, those days had become increasingly rare. His most poignant visit was with Antoine Arnauld, who came dressed in disguise for fear of the king’s secret police. The two men talked over their differences and came to a final reconciliation. By August 3, Blaise had settled all of his affairs and signed his will. Eleven days later, he had a sudden attack of dizziness and a massive headache. After three days, he fell into convulsions. On the night of August 17, the terrified Gilberte sent for Père Beurrier, who rushed to Pascal’s bedside and administered viaticum, the Eucharist of the journey, given to those who are about to die. Afterward he gave him extreme unction, which is now called the anointing of the sick. Pascal received the sacrament with tears in his eyes, and when the priest took the ciborium and traced the sign of the cross in the air with it as a final blessing, Pascal cried out, “May God never abandon me!” Soon after, he fell into a coma, and at one o’clock
in the morning on Saturday, August 19, 1662, he died in his bed. He was thirty-nine years old.

But this wasn’t the end of the story. On Monday, three days later, Père Beurrier offered Pascal’s funeral Mass at the parish church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and afterward they laid his body in a tomb inside the church, behind the high altar of the Lady Chapel. Eighteen months later, the Perier family erected a small plaque on the wall near his tomb. The plaque merely said that he had spent his last days “meditating on the law of God.” The war against Jansenism was in a fever pitch, however, and someone quickly reported to the new archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe, that the plaque was an obscenity, since Pascal had died a heretic who had refused the sacraments. They demanded that his body be removed from the church.