Pascal's Wager (5 page)

O
ne must never forget that Étienne Pascal had taken his children to the Paris of Cardinal Richelieu—a fashionable place, a wealthy place, a place of power, where the Bastille glowered over all things. The Pascals had met the cardinal on several occasions, for they were themselves a fashionable family; they changed residences five times during their stay in Paris, always from one smart district to another. Their first house was on the rue de la Tissanderie, in a district where Henri IV had built two new palaces with their elaborate lawns and avenues. After a few years, Étienne brought his family across the river Seine to the Alberg-Charmaine, across from the great
hôtel
of the king’s cousin, the prince
de Condé, the man whose son would eventually lead a revolt against the regency of Louis XIV during the Fronde of the Princes, a coup d’état by the old nobility, misnamed really, for the term
fronde
refers to a popular uprising.

The cardinal was at the height of his power in those years. An odd man, diminutive, oppressed by his own conscience, sickly, he was a conservative churchman who nevertheless considered his first duty to be to his king and not to his church. He had set himself the task of welding that collection of feudal principalities that was France into one of the great nations of Europe, under an all-powerful absolute monarch, a monarch whom the cardinal controlled. Order was his abiding spiritual principle, and though he often used the rack as a finger of government, he used it no more than did any other ruler at the time.

Richelieu worked incessantly; he was never far from his desk, a fact that showed his middle-class roots. Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, the cardinal, was a breathing contradiction. He had an iron will but a weak constitution, frail and sickly, pale under his ecclesiastical robes. Though perpetually ill or suffering from the fear of illness, he terrorized the entire court.

In spite of his frailty, once he was dressed in his cardinal’s robes, his stern, unbending appearance forced people into submission. And he even exercised this power though Louis XIII, his great protector and benefactor, did not like him very much. Everyone knew this. As he was with so many people, Louis was outwardly courteous but cool. But every time he tried to oppose the cardinal, Richelieu appeared before him and presented his case, step-by-step. Richelieu was so rigorous, so rational in his argument, that Louis could not help but agree.

Various cabals gathered to rid the court of the little cardinal but failed. The man behind most of them was the king’s brother Gaston d’Orléans, a wastrel addicted to gambling, good times, and irresponsibility, though he was his mother’s favorite son. Time after time, in a bid for the throne he tried to unseat the cardinal in order to make his brother the king, who was chronically ill from tuberculosis, more vulnerable, for everyone knew that it was the cardinal who kept the king secure on his throne.
But Gaston was not the cardinal’s only enemy. Both queens—Anne of Austria, the wife of King Louis XIII; and the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis—detested him and wanted to be rid of him, and on at least one occasion they tried to unseat him. But he proved stronger than they, and in the end the Queen Mother, along with Gaston d’Orléans, had to flee France for their lives.

Richelieu had some experience, and some talent, in putting down revolts. He had a world-class intelligence service, led by a Franciscan monk, Father Joseph. In 1626, the monk’s agents caught Gaston in a conspiracy. The cardinal could not imprison a member of the royal family, so he went after the other conspirators: the governor of Gaston’s territory, Marshall Dornano; and Gaston’s friend Henri de Talleyrand, the marquis de Cha-lais. Richelieu had them arrested, had the friend executed, and sent the governor to the Bastille, where he died. After that, one after another, the cardinal removed the teeth from his once-powerful opponents. The prince de Condé, the king’s cousin and the Pascals’ neighbor, a famous warrior and a lion on the battlefield, eventually held the curtains open for the cardinal to let him pass. Others did the same. Even the king was easily bullied, for Richelieu had built for himself the perfect place for any bureaucrat: he was indispensable. Louis was a weak, vacillating king, a deeply closeted homosexual susceptible to older men. Without much of a mind of his own, he left the job of running the country to his minister, Richelieu. The problem was that Louis had a conscience, an unfortunate possession for a king, and he vacillated between the realpolitik of Richelieu and the dictates of his own conscience. But Richelieu always seemed to win, even over the king’s scruples, for he set such moral issues against Louis’s own self-interests. And the fact that the cardinal’s oppressive tax policies kept the money flowing didn’t hurt, either.

Richelieu was an amateur at finance, but his policies, though not very successful in growing the economy, managed to wring enough money out of the people to keep the royal family in palaces. Everyone at court knew this and gnashed their teeth in frustration. Meanwhile, powerful men ended their lives in the Bastille or swinging at the end of a rope. “Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I would find
some reason there to have him hanged,” Richelieu once said. Everyone knew this to be true.

Historians have been hard on Cardinal Richelieu, and perhaps unfairly. The Enlightenment pundits loathed him; their novelists and playwrights made fun of him, because he was the architect of the Old Order. Nevertheless, it would have been a disaster for France had the cardinal fallen. Gaston was too self-involved to be a good king, and he owed too many favors to the old feudal princes to be his own man. The same can be said of the prince de Condé, for he was the man in charge of the old baronial party. Had either of these men dethroned Louis and his first minister, France would have shattered into a hundred feudal pieces and fallen back into medieval disarray, to be nibbled to death by the surrounding Hapsburg powers. It was probably best for France that the Magnificent Bastard crushed all his opponents at court, though you couldn’t have told them that.
⁸

The fact that Étienne Pascal had chosen to live in such fashionable surroundings, so close to the seats of power, suggests that he had more than one reason for moving his children to Paris. Like the cardinal, he was a consummate bureaucrat, a man whose fortunes lay with the administration of the nation. To grow in power and influence would mean to find ways of being close to princes—but, as he would find out, the power of princes can be a force of nature, shifting with the winds of policy. And the man who drove those winds was Cardinal Richelieu.

If Étienne had wished for the life of an intellectual, with an intellectual’s reputation, he soon got it. Jean-Baptiste Morin had developed a new technique for calculating longitude, a vital problem for any nation that had dreams of maritime trade, the solution of which meant life or death for sailors. In 1634, Cardinal Richelieu appointed Étienne to a special seven-member committee of scientists and mathematicians called together to evaluate Morin’s technique. Richelieu wanted a quick solution to the longitude problem but had little idea of what that involved. After all their long discussions, the committee was not able to declare a solution, though Étienne’s gamble had paid off. He had left his hometown for the great city, and the cardinal had favored him—at least for the moment. That would change.

P
ère Mersenne’s little group was not Étienne’s only circle of friends in Paris. Another was the group of pundits, poets, and satirists who gathered around Madame Sainctot, a woman of the court, well known to the queen. Madame Sainctot, like so many court women, was a great beauty with an infamous past. A women of influence, she was a member of the lower nobility who had cultivated the virtues of the courtesan—timing, beauty, cheek, brilliance, joie de vivre, grace, and charm.
⁹
And she had
l’esprit
aplenty. She was a mistress of the art of conversation, surrounding herself with witty and often outrageous companions, so that her soirees were like her own private court, filled with glittering people who told ribald stories and preached mildly radical ideas. She was also pious in her own way, and sprinkled among the literati
was a pinch of clergy. The literati knew their part, as did the clergy, so the conversation was often radical, but not too radical—that could get one a ticket to the Bastille—just radical enough to titillate.

The Sainctot family is little known, though they had their moments. Originating in the Île-de-France region, they were ennobled in 1583, and then confirmed in 1604, likely for bureaucratic service to the king. Jean-Baptiste de Sainctot, the lord of Veymar, had been an ordinary gentleman who had served several terms working in the justice system and as an adviser to Louis XIII. Jean-Baptiste was the uncle of Nicholas de Sainctot, who was the master of ceremonies for Louis XIV. His sister, Madame Françoise de Dreux, was later denounced and tried as a poisoner, though how justly this was done was controversial even then.

Étienne’s three children played with Madame Sainctot’s children, and so Blaise and his sisters might often have chased one another through the salon until they were caught, or crept about the corners of the adult gatherings, listening in. This would have been Blaise’s introduction to the
libertins érudits
, the rising breed of skeptics who would build a new world out of their faith in doubt. Though Blaise was still too young to sense it, the world of adults was changing fast, so fast that a pall of doubt had covered Europe. The old certainties that dominated the Middle Ages had been mortally wounded, but their dying was slow. Blaise himself would become part of the killing. Christendom had been shattered by reform, and throughout most of Blaise’s short life, Christians fought one another with a ferocity that only true believers can muster. The old aristocracy, the
noblesse d’épée
, the nobility of the sword, was being replaced step-by-step by the bourgeoisie, that class of new men who spent their lives worrying about money. Blaise’s own father, Étienne, was himself one of these new men, as were the Sainctots.

Change was everywhere. Doubt was everywhere. And in times of such uncertainty, some people fling off their clothes and run around proclaiming wild new beliefs and wild new freedoms, while others wall themselves into the fortresses of their beliefs and hunker down. These were the two types who were gathering their forces all across France, first in the Jansenist debate over free will, and then later in the bourgeois revolution that swept aside all their society.

The salon was the gathering place where the intellectually inclined chewed on these uncertainties. There, in Madame Sainctot’s salon, Blaise would have heard the wry comments of the satirists and
libertins érudits
, the literary set who first questioned the very basis of the Christian faith and sought to replace it with Deism, with its god of reason, who created the world but who had little to do with the daily affairs of human beings. After a few years, when Blaise entered the society of Père Mersenne, he would have heard the other side of the story—that is, Mersenne’s ferocious defense of Christianity and his attacks on the pundits and the scoffers.

Blaise would also have encountered the art of diversion. Within the court, and for those attending it, like Madame Sainctot, one of the most important parts of life was the pursuit of good times. There were, of course, music and the theater, but most of all, there was gambling.

Gambling was everywhere: the aristocracy gambled ferociously; the poor gambled desperately. There was an itch there, an itch that could not be scratched in any other way, an itch caused by the uncertainty of life and a desire for some great event to make it all better. Gamblers place all they are and own at risk, and that is the fun of it. The player throws the dice. The bets are down, the game is committed, and while the dice are tumbling, there is that thrill of mystery and that fear of the future. No one knows what the dice will show, and yet everything rides on it. Whole family fortunes were lost or regained in the tumbling of the dice. In a world where money unrelentingly nibbled at the power of the aristocracy, like hot groundwater eating at stones, what happened in a dice game or card game could mean life or death.

There was something military about gambling among the aristocrats in Pascal’s day. Those who were
noblesse d’épée
, ennobled through the sword, or the descendents of long-dead heroes who had risked their lives fighting beside their king, were given lands and titles just as modern armies give medals, and their children and grandchildren inherited their good fortune. These were the old aristocrats, whose families curled back into the dim memory of the nation. Their descendents enjoyed numerous honors and great wealth by the odd accident of their birth. And they assumed that they were superior because of it. But living in the comfortable court as they did, they had few opportunities for heroism, save for the perennial
duels that exploded over trifles, so they spent their evenings attending salons looking for a substitute, throwing dice or turning cards.

An ethical stoicism hid behind this martial understanding of gambling. In classical culture, the soldier, and therefore the noble, encountered a choice when confronted by chance events. If a battle turned against you, you were expected to stand up to your fate and take it without flinching. If a battle went for you, you were expected to do the same. When Fortune turned against you, you could either buckle before fate and cry to heaven over your bad luck, or you could stand tall and accept whatever came, the good and the bad, with equal aplomb. This was
areté
for the Greeks and
virtus
for the Romans, an ethical quality of soul that raised the aristocrat above the common herd.
¹⁰

Dicing in one form or another is the oldest of all gambling games. Card games became popular only after the invention of printing, but throwing the astragali is as old as civilization. Egyptian inscriptions have depicted dicing games from 2000
B.C.
; the Chinese have references dating back to 400
B.C.
The word
dice
is the plural of
die
, which comes from street Latin
data
, which comes from
dare
, “to give.” To throw the dice is to face that which is given by the gods, by powers higher than human. It is to face reality at its most mysterious, like standing unflinching before the thunderstorm.
¹¹
The tradition, coming down to us from the Romans, was that there was a goddess, Fortuna—or, in Greek, Tyche—who ruled each turn of the card, each toss of the dice:

This was the dominant belief, the common sense throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The tavern was the goddess’s place, the place where the courageous wrestled with her nightly. It was a place apart from the rest of the world, where the ordinary rules of society did not apply. Those who forgot the slipperiness of Fortune were doomed to suffer under her wheel, for such fools were guilty of hubris, vaunting pride, the source of all sin. Thus, in its earliest incarnation, gambling was a warriors’ game, a sparring match between the knight and the goddess. Like jousting, it was both a sport and a reenactment of the truth of life. The first Christian dice game,
le hasard
, was brought back to France by crusaders, and it offered the knights a chance of doing battle in the drawing room, a way of civilizing war itself or of bringing war home with them. William of Tyre tells the story, in his
Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum
, about a crusader army forced to stay in a Syrian castle named Hasart. Far from battle, the men were so bored that they invented a dice game,
hasart
, and enjoyed it so much that when they returned to Christian lands, they brought the game with them, and that game gradually mutated into the modern game of craps. The goddess, meanwhile, the personification of surprise and of caprice, handed out good and evil as she desired.

Young Blaise likely attended one of Madame Sainctot’s soirees and peeked into the room where the adults were playing adult games. As a child, he would not have understood the subtleties. Gambling was a demonstration of the aristocrats’ superiority over the bourgeoisie, who spent their lives intertwined in the affairs of money. It was therefore winked at, though it was illegal. The fact that the aristocracy could practice it with impunity was another sign of their inherent superiority. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie looked at gambling as a moral evil, as a languid vice of the nobility, whom they saw as living misspent lives. Not that they didn’t yearn for the aristocratic pleasures themselves. After the French Revolution, the bour
geoisie happily picked up all the vices that the aristocracy had dropped on the way to the guillotine. Before the Revolution, however, their condemnation of gambling was largely a product of their own fear of falling. Because their social standing depended so thoroughly on money—to accumulate it, to use it, and to disperse it—any cavalier use of money, especially in the manner practiced by the aristocracy, was treated almost as a personal affront. Nevertheless, as a courtesan, Madame Sainctot would have practiced those very vices, and allowed them to be practiced. How else could she have looked like an aristocrat herself?

Oddly enough, the bourgeoisie were caught between the martial games of the upper classes, partly expressed through high-stakes gambling, and the endemic gambling practiced by the poor. Whereas the aristocracy could disdain money because their social position did not depend upon it, the poor had no money, or too little of it, and so did not fear falling from their social position, because they had already fallen. It was the unique and exquisite plight of the middle classes, especially those who had been recently ennobled or were on their way to becoming noble, that no matter how high they climbed, their lives were still dependent upon money, and they still suffered the lightly veiled contempt of the aristocracy, whose social position was so much more stable than their own. When they gambled, which they did regularly in order to fit in with the court, they did so with fear and trembling—which, of course, they could not let show without also displaying their middle-class origins.

Thus the Pascals, who lived on a fixed income, settled into a life at court, where people nightly put their children’s future at risk, and pretended to be amused. Blaise, ever observant, watched the great show, and learned more than anyone expected.