Pascal's Wager (7 page)

J
acqueline’s gambit had worked. According to her sister, Gilberte, “M. the Cardinal said to her: ‘Not only do I grant your request, but I heartily desire its fulfillment. Tell your father to come to see me in all confidence, and when he comes he should bring his whole family with him.’”
¹⁶
Jacqueline begged her father to return home and present himself to His Eminence, which, in spite of the cardinal’s kind words, was not a completely safe thing to do. What the cardinal might say to a sweet little child, so lately the favorite of the king and queen, was one thing, and what he might say to the father, so lately the cause of civil unrest, was another. But as it turned out, the word of Richelieu was good, at least this time. Étienne Pascal appeared before him to make his apologies and to beg forgiveness, and nothing particularly dangerous happened to him. Jacqueline must have been quite the hit, even with the inventor of realpolitik, for not only was her father forgiven, but six months later he found himself with an appointment as the king’s commissioner of taxes in the city of Rouen.

Rouen is a seaport on the river Seine in Normandy, slightly northeast of the American beachheads of World War II, and is mentioned sooner or
later in nearly every movie about D-day. It was built as close to the mouth of the river as possible and still spans the river with bridges. In its youth, Rouen was a trading center for Celtic merchants; later, it became a Roman outpost, and later still a base camp for Vikings. In the nineteenth century, its already famous cathedral was sketched and painted over and over by Monet, to capture the subtle moods of the light. It was a thriving seaport in Pascal’s day as well, and trade brings taxes, which bring tax collectors.

In spite of all his outward kindness, Cardinal Richelieu never completely forgave the Pascals, or anyone who opposed him. What he had given to Étienne was both a reward and a punishment, for the region was aflame with a vicious tax revolt. Royal commissioners for taxes were roundly hated by the people, and France’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War had been squeezing them into revolt or starvation. There were taxes for just about everything, and fees on the taxes. As usual, the rich understood the system and used it for their gain. The king’s creditors received the privilege of levying fees upon the people in a particular region, thus repaying the debt without much bother to the king, much as if Chase Manhattan Bank held a promissory note from the president, and in payment received the right to wring extra money out of the people of Minnesota. This saved the king the bother of trying to find the money to pay back his creditors, and if in the process he added one more tax onto the already overburdened people, what did that matter? Understandably, civil uprisings were popping up all over France, explosions of peasant and minor bourgeois fury that would brood throughout the reign of Louis XIII, then into the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, and suddenly flame into the Great Revolution. But the French kings did not know that they were signing away their future just to unravel the crisis of the moment, for the easy way to solve problems is rarely the best way. In 1639, the year that Étienne Pascal brought his children to Rouen, uprisings burned across the entire region, exploding overnight and then burning on sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months.

Such events occurred all over France. It is likely that nearly every day young Blaise overheard a report of an uprising somewhere—a riot, a brawl, a murder. Years later, in the
Pensées
, he wrote about kings and
their use of power, about the pain they caused, about the death. Perhaps his own sympathies during those years may eventually have come to rest with the people, the common folk.

This was a creative time for Blaise, a time when he started to build his reputation. The jury was out on his personality, however. Some said that young Blaise Pascal was a prodigy, others that he was an arrogant boy. Probably both views had some truth. Certainly, he was the overprotected son of a rich father, a father who had achieved intellectual fame and who wanted his son to do the same. He was a driven boy, and yet one can forgive much of his edge because of his lust for knowledge. He was manically curious, with an encyclopedic, roving mind that attached itself to one mathematical problem after another, a lamprey chewing through the skin of a shark until he had penetrated the problem deep to the bone. What was best about him was his openness to unfamiliar ideas and his willingness to accept the evidence of his eyes. These gifts would serve him well in the years to come.

Gilberte was then twenty years old and Blaise nearly seventeen. Rouen was an old city, with winding, narrow streets and tall half-beam houses. The Pascal house was in a compact neighborhood near the monastery of Saint-Ouen, what would have passed for a suburb in that time, on the northwest edge of the city, an area mainly occupied by bureaucrats and their families. Their friends and neighbors were mostly government employees at one level or another. Churches were all around them, with shops sprinkled here and there. Nearby was the rue du Gros-Horloge, where St. Joan of Arc had been burned as a heretic. The gothic spires of the church of Saint-Ouen dominated the skyline, with the building’s stained-glass windows depicting biblical stories and moments in the lives of the saints. When the sun shone through them, the interior of the church was cast with rose- and gold-colored light. In the summertime, flowers peered blue and red and white above the lips of planter boxes, while off in the distance the sea boiled up hillocks of vapor that marched onshore as the day waned.

Blaise was now in the coils of adolescence. He was not a handsome boy, small for his age, thin and frail looking, snappish one moment, senti
mental and pious the next, slouching between insecurity of body and arrogance of mind. His sister Gilberte had maintained her dark beauty, dark eyes, dark hair, white skin, and elegant figure, and she was surrounded by young men. Jacqueline, though her face had been spoiled by smallpox, was lovely enough to have her share of suitors. Étienne tried to find a husband for her several times, but it never quite happened. Jacqueline showed little interest. Outwardly, however, the Pascals were the perfect provincial family—middle-class, comfortable, acceptable, with hints of great expectation sprinkled through. Inwardly, they were hyperintelligent, given to emotional extremes, and not a little eccentric. Though Blaise had shown the first signs of great promise, it was Jacqueline who kept winning prizes for her poetry, and it was this rather than romance that consumed her life. Blaise had yearned for celebrity since childhood, and Jacqueline’s early success must have galled him in his private room, though he would have smiled and applauded her in public. Moreover, while Blaise was utterly under his father’s thumb, following out his father’s program, Jacqueline showed an alarming independence, something that was simply not done among their kind.

While in Rouen, the family had met Pierre Corneille, the Norman tragedian, who quickly befriended them and encouraged Jacqueline to pursue the life of a poet and playwright. It seemed at first that she was on the verge of doing so. Meanwhile, Blaise received a copy of Desargues’ book on conic sections and, egged on by his father and by Mersenne, set out to make his own contributions. Living in Rouen at the time, he was off in the provinces, like Fermat in Toulouse, and had to rely on letters and gossip for news of the intellectual tides of Mersenne’s academy. But the monk, the great communicator, kept everyone apprised of the latest, and made sure that the right books ended up in the right hands.

While Blaise scribbled his notes on conic sections, crowds gathered in the street below and shouted angry insults at the government employees in the neighborhood. Richelieu’s gluttonous taxes, the very thing that the Pascal family had come to Rouen to administer, had crushed the common people into rebellion. Brush fires of plague had also erupted in parts of the city and throughout Normandy. In the summer of 1639, just as the
Pascal family had taken up residence, the city exploded with riots. Gangs of looters roamed the streets, singing bawdy songs and throwing curses. For the first year of the Pascal family’s stay in Rouen, they must have felt as if the people’s vengeance would swallow them whole.

Finally, Blaise sent his first work of serious mathematics off to Père Mersenne. It was a short piece, a pamphlet entitled
Essai pour les co-niques
, or
Essay on Conics
. In it, Blaise outlined his proof for what has been called the Mystic Hexagram. Here is a short description of the concept:

• 1. Take a cone:
  

• 2. Take a simple plane, and slice the cone in two.
  

• 3. If the plane is straight across, the section cut out will be a circle. This is the specialized case:
  

• 4. If the plane is at an angle, the section cut out will be an ellipse. This is the more general case, because ellipses can be squat or long, thin or nearly round:
  Because Pascal wanted to prove a general theorem, he took the case of an ellipse:
  

• 5. Draw a hexagram, a six-sided figure, inside the ellipse. The hexagram
  does not have to be regular.
  

• 6. Now, take a pencil and make big dots on the vertices of the hexagram, and draw lines between the vertices. Then, extend the lines out to where they cross.