Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/356

 334 PASCAL to Paris for the education of his children and for his own indulgence in scientific society. It does not appear that Blaise, who went to no school, but was taught by his father, was at all forced, but rather the contrary. Never theless he has a distinguished place in the story of pre cocious children, and in the much more limited chapter of children whose precocity has been followed by great per formance at maturity, though he never became what is called a learned man, perhaps did not know Greek, and was pretty certainly indebted for most of his miscellaneous reading to Montaigne. How, purposely kept from books, he worked out the more elementary problems of geometry for himself ; how at sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections which Descartes refused to believe in except as the work of a master and not of a student ; how he wrote treatises on acoustics at twelve, and began elaborate cal culating machines when he was still a boy, are things dwelt upon in all biographies of him. In this notice his attainments in mathematical and physical science, except those which have some special connexion with his life and history, will be dealt with separately and later. The Pascal family, some years after settling in Paris, had to go through a period of adversity, ittienne Pascal, on leaving Clermont, had bought certain of the Hotel de Ville rentes, almost the only regular investment open to Frenchmen at the time. Richelieu reduced the interest and the investors protested, Pascal amongst them. But the great cardinal did not understand such protests, and to escape the Bastille Pascal had to go into hiding. He was, according to the story, restored to favour owing to the good acting and graceful appearance of his daughter Jacqueline in a representation of Scude&quot;ry s Amour Tyran- nique before Richelieu. Indeed Jacqueline, who was only fourteen, herself gives the account in a pleasant letter which is extant, and which contains an allusion to her brother s mathematical prowess. Madame d Aiguillon s intervention in the matter was perhaps as powerful as Jacqueline s acting, and Richelieu not only relieved Etienne Pascal from the necessity of keeping out of the way, but gave him (in 1641) the important and lucrative though somewhat troublesome intendancy of Rouen. The family accordingly removed to the Norman capital, though Gilberte Pascal shortly after, on her marriage, returned to Clermont. At Rouen they became acquainted with Corneille, and Blaise Pascal pursued his studies with such vehemence that he already showed signs of an injured constitution, Nothing, however, of importance happened till the year 1646. Then Pascal the elder was confined to the house by the consequences of an accident on the ice, and was visited by certain gentlemen of the neighbourhood who had come under the influence of St Cyran and the Jansenists. It does not appear that up to this time the Pascal family had been contemners of religion, but they now eagerly embraced the creed, or at least the attitude of Jansenism. One of the more immediate results of this conversion has rather shocked some modern admirers of Pascal, who forget that toleration, except of the Gallio kind, is an idea which had no place in men s minds in Pascal s day. .He came into contact with a Capuchin known as Pere St Ange, but whose real name was Forton, and who seems to have entertained some speculative ideas on theological points which were not strictly orthodox. Thereupon Pascal with some of his friends lodged an information against the heretic with the representative of the archbishop of Rouen. There seems to have been no lack of zeal about the accusers, but the accused made no difficulty whatever in making profession of orthodoxy, and the judge appears to have been by no means anxious to push the matter home. No doubt Pascal was perfectly sincere, and like most of his contemporaries held the opinion attributed to a great English nonconformist con temporary of his, that, while it was very shocking that men who were in the right should not be tolerated, it was almost equally shocking that men who were in the wrong should be. His bodily health was at this time very far from satis factory, and he appears to have suffered, not merely from acute dyspepsia, but from a kind of paralysis. He was, however, except when physicians positively forbade study, and probably sometimes when they did so forbid, inde fatigable in his mathematical work. In 1647 he published his Nouvelles Experiences sur h Vide, and in the next year the famous experiment with the barometer on the Puy de Dome was carried out for him by his brother-in-law Perier, and repeated on a smaller scale by himself at Paris, to which place by the end of 1647 he and his sister Jacqueline had removed, to be followed shortly by their father. In a letter of Jacqueline s dated the 27th of September, an account of a visit paid by Descartes to Pascal is given, which, like the other information on the relations of the two, gives strong suspicion of mutual jealousy. Descartes, however, gave Pascal the very sensible advice to stay in bed as long as he could (it may be remembered that the philosopher himself never got up till eleven) and to take plenty of beef tea. But the relations of Pascal with Descartes belong chiefly to the scientific achievements of the former. He had, however, other relations, both domestic and miscellaneous, which had nothing to do with science. As early as May 1648 Jacqueline Pascal was strongly drawn to Port Royal, and her brother fre quently accompanied her to its church. She dcsm.l indeed to join the convent, but her father, who at thf date above mentioned returned to Paris with the dignity of counsellor of state (his functions at Rouen having ceased), disapproved of the plan, and took both brother and sister to Clermont. Pascal stayed in Auvergne for the greater part of two years, but next to nothing is known of what he did there. Flechier, in his account of the Grands Jours at Clermont many years after, speaks of a &quot; belle savante &quot; in whose company Pascal had frequently been a trivial mention on which, as on many other trivial points of scantily known lives, the most childish structures of comment and conjecture have been based. It is sufficient to say that at this time, despite the Rouen &quot;conversion,&quot; there is no evidence to show that Pascal was in any way a recluse, an ascetic, or in short anything but a young man of great intellectual promise and performance who was not indifferent to society, but whose aptitude both for society and study was affected by weak health and the horse-doctoring of the time. He, his sister, and their father returned to Paris in the late autumn of 1650, and in September of the next year litienne Pascal died. Almost immediately afterwards Jacqueline fulfilled her purpose of joining Port Royal a proceeding which led to some soreness, finally healed, between herself and her brother and sister as to the dis posal of her property. Perhaps this difference, but more probably the mere habitual use of the well-known dialect of Port Royal, led Jacqueline to employ in reference to her brother expressions which have led biographers into most unnecessary excursions of fancy. For these they have seemed to find further warrant in similar phrases used by the Periers, mother and daughter. It has been supposed that Pascal, from 1651 or earlier to the famous accident of 1654, lived a dissipated, extravagant, worldly, luxurious (though admittedly not vicious) life with his friend the Due de Roannez and others. His Discours sur les Passions Je i 1 Amour, a striking and characteristic piece, only recently discovered and printed, has also been assigned to this period, and has been supposed to indicate a hope-