Pascal's Wager Read online

  The people loved the young king for his youth, and they loved his mother, Anne, mainly for her suffering. No one likes a monarch who has a good time, but one who suffers delicately has everyone’s goodwill. As they traveled toward Paris, the people lined the streets and cheered them, calling the young king the Dieudonné, the gift of God, and praying down blessings on the Queen Mother. At the gates of the city, the procession stopped to listen to speeches given by local government officials and by prominent merchants, and this went on and on. More than likely, the four-year-old king was bored.

  Because of his youth, his mother quickly became the regent and ruled in his stead, an unstable business because both the queen and her first minister were foreigners, and though the people loved them for the moment, that could quickly change. French nationalists like the prince de Condé resented their coming to power and schemed voraciously in the background. The duc d’Orléans pretended to be upset by the regency and was ready to go to war over it, but then the queen made him the lieutenant general of France, and he went away happy. The prince de Condé became the president of the King’s Council, and even he stopped grumbling for a time.

  On Monday, May 18, the Parlement de Paris assembled to register Anne’s regency, which they did quickly, with pomp and flourishes and plenty of references to the will of God. The queen immediately called the exiles home, freed the political prisoners, and even pardoned many criminals. Those who had lost their jobs under Richelieu were soon given new employment, and all requests were granted.36 Three days later, Anne named Cardinal Mazarin to be her chief minister, and no one was surprised, though everyone at court and out of court knew him for what he was—Richelieu’s creature—and hated him.

  At first, painfully aware of her dead husband’s shortcomings, especially his constant deferral to Richelieu, the queen tried to rule in her own right, and rule by Christian principles. Not being a holy man himself, Cardinal Mazarin couldn’t allow that. He had other ideas, and immediately set clandestine schemes running through the palace to undermine the queen and to maneuver her power away from her. Like his predecessor, Richelieu, he wanted no restrictions on his own power, but unlike Richelieu, he had little conscience, and sought his own glory over the welfare of the nation.

  By that time, Richelieu’s taxes had bled the people white, a fact that many pious people, even the queen’s favorite Vincent de Paul, had taken great pains to tell her. However, she was no longer in control of the regency and was further hampered by her vision of royal power. Life at court was spent mostly in the search of pleasure—frivolous conversation, rich banquets, plays and concerts, coquetry. Mazarin, to entertain the queen, brought an Italian acting troupe to Paris to stage a musical comedy, Orfeo, which the boy king loved and demanded to see again and again, though it cost four hundred thousand livres just to purchase the set and the machinery for the special effects. This did not include the salaries of the players or the cost of transporting them from Italy. The amount of money the court spent on a daily basis was outrageous, and it is telling that the court was oblivious to the effects that their pleasures were having on the populace. While the courtiers tittered over the latest intrigue, the most recent scandal, the people languished in poverty, and the French Revolution inched closer.

  In the end, all of her good intentions fell apart in May 1648. The war that was impoverishing the nation seemed to go on and on, while the court spent more money every year on frivolities. D’Emery, Mazarin’s superintendent of finance, widely known as one of the most corrupt men of the time, was foraging for new tax schemes. He issued edicts announcing new taxes as fast as he could name them

  Up until this point, there had been no popular uprising in Paris as there had been in the provinces. The streets had been clear, the people quiet. The only thing that had happened was that the tax officers had refused to do their jobs under protest of the new strictures to tax more and receive less, and some members of the Parlement had made speeches against the regent’s policies. But Anne would not let this go; she insisted on seeing these protests as the start of an insurrection. And by doing so, she incited the very rebellion she feared. What neither the queen, nor Mazarin, nor anyone else in court realized was that the rebellion had been brewing since Richelieu’s day, and that the violent tax revolts that had become commonplace in the provinces were about to visit the capital.

  Meanwhile, Cardinal de Retz, who was out of favor at court because of his opposition to Mazarin, used his position as coadjutor of Paris to win the love of the people. From February 25 to March 26, 1648, he distributed thirty-six thousand crowns among the poor. Seeing what was going on, he informed the queen and Cardinal Mazarin of the people’s disaffection, and then quietly told the queen of Mazarin’s cunning, which earned him no love from the cardinal and no gratitude from the queen.

  All of a sudden, news came to the court that the young prince de Condé, the son of the old grumpy lion of Louis XIII’s day, had achieved a great military victory in the town of Lens. The court was jubilant. The queen ordered a Te Deum to be sung at Notre Dame. Then she called her council together, and they decided that the celebration would be a perfect opportunity to crush the rebellion in the Parlement. The people would be too busy celebrating to notice that their leaders had been quietly arrested. Just before leaving for the cathedral, she called Comminges, a lieutenant of the royal guard, to her side, quietly informed him of her plans, and placed him in charge of the detachment making the arrests. This decision was the beginning of the Fronde of the Parlement, a rebellion that ultimately failed and merely strengthened the power of the crown, for France was not quite ripe for revolution.37

  Comminges packed his carriage with four of his guards and one other officer, and together they drove to the street of Monsieur Broussel. Broussel, an old army officer who suffered from gout, was the most vociferous opponent of the king’s taxes, and the people claimed him as their great protector. Comminges ordered the carriage to the end of the street, with orders to come at once as soon as he had entered the counselor’s house. Then he marched up on foot and knocked on the door. A young boy answered and opened the door for him, and once it was open Comminges leaped inside, holding the door until the carriage arrived. Then, leaving two men at the door, he took the other two guards up to Broussel’s apartment and barged into the room, where the man was finishing his dinner with his family. Comminges announced that he had an order from the king to arrest him and take him to prison. Broussel, who had shown great courage in the Parlement in denouncing Mazarin and his policies, was over sixty years old, and trembled at the sight of the lieutenant and his men. He told them that he had taken medicine that morning and that he was in no state to travel, but they would not listen. They grabbed the old man, and at that one of the servants, Broussel’s old nurse, ran down the street screaming to the people for help, saying that their protector was being carried off to prison. Suddenly the street was filled with an angry mob. When they heard that Broussel had been arrested, they snatched at the reins, scrambled for the carriage, pulled at the guards. Inside the house, Comminges looked out the window and saw that a riot was beginning. He told Broussel that if he tried to delay any longer he would kill him. Seizing him, he dragged him from the apartment and down the stairs, and threw him into the carriage, while the guards pushed back the people.

  With that, the crowd grew more violent and angrier than before; the people pushed and shoved and cursed and threw rocks. The mob teemed all around them even as Comminges and his men tried to escape with their prisoner. He and his men, especially a young page, fought back, but the crowd managed to lay hold of the carriage and overturn it. They would have beaten the men to death had there not been soldiers from the guards standing nearby. Leaping out of the carriage, Comminges pulled his prisoner out the door and fought his way through the crowd. “To arms! Comrades! Help us!” he shouted to the soldiers, and they fought with the people in the streets until the guards brought up another carriage and Comminges escaped with his prisoner. Suddenl
y, all of Paris boiled with sedition. When the queen heard about the riot, she sent troops through the streets to pacify the people. It didn’t work.

  The queen’s counsel, meanwhile, met in the Palais-Royal to discuss the problem, trying to ignore the sounds of rough singing from the streets below. They laughed, they talked about frivolous things, but not one of them was willing to show what they really felt, what the queen felt—that they were all deeply afraid and had no idea how to solve the problem. Anne, meanwhile, ridiculed the people’s anger and told the court that she was not afraid of the people, that she was certain they would do her no harm.

  Later that evening, Retz appeared before the queen as an intermediary for the people. On their behalf, he requested once again that they release Broussel and warned her that if she did not do so, the people would recover him by force. But the queen would not bend and ridiculed the idea, sending the coadjutor of Paris back to the people empty-handed. At that point, many in the court could see that the queen’s inflexibility would likely get them all killed.

  It was in the middle of all this that the Pascal family decided that a visit to the country, to Clermont, was a good idea. They were not attending the queen at that time, because it was Étienne’s own class of men who had rebelled. Étienne had returned to Paris after finishing his term of office in Rouen, and when the rioting broke out, his position as a tax judge made him vulnerable to the whims of the mob, though his fellow tax judges were the darlings of the crowd for the moment. But, while the rebellion had been started by men like him, the people had become a force of their own, and their fury could easily turn on the Pascal family as representatives of the system that had held them down for so long. As the riots worsened in the city, Étienne packed his bags once again and, with Blaise and Jacqueline in tow, fled the city for Clermont, their ancestral home. Life at court was not worth this.

  As the night deepened, the crowds gradually dispersed and the queen took heart, reassuring herself that there was nothing to fear. She was wrong.

  The next day wasn’t much better, nor the day after that. What had started out as a strike by government employees ended as a popular uprising. What no one had the foresight to see, neither the members of the Parlement nor the members of the royal court, was that this was only the first shot, the prologue to a general revolution a hundred years later that would topple the monarchy and set Europe on fire.

  The Paris that the members of the royal court imagined as a city of beauty and pleasure had revealed its truest heart. Among the lower classes, it was a city that yearned for revenge; a blood feud was building between the rich, entombed in their privileges, and the poor, desperate and hungry, and there was no solution for it, no solution other than blood. Meanwhile, the queen kept court as best she could, and in the city, the Parlement met and deliberated about the queen. By the end of the next day, they sent representatives to the queen, who met them without pomp in the little gallery. The chief president promised not to deliberate on taxes until after St. Martin’s Day, but that was the best they could offer. The queen was not happy, for it was not the solution she desired; she could see that this was only a reprieve. Nevertheless, she recognized that the Parlement was seeking a compromise, and so she ordered the release of Broussel. Vengeance would come in its own time.

  Once outside the Palais-Royal, the representatives of the Parlement approached the people gathered on the street and told them that they had secured the release of Broussel. Not everyone believed them. Some announced that if this was a deception, the people would storm the Palais-Royal and pillage it, and then throw the foreigner out!

  When the rules of civilization crumble, even for a short time, what is left is the mob. The populace takes on a new personality, darker than its everyday personality, driven more by paranoia than by reason, or even by self-interest. Paris did not settle down after Broussel’s return, because the people did not trust the queen, even when she returned their great protector to them. Though their fear was well founded, as it turned out, the driving force of the rebellion was no longer the freedom of Broussel but their mistrust and hatred of the queen. The burghers refused to tear down the barricades and to lay down their arms. The people refused to return to their homes until the Parlement sounded the all-clear. They were all too afraid that the queen meant what she said—that she would avenge herself and her son upon them and their city for their disobedience. Finally, late on the morning of August 28, 1648, with Broussel attending, the assembly published a decree enjoining the people to obey the will of the king and to return to their homes. The decree was passed later that day.

  The people listened, the barricades came down, and the crowds melted away. Everyone breathed easily, and the city seemed to return to itself and become a place of charm and grace once again. But this didn’t last very long. The guards at the Palais-Royal needed resupply, and, unhappily, their two caissons of gunpowder arrived in the city at just that moment. The people watched as the military procession rolled through the streets of the city, and they became certain that the queen was preparing to strike. All of a sudden, the streets were filled with people calling, “To arms!” And things were just as bad as they had been the day before. The magistrates moved among the people to reassure them, but no one listened. Within half an hour, the city was alive with rebellion once again.

  Two months later, the queen, the young king, and the cardinal, leaving much of the court to fend for themselves, sneaked out of the city and rallied troops for their attack on the city. Fortunately for them, the Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years’ War, and the French Army, under the command of the young prince de Condé, was now free to put down the rebellion. His troops surrounded the capital, and all the people’s fears seemed to come true. The queen would have her vengeance after all. But the prince was not eager to lead a general slaughter, and never led his troops inside the capital. Meanwhile, the nobles among the rebels quietly negotiated with the Spanish, the queen’s own family, to intercede on their behalf. But the people were too French for that, and wouldn’t be saved by the hated Spaniards, and so they were forced to submit. Negotiations started; messages zoomed back and forth across the barricades; the people submitted; the queen relented; and suddenly in 1649, with the Peace of Rueil, there was peace at last. The only problem left was the prince de Condé, who had his own army to play with and now felt that the queen owed him. She didn’t agree, and the Fronde of the Princes was on.

  [1648–1654]

  Adrift in the World

  Now a’ is done that men can do,

  And a’ is done in vain.

  —ROBERT BURNS

  Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain

  Which, with pain purchas’d, doth inherit pain.

  —SHAKESPEARE, Love’s Labours Lost

  From all blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy;

  from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

  —The Book of Common Prayer

  And then I said: O Lord, how long?

  —ISAIAH

  The Pascal family had fled Paris for the Auvergne in May 1649, and lived there for the next eighteen months at the home of Gilberte and Florin Perier. Undoubtedly, they gleaned whatever news they could of the events in Paris and waited for the fire to die down. Blaise continued with his scientific investigations, and had momentary episodes of religious fervor, but these, too, died down. Gilberte recorded how he made retreats in the country, in spite of his constant infirmity, to help sort out his faith. At home, he took on many of the tasks once reserved for the servants, and refused their help on household chores. He made his own bed, carried his dishes in from the table, even cooked for himself from time to time. Whether that was a bad idea or not, Gilberte never said. He read the Bible voraciously, and said that the Bible was not a text for “the genius,” the rational mind, but for the heart. His life was inching toward a fork in the road. His problem was complex—how to reconcile his scien
tific pursuits with his spirituality, especially when his spiritual directors thought that science itself was a sin equal to lust. He felt, increasingly, that he had to make a choice. The fact that this very idea would have appeared excessive, even ridiculous, to the vast majority of Catholics, especially those trained by the Jesuits, never quite sank in.

  Jacqueline, on the other hand, never wavered. She kept her promises to Mère Angélique and remained in her room as best she could, living a life of monastic silence. According to Gilberte, Jacqueline never left her quarters except to go to church or to visit the sick and the poor, all of which were part of the life of the sisterhood. She maintained her contact with Port-Royal through a stream of letters between herself and Mère Agnès Arnauld, the novice mistress and Mère Angélique’s sister and closest confidant. Finally, as the Fronde of the Parlement died down, Étienne decided that it was time for the Pascals to return to the capital. They arrived in November 1650 and took residence in a house on the rue de Touraine. The Fronde of the Princes was not quite over with, however, and so the family watched through their second-story windows as troops maneuvered on the streets below and soldiers fired muskets on one another and died.

  While all this was going on, Blaise found himself in a war of his own. In the summer of 1651, an anonymous Jesuit attached to the college in Montferrand wrote a treatise attacking Blaise’s work on the vacuum. The Jesuits, awash in Thomistic Aristotelianism, naturally abhorred the vacuum, and fought the idea whenever they could. After all, Descartes was their boy and Pascal wasn’t. Thomas Aquinas was a saint, and Pascal wasn’t that, either. In his treatise, the anonymous Jesuit wrote that “certain persons, lovers of novelty,” had falsely claimed credit for the discovery of the vacuum from experiments performed in Normandy and the Auvergne when in fact these same experiments had already been carried out in Italy and in Germany. Adding acid to the wound, the Jesuit dedicated his treatise to Étienne’s successor on the Cour des Aides, the tax court of the Auvergne.