Free Pascal's Wager by James A. Connor

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 andtheir 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, sentimental 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,