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But much still remained to be done, and especially to resolve the problems connected with it in a “general and uniform manner.” “Pascal,” says Bossut, “devised within eight days, and in the midst of cruel sufferings, a method which embraced all the problems—a method founded upon the summation of certain series, of which he had given the elements in his writings accompanying his ‘Traité du Triangle Arithmétique.’ From this discovery there was only a step to that of the Differential and Integral Calculus; and it may be confidently presumed that, if Pascal had proceeded with his mathematical studies, he would have anticipated Leibnitz and Newton in the glory of their great invention.”
What Pascal himself did not do, M. Havet does not think it possible any editor can do. Accordingly, he recurs to the old, if somewhat arbitrary, arrangement of Bossut, as the most familiar and useful.
He completed what they had begun, and verified what they had indicated. As the Abbé Bossut has expressed it, Galileo proved that air was a heavy fluid; Torricelli conceived that its weight was the cause of the suspension of the water in a pump and the mercury in a tube. Pascal demonstrated that this was the fact.
We saw the land to the southward of Roebuck Bay on October 8th, and at noon passed four miles from Cape Bossut, which we found to be in latitude 18 degrees 42 minutes South and longitude 121 degrees 45 minutes East.* On the south side opened a bay two miles deep, with a small high-water inlet at its head.
It became a current idea among the Encyclopedists that the accident at Neuilly had affected Pascal’s brain. In the following year, 1779, appeared the elaborate and well-known edition of Pascal’s works by the Abbé Bossut, accompanied by an admirable “Discours sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Pascal.” In this edition the remains are found for the first time in some degree of completeness.
But what are promises, marriage vows, or even bonds written in blood? Henri not long after became unfaithful to the confiding Anne by eloping with a fair widow, the Countess de Bossut, whom he carried off to Brussels and ultimately married.
The Duke de Guise, after playing a conspicuous part in the first dissensions of the Regency, and after having killed Coligny, had married at Brussels the widow of the Count de Bossut, with whom he became quickly disgusted, and whose fortune he squandered. A violent passion next possessed him for the charming and witty Mademoiselle de Pons, maid of honour to the Queen.
It is remarkable, therefore, that neither of them says anything of the well-known incident, emphasised by Bossut as the mainly exciting cause of his great change:—
"The Court meanwhile had granted the application for Mme. de Nucingen's separation as to her estate, and the question became still more complicated. The newspapers announced the return of M. le Baron de Nucingen from a journey to Belgium; he had been arranging, it was said, with a well-known Belgian firm to resume the working of some coal-pits in the Bois de Bossut.
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