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Carcavi was an old friend of Pascal’s father as well as of himself; and being a lawyer as well as a mathematician, the arrangement of the affair seems to have been intrusted to him.
In Paris the elder Pascal became a centre of men of congenial intellectual tastes with himself, and his house a sort of rendezvous for the mathematicians and the physicists of the time. Among them were Descartes, Gassendi, Mersenne, Roberval, Carcavi, and Le Pailleur; and from the frequent reunion of these men is said to have sprung the Academy of Sciences founded in 1666.
Descartes, however, in his retirement at Stockholm, plainly cherished the impression that Roberval’s intimacy with Pascal prevented the latter from doing full justice to his scientific position and suggestions; and having as yet heard nothing, in June 1649, of the special results of Pascal’s experiments on the Puy de Dôme in the preceding year, he wrote to his friend Carcavi to let him know about these.
That letter was immediately communicated to Pascal by Carcavi, who was his intimate associate no less than Roberval. But it seems to have elicited no reply. It would ill become any admirer of Pascal to detract from the glory of Descartes. But it must be held no less firmly, that in the personal question raised by Descartes’s letter, the balance of evidence is all in favour of Pascal.
But Wallis, of Oxford, and Lallouère, a Jesuit of Toulouse, were the only two competitors who treated all the problems proposed. It was held that they had not completely succeeded in solving them; and Dettonville published his own solution in an elaborate letter addressed to M. Carcavi, and in a treatise on the subject.
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