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Blaise Pascal, mathematician, theologian, and one of the greatest writers of French prose, was born on June 19, 1623, at Clermont-Ferrand, and died on August 19, 1662. His mother died in his fourth year, and the father, an eminent lawyer, took the boy with his two sisters to Paris. Pascal showed the most astonishing mathematical genius; he produced at the age of seventeen a profound work on conic sections, and devoted the following years to physical researches and to investigations in the higher mathematics. In 1654, Pascal, having experienced a remarkable vision, which he recorded on a parchment known as his "amulet," renounced the world and entered on the ascetic life, in close relations with the Jansenist community. Hence, in the interests of Arnauld, the Jansenist leader, Pascal issued the famous "Letters Written to a Provincial" ("Lettres Écrites par Louis de Montalte
In reply to this overwhelming argument of the Jesuit, the sire of Montalte would have sounded the tocsin, and would have shouted that society was in peril, that the Jesuits were sapping its very foundations. We rob, 14. By commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his legitimate salary. We rob, 15. By making profit on our product, by accepting sinecures, and by exacting exorbitant wages.
All the while Pascal was busy in the room below; and, “behind the closed curtains of the bed by the side of which they were talking, a score of fresh impressions of the seventh Letter were laid out to dry.” Pascal rejoiced in his incognito. It was not till the controversy had somewhat advanced that he assumed the pseudonym Louis de Montalte.
In this way Bayard and Du Gueselin became great captains, from having been the most ill-tempered and most intractable children that ever existed; in the same way, too, the swineherd, whom nature had made the herdsman of Montalte, and whose genius had converted him into Sexte-Quinte, became a great pope, because he had persisted in performing his duties as a swineherd in an indifferent manner.
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