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Pascal’s health, we have seen, was very delicate. His labours to perfect his arithmetical machine had seriously impaired it. The attack of partial paralysis, described by his niece, seems to have taken place in the early summer of 1647. As soon as he was able, he removed to Paris, where we find him settled with his younger sister in September of the same year.
It may be, also, that the father sought the means of withdrawing Jacqueline from the neighbourhood of Port Royal, and from the equally exciting associations to her connected with that neighbourhood. Of Pascal’s life at this time in Auvergne we know nothing, or next to nothing.
Fortunately, the first strokes of their feet broke the traces which attached them to the pole, and the carriage was stayed on the brink of the precipice. The effect of such a shock on one of Pascal’s feeble health may be imagined.
Pascal’s genius was in no degree historical, and but slightly critical—not to mention that the very idea of historical criticism had not emerged in his time, nor long afterwards.
Pascal’s labours on the cycloid may be said to bring to a close his scientific career. There is still one invention, however, of a very practical kind, associated with the very last months of his life. Amongst the letters of Madame Périer, there is one of date March 24, 1662, addressed to M. Arnauld de Pompone —a nephew of the great Arnauld—in which she gives a lively description of the success of an experiment “dans l’affaire des carrosses.” The affair was nothing less than the trial on certain routes in Paris of what is now known as an “omnibus;” and the idea of such conveyances for the public—“carrosses
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.
The principle observed by M. Faugère is strongly defended in his preface. So far, this principle has been adhered to by subsequent editors. There has been no further tampering with Pascal’s words, but more or less latitude has been taken in publishing all the manuscript details, and especially in the arrangement of the several fragments.
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.
He appears to have been greatly fascinated by Pascal’s peculiar powers; but the men were of too marked individuality of character, and too divergent in intellectual sympathy and personal aspiration, to appreciate each other fully. Pascal’s next achievement was the invention of an arithmetical machine, chiefly prompted by a desire to assist his father in his official duties at Rouen.
The father also returned to Paris in May 1648. The Provincial Parliament, with regained authority, had exacted the recall of the Intendants appointed by the Court. Étienne Pascal’s services were remunerated by the dignity of a Counsellor of State, and he was set at liberty to rejoin his children.
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