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that way before. This was quite an achievement, one that entranced the young Pascal, who had come to believe that geometry was the path to understanding the greatest truths of all. A short time later, after his family had moved to Rouen, and while the city was on fire with revolution, Pascal would make his own contribution to this new geometry. What better way to retreat from the violence of the outside world than into your own mind?

[1585–1642]
Un Bâtarad Magnifique
    Deceit is the knowledge of kings.
    Qu’on me donne six lignes de la main du plus honnête homme,
    j’y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
    [Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I would find some reason there to have him hanged.]
    Pour tromper un rival l’artifice est permis; on peut tout employer
    contres ses ennemis.
    [Deception is permissible to mislead a rival; use every means against an enemy.]
    —A RMAND J EAN DU P LESSIS , C ARDINAL R ICHELIEU
    O ne must never forget that Étienne Pascal had taken his children to the Paris of Cardinal Richelieu—a fashionable place, a wealthy place, a place of power, where the Bastille glowered over all things. The Pascals had met the cardinal on several occasions, for they were themselves a fashionable family; they changed residences five times during their stay in Paris, always from one smart district to another. Their first house was on the rue de la Tissanderie, in a district where Henri IV had built two new palaces with their elaborate lawns and avenues. After a few years, Étienne brought his family across the river Seine to the Alberg-Charmaine, across from the great hôtel of the king’s cousin, the princede Condé, the man whose son would eventually lead a revolt against the regency of Louis XIV during the Fronde of the Princes, a coup d’état by the old nobility, misnamed really, for the term fronde refers to a popular uprising.
    The cardinal was at the height of his power in those years. An odd man, diminutive, oppressed by his own conscience, sickly, he was a conservative churchman who nevertheless considered his first duty to be to his king and not to his church. He had set himself the task of welding that collection of feudal principalities that was France into one of the great nations of Europe, under an all-powerful absolute monarch, a monarch whom the cardinal controlled. Order was his abiding spiritual principle, and though he often used the rack as a finger of government, he used it no more than did any other ruler at the time.
    Richelieu worked incessantly; he was never far from his desk, a fact that showed his middle-class roots. Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, the cardinal, was a breathing contradiction. He had an iron will but a weak constitution, frail and sickly, pale under his ecclesiastical robes. Though perpetually ill or suffering from the fear of illness, he terrorized the entire court.
    In spite of his frailty, once he was dressed in his cardinal’s robes, his stern, unbending appearance forced people into submission. And he even exercised this power though Louis XIII, his great protector and benefactor, did not like him very much. Everyone knew this. As he was with so many people, Louis was outwardly courteous but cool. But every time he tried to oppose the cardinal, Richelieu appeared before him and presented his case, step-by-step. Richelieu was so rigorous, so rational in his argument, that Louis could not help but agree.
    Various cabals gathered to rid the court of the little cardinal but failed. The man behind most of them was the king’s brother Gaston d’Orléans, a wastrel addicted to gambling, good times, and irresponsibility, though he was his mother’s favorite son. Time after time, in a bid for the throne he tried to unseat the cardinal in order to make his brother the king, who was chronically ill from tuberculosis, more vulnerable, for everyone knew that it was the cardinal who kept the king secure on his throne.But Gaston was not the