I understand the relic-mania of the Middle Ages, for I like relics myself. Not that I collect them – I don’t really have that collecting vibe in my life. I’m a great thrower-outer, too great in fact. I have regretted certain trips to the dumpster. However, I do like the idea of seeing a great man or woman’s tomb, or seeing their handwriting, or the chair they sat in. I like to follow the footsteps of some figure from history, donning my psychogeographical mook’s outfit – or more simply, taking pictures with my cell phone – as I find their address and try to imagine, through archives of newspapers, what they saw on their street. I like having a destination. I especially like this in Paris, which is an infinite universe of destinations. The great metropolises contain their chronographic essence in ways that tickle the sensitives among us, the ones for whom the past is an ESP ambush. Who see and dicker with the ghosts.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Pascal. I have not really read Pascal in decades; he never became my life companion, like Montaigne. But Pascal was so obviously that rare thing, the mooncalf genius, the boy who at 6 or 7 went through Euclid and did the proofs himself, that he retains a very distinct freak sparkle for me.
One day this spring I was walking down Rue des Minimes and thought, this is where Pascal and Descartes met. They met and talked for almost three days at the Couvent des Minimes, a building that is now a private Catholic school. They argued about the vacuum, with Pascal maintaining that nature does not abhor a vacuum and Descartes holding the classical Aristotelian position, although borrowed to function in Descartes cosmological system of vortices.
In 1647, Pascal made a famous experiment to show that the air has a weight and that it has less weight higher up – which was an essential insight into the constitution of the atmosphere. He used 2 tubes of glass 40 feet high, which he had installed on Puy de Dome, and compared the level of the mercury in them to the level of mercury in tubes put in a place of lesser elevation. From the heights of the mercury Pascal not only deduced the weight of the atmosphere but, as well, a more general notion of a vacuum.
As he put it: “nature has no repugnance for the vacuum, that it makes no effort to avoid it, and admits it without pain or resistance.”
In that phrase one sees something much larger that was happening in the 17th century: the scientific discarding of nature as a recognized actor. Nature, unlike the elements, or fluids, or matter in its forms, has no scientific profile whatsoever. This was the conclusion, latter in the century, of Boyle, and science has gone on this way ever since. Nature is "law bound" - or in other words, corresponds to our formulation of forces. It is never supervenient on its "laws".
So when Descartes met Pascal on 24 September 1647, he was meeting, in a sense, the future. That was too much for Descartes. If nature didn’t abhor a vacuum, what good was it?
2. Psychogeography, and the random walk, perculate up in the interstices of ordinary life under the reign of deathdrive capitalism. I’d call them all adventures in oppositional nostalgia. We can walk about where natural philosophy started turning our cosmovision upside down – and in that walk, number 12, Rue de Minimes, has a privileged place.
3. Pascal’s vita, in the hands of his sister Gilberte and his comrades at Port Royal, became the story of a God infested man. There were scores of god infested men in the 17th century. Few, though, were also mathematicians, natural philosophers, and experimentalists. Pascal was a prototype, in these respects, of what later came to be that familiar enlightenment figure, the philosopher.
Take, for instance, what Pascal made of his experience of Paris. We do know that the year of his death, the year when the ecstatic state described in the Pensees was reaching its peak, he was also involved in a prescient attempt to provide Paris with a bus service.
We don’t have the dense tableaux of Paris from his time that we have in the Paris chroniclers of the 18th century, like Mercier. But we do have certain documents – for instance, the Lettre d’un sicilien a un de ses amis, which was probably written between 1681, when its writer, Giovanni Paolo Marena settled there, and 1693, when he died, which are devoted to describing aspects of the metropolis. Like Pascal, Marena took a carriage now and then. This is how he describes them: “there are an infinite number here, which are all worn out and mudsplattered and seem to be instruments to kill living things. The horses that pull them eat while they work, like those that pulled Seneca [in the Roman Empire] to the country, for they are boney and mangey. The coachmen are so brutal, they have such horrible harsh voices and clack their whips so much to augment the general noise level that it seems like the Furies are in movement to make Paris into a hell. These cruel vehicles are payed for by the hour, a custom surely invented to abbreviate our days in a time when life is short.”
Pascal and the company he formed addressed what they saw as a need, in the pedestrian and coach crowded streets, to create some order that would allow even the poorer inhabitants to travel throughout the city. Pascal’s proposal would have made certain spots on the street carriage stops, which would be regularized according to a schedule and would be parts of a line that would extend in this or that direction through Paris. The price was to be five sols. The company received a license from Parliament and then a brevet from King Louis XIV – with a codicil that effectively eliminated the potential pool of users, as the court forbade the use of such carriages to “soldiers, pages, servants, manual laborers, etc.” Interestingly, this interference by a hierarchical social order that seeks to maintain the privileges of those on top has gone on to infest every scheme to organize public transport to our day: the wealthier and more powerful are not only wary about according mobility to the lower classes, but are also determined to keep their transportation privileges in place even if that means undermining the speed and reliability of public transport.
4. Pascal’s body was a subject of debate in 1792.
Pascal was buried in Eglise Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on August 21, 1662. He’d died just up the street in the home of his sister, Gilberte. Fifty priests assisted at his funeral. The family donated 20 francs for the services.
And thus it lay for more than a century when, during the time of the French Revolution, the Eglise Saint-Etienne’s neighboring church, Saint Genevieve, was nationalized by the state and turned into the Pantheon. The Eglise Sainte Genevieve was recent, actually – it was finished in 1790, and had been inaugurated by Louis XV in 1744, to pay homage to the saint who he had prayed to in an illness. The Pantheon was conceived as a temple to the great men of the Revolution and the enlightened men who had led up to it – Mirabeau, Voltaire, Marat, Rousseau. As the anti-Catholic vogue became more intense in 1793, the Eglise Saint-Etienne was renamed the Temple of filial piety, and the two great men buried there, Pascal and Racine, were marked for removal to the Pantheon. This never happened – it was buried under the politics of the time. It may well have been the last time that Pascal’s resting place was still identifiable.
Now – and by now I mean last week, when I visited the Eglise Saint-Etienne – we have only an approximate idea of where Pascal’s ashes are stored (against his resurrection, of course). It is somewhere under a pillar in the chapel of the Virgin.
The cult of the virgin, in Pascal’s time, certainly had its fervent devotees, but it was in the 19th century that the cult became more fundamental to the Church. In 1854, the Pope issued a bull affirming the immaculate conception of Mary. This had an unusual afteraffect on the Eglise Saint-Etienne. The archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, was in the Church on January 3, 1857 when he was approached by an ex-priest, Jean-Louis Verger, who was a fanatic opponent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Verger took out a knife and stabbed the archbishop to death while screaming: “no goddesses! Death to the goddesses!”
This might be the most patriarchal moment in all of history. Or, maybe not. In any case, I do wonder what the spirit of Pascal made of it all. Pascal did have strong Jansenist sympathies. But he was no prisoner of that creed.
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