The king and the nation are in harmony.
Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in which Louis XIV.

began to govern.

Born at Clermont, in Auvergne, educated at his father's and by his father, though it was not thought desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at her brother, said to M.Pascal, the two children's father, who had come to thank him for a favor, "Take care of them; I mean to make something great of them." This was the native and powerful instinct of genius divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without having done anything for the children who had impressed him beyond giving their father a share in the superintendence of Rouen; he thus put them in the way of the great Corneille, who was affectionately kind to Jacqueline, but took no particular notice of Blaise Pascal.

The latter was seventeen; he had already written his _Traite des Coniques_ (Treatise on Conics) and begun to occupy himself with "his arithmetical machine," as his sister, Madame Perier calls it.

At twenty-three he had ceased to apply his mind to human sciences; "when he afterwards discovered the roulette (cycloid), it was without thinking," says Madame Perier, "and to distract his attention from a severe tooth-ache he had." He was not twenty-four when anxiety for his salvation and for the glory of God had taken complete possession of his soul.