to have possessed many attractive qualities. He was devoted to Pascal—could hardly “bear him out of his sight,” as Marguerite Périer says—and Pascal warmly returned his friendship. It seems as if they had lived together a good deal, or at least that Pascal spent the most of his time with the young Duke; and it was in his house and society no doubt that he tasted the joys and perils of that fashionable and luxurious life of which his sister speaks so bitterly.13 It was a life, after all, of thoughtless enjoyment rather than of any deeper folly. Both men were as yet very young—the Duke only twenty-two years of age, and Pascal twenty-eight. After his simple and severe training, and the society of his Jansenist friends, it must have been a change full of excitement, possibly of moral danger, to the once enthusiastic student; for the society of the time was charged with the elements both of sceptical and moral indifference. It has been even said that “no society was ever more grandly dissolute” than that of the Fronde, “when women like La Barette14 page 66and La Couronne took the lead in the least discreet pleasures.”
Among the men whom Pascal evidently met at the hotel of the Duc de Roannez, and with whom he formed something of a friendship, was the well-known Chevalier de Méré, whom we know best as a tutor of Madame de Maintenon, and whose graceful but flippant letters still survive as a picture of the time. He was a gambler and libertine, yet with some tincture of science and professed interest in its progress. In his correspondence there is a letter to Pascal, in which he makes free in a somewhat ridiculous manner with the young geometrician already so distinguished. Other names still less reputable—those of Miton and Desbarreaux, for example—have been associated with Pascal during this period. Miton was undoubtedly an intimate ally of De Méré, and amidst all his dissoluteness, made pretensions to scientific knowledge and attainments as a writer. Desbarreaux was a companion of both, but of a still lower grade—a man of open profligacy, and a despiser of the rites of the Church. Along with Miton and other boon companions, he is spoken of as betaking himself to St Cloud for carnival during the Holy