f 1620, printed
with this chapter.

Even if the language and ideas of Corneille's plays do not touch a
sympathetic chord in these days when the musketeers of Dumas and the
bravery of Cyrano de Bergerac hold the stage on both sides of the
Channel, it is impossible to refuse to Corneille a very high position
in any estimate of French dramatic literature. With that estimate I am
not here concerned, but in sketching the history of his birthplace, I
may be permitted to suggest some of the influences which may be
traced from it upon his work. And in addition to those already
mentioned, I would especially refer to an occurrence some time
previously, which left its undoubted marks upon the writing of
Corneille, and may also serve to introduce you to yet another
interesting figure in the tale of Rouen. For when he was only
thirty-three, when he had won fame with the "Cid," and had followed up
his success by "Horace" and by "Cinna," Corneille had the advantage of
meeting a family of particular distinction.

In 1639 the father of Blaise Pascal was sent down to Rouen as an
"Intendant du Roi." Though but sixteen, the youth had already
attracted the notice of the mathematical world by his treatise on
conic sections. Even when only twelve the precocious boy had worked
out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid
unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a
workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous
experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people,
including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous
letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until
1656, after he had returned to Paris, yet the religious influence of
the family must have been a strong one upon all their intimate
friends, and it is hardly too much to suggest that under this
influence Corneille wrote "Polyeucte" and "Theodore," even if it be
too great an extension of the idea to suggest that Racine's "Esther"
and "Athalie," even Voltaire's "Zaire," were also due to the same
impressions.

It is pleasant to imagine that cultured circle, conversing over the
troubles of the time or arguing on literary and scientific subjects.
There were two girls in the Pascal family, the pretty Gilberte, who
very soon married a young councillor of Rouen at twenty-one, and
Jacqueline, five years her junior, who won the prize at the Puy des
Palonods, and had the honour of an ode fr