The Night Fire Broke Through

On the evening of November 23, 1654, Blaise Pascal sat alone in his room in Paris. He was already famous across Europe — a mathematical prodigy, an inventor, a darling of the French intellectual elite. But that night, from roughly half past ten until just after midnight, something shattered his careful, brilliant world. He could only call it "FIRE." Pascal seized a scrap of parchment and wrote feverishly: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars.…