In Baudelaire's poem, "The Void" he mentions a man by the name of Pascal. Who is Pascal and how is he .......

Question

RELATED TO BAUDELAIRE?

Answer 1

I think the Pascal Baudelaire refers to is Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century Frenchman and Jansenist, whose collection "Thoughts" ("Pensees"), is one of the most agonized and eloquent defences of religious faith. But Pascal knew how to express the sense of human desolation, as in his remark about the heavens, "The silence of those infinite spaces frightens me," to which the title of Baudelaire's poem ("The Void") could well be a reference. Pascal came to religious faith; Baudelaire presumably did not.