PAGAN (Blaise François Comte de)

, an eminent French mathematician and engineer, was born at Avignon in Provence, 1604; and took to the profession of a soldier at 14 years of age. In 1620 he was employed at the siege of Caen, in the battle of Pont de Cé, and the reduction of the Navareins, and the rest of Béarn; where he signalized himself, and acquired a reputation far above his years. He was present, in 1621, at the siege of St. John d'Angeli, as also that of Clarac and Montauban, where he lost an eye by a musket-shot. After this time, there happened neither siege, battle, nor any other occasion, in which he did not signalize himself by some effort of courage and conduct. At the passage of the Alps, and the barricade of Suza, he put himself at the head of the Forlorn Hope, composed of the bravest youths among the guards; and undertook to arrive the first at the attack, by a private way which was extremely dangerous; when, having gained the top of a very steep mountain, he cried out to his followers, “There lies the way to glory!” Upon which, sliding along this mountain, they came first to the attack; when immediately commencing a furious onset, and the army coming to their assistance, they forced the barricades. When the king laid siege to Nancy in 1633, Pagan attended him, in drawing the lines and forts of circumvallation.—In 1642 he was sent to the service in Portugal, as fieldmarshal; and the same year he unfortunately lost the sight of his other eye by a distemper, and thus became totally blind.

But though he was thus prevented from serving his country with his conduct and courage in the field, he resumed the vigorous study of fortification and the mathematics; and in 1645 he gave the public a treatise on the former subject, which was esteemed the best extant.—In 1651 he published his Geometrical Theorems, which shewed an extensive and critical knowledge of his subject.—In 1655 he printed a Paraphrase of the Account of the River of Amazons, by father de Rennes; and, though blind, it is said he drew the chart of the river and the adjacent parts of the country, as in that work.—In 1657 he published The Theory of the Planets, cleared from that multiplicity of eccentric cycles and epicycles, which the astronomers had invented to explain their motions. This work distinguished him among astronomers as much as that of Fortification had among engineers. And in 1658 he printed his Astronomical Tables, which are plain and succinct.

Few great men are without some foible: Pagan's was that of a prejudice in favour of judicial astrology; and though he is more reserved than most others on that head, yet we cannot place what he did on that subject among those productions which do honour to his understanding. He was beloved and respected by all persons illustrious for rank as well as science; and his house was the rendezvous of all the polite and learned both in city and court.—He died at Paris, universally regretted, Nov. 18, 1665.

Pagan had an universal genius; and, having turned his attention chiefly to the art of war, and particularly to the branch of Fortisication, he made extraordinary progress and improvements in it. He understood mathematics not only better than is usual for a gentleman whose view is to push his fortune in the army, but even to a degree of perfection superior to that of the ordinary masters who teach that science. He had so particular a genius for this kind of learning, that he acquired it more readily by meditation than by reading authors upon it; and accordingly he spent less time in such books than he did in those of history and geography. He had also made morality and politics his particular study; so that he may be said to have drawn his own character in his Homme Heroïque, and to have been one of the completest gentlemen of his time.— Having never married, t<*>at branch of his family, which removed from Naples to France in 1552, became extinct in his person.