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interest and morality.” Some of the priests were intelligent and sophisticated, others stupid and credulous; some evidently pious, others sceptical to the point of blasphemy. I remember the shock around the refectory table when the subversive Père Marais started baiting the Druidical Père Calvard about which of their home villages got a better quality of Holy Ghost coming down at Pentecost. It was also here that I saw my first dead body: that of Père Roussel, a young teaching priest. His corpse was laid out in an anteroom by the school’s front entrance; boys and staff were encouraged to visit him. I did no more than gaze through the glass of the double doors, telling myself that this was tact; whereas in all probability it was only fear.
    The priests treated me in a kindly way, a little teasing, a little incomprehending. “Ah,” they would say, stopping me in the corridor, touching my arm and offering a shy smile, “ La perfide Albion. ” Among their number was a certain Père Hubert de Goësbriand, a dim if good-hearted fellow who might have acquired his grand, aristocratic Breton name in a raffle, so little did it fit him. He was in his early fifties, plump, slow, hairless, and deaf. His main pleasure in life was to play practical jokes at mealtimes on the timid school secretary, M. Lhomer: surreptitiously stuffing cutlery into his pocket, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, tickling his neck, shoving the mustard pot unexpectedly under his nose. The school secretary displayed a truly Christian endurance to these tedious daily provocations. At first, Père de Goësbriand used to poke me in the ribs or pull my hair every time he passed me, until I cheerfully called him a bastard and he stopped. During the war he had been wounded in the left buttock (“Running away, Hubert!” “No, we were surrounded”), so travelled cheap-rate and had a subscription to a magazine for Anciens Combattants. The other priests treated him with head-shaking indulgence. “ Pauvre Hubert ” was the most common remark heard at mealtimes, whether as a muttered aside or shouted directly into his face.
    De Goësbriand had just celebrated twenty-five years as a priest, and took his faith very straightforwardly. He was shocked when, listening in on my conversation with Père Marais, he discovered that I hadn’t been baptised. Pauvre Hubert became immediately concerned on my behalf, and spelled out to me the dire theological consequences: that without baptism I had no chance of getting to Heaven. Perhaps because of my outcast status, he would sometimes admit to me the frustrations and restrictions of the priestly life. One day, he cautiously confided, “You don’t think I’d go through all this unless there was Heaven at the end of it, do you?”
    At the time, I was half impressed by such practical thinking, half appalled at a life wasted in vain hope. But Père de Goësbriand’s calculation had a distinguished history, and I might have recognized it as a workaday version of Pascal’s famous wager. The Pascalian bet sounds simple enough. If you believe, and God turns out to exist, you win. If you believe, and God turns out not to exist, you lose, but not half as badly as you would if you chose not to believe, only to find out after death that God does exist. It is, perhaps, not so much an argument as a piece of self-interested position-taking worthy of the French diplomatic corps; though the primary wager, on God’s existence, does depend on a second and simultaneous wager, on God’s nature. What if God is not as imagined? What, for instance, if He disapproves of gamblers, especially those whose purported belief in Him is dependent on some acorn-beneath-the-cup mentality? And who decides who wins? Not us: God might prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer.
    The Pascalian bet echoes down the centuries, always finding takers. Here is an extreme, action-man version. In June 2006, at the Kiev zoo, a man lowered himself by