Pascal’s masterpiece I got a couple of days ago has a portrait of his on the front cover. A trace of a smile on his face is most charming. I quite like the painting. As I like to tease my beloved, Pascal reminds me of her, if only slightly. And she agrees. Triangular face, high forehead, and long, hooked nose are not far apart. But she insists that her eyes are very different than his, which is certainly the case. As is written on the back cover, the portrait was painted by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674). The year it was painted is missing, though. I checked quite a number of pages on the World Wide Web, but I got none the wiser. All that can be found under the portrait on so many websites is that it is of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Judging by other portraits of his, Pascal was in his early thirties at the time. The hair on his forehead is thinning, but it is still there. He died when he was thirty-nine, by which time he was much balder. At any rate, the likeness between the French thinker and my beloved started me thinking. It would not surprise me that likeness went together with other deep emotions. There is likely to be some likeness between people one likes, or even loves, and vice versa.

Addendum (April 14, 2014)

When I told my beloved about this piece, she repeated that her eyes had nothing to do with Pascal’s. This had nothing to do with her eyes being greenish gray and his brown, I knew. But then she reflected for a few seconds. “Actually,” she frowned at last, “his eyes remind me of your mother’s!” And then she mentioned my mother’s portrait by Vilko Šeferov, which was painted in 1942. “Very similar,” she concluded. Although my mother’s eyes were purplish blue, I kind of agreed. The smile on de Champaigne’s painting perhaps adds to the likeness, too. One way or another, my beloved’s comments only added support to my hypothesis about the likeness of people one liked. Not to mention the likeness between my mother and my beloved…