The playwright's taste for imagined conversations between historical figures was not confined to the French Revolution. On October 22, 1985, at the Petit Odéon in Paris, he had L’Entretien de monsieur Descartes avec monsieur Pascal le Jeune staged, with Henri Virlojeux as Descartes and Daniel Mesguich as Pascal. Drawing on the real conversation the two philosophers are said to have had on September 24, 1647—a meeting from which no details appear to have emerged—the author spins a fairly lengthy imaginary dialogue between them.
The author delights in imagining the two scholars attempting to devise a "theory of everything" that anticipates nothing less than general relativity:
"Descartes: You know that the universe is a function of measurement and number; space and time are linked. Would you be willing to work from that assumption?
Pascal: And what would that lead me to? An equation?
Descartes: An equation that would illuminate all the laws of the universe."
