Rohmer takes Pascal's Pensées for his text. According to Pascal we meet our sense of the void with nausea, ennui, anxiety: "All our unhappiness stems from the fact that we are incapable of sitting quietly by ourselves in a room." (pp. 132-33)

[In Chloe in the Afternoon, Chloe is, for Frédéric] the inauthentic diversion from mortality and from eternity, as represented by his marriage and embodied by his children. For Frédéric, like many, fears the happiness of fulfillment; he tells us that he dreams madly of a life made of "first loves", that is to say—though he doesn't realize this—a life without death. In a stunning parade of impersonations, which Rohmer makes the most of visually, Chloe sees him in the afternoons, subtly giving him his wish, this safe feeling of constant newness, while his wife works on her graduate thesis. Like a knight in a mediaeval temptation he resists Chloe, yet is in thrall [until he realizes his mistake and returns to his wife.] (p. 133)

It is through the power of the human mind (operative even here, in such a trivial association) that Frédéric has finally managed to dare to replace an "inauthentic diversion" with a "true object of belief and love".

In Claire's Knee the inauthentic diversion would appear to be Claire's knee, an object of belief and love which Pascal would surely term a false one. Jerome,… engaged to be married, becomes obsessed by the knee of a young girl. But the film actually is concerned with the brilliant secret efforts of an entirely different person to cure herself of her fascination with the silly and cruel Jerome, who is her Claire's knee, her false object. Aurora is a gifted Romanian novelist who, cleverly encouraging Jerome to tell her step-by-step of how he cured himself of his obsession by literally touching Claire's knee, figuratively touches Jerome, proves to herself just how silly and cruel he is. This complex intellectual work which Rohmer forces us to follow with our own intellects thus releases her for marriage to a man whom she'd objectively respected deeply but from whom she'd been running.

Strong as these films are, they are not as strong as My Night At Maude's…. [In this film the] time is the present and the visible protagonists are flesh-and-blood, but no less alive for Rohmer is the mind of the great scientist and philosopher [Pascal], whose religious ideology systematically ordains the progress of this remarkably intellectual film. (pp. 133-34)

[Upon analyzing Jean-Louis's and Vidal's philosophical discussion, we] can understand why Jean-Louis would not find Jansenism attractive, and why Vidal might imagine himself a bit of a Jansenist. But if we observe carefully, Vidal's intense talk, brilliant and passionate, may be desperate bombast. And if we look carefully at the face of Jean-Louis, seeing a man who rather likes to indulge himself, we may also simultaneously see a man undergoing some deep process of difficult change, about to emerge in the breadth and light, or at least terrifiedly on the brink of it. (p. 136)

If Jean-Louis is "furious at Pascal's rigidity," it's because he may be about to find himself living it for the rest of his life. If Vidal is fascinated by it, it may be because it's academic for him, only a diversion from his real anguish. (p. 137)

Maude and Jean-Louis are not really in agreement at all [in their attitudes towards people]. Maude's become tired of seeing the same faces so she's looking for new ones. Jean-Louis draws a different conclusion from the same experience. He's learned that there are no "new" people. So, having experienced Pascal's stage of the flesh for what it's worth, he is now embarking perilously, purposefully, on a different endeavor.

Vidal, who is of the order of mind, is playing intellectual games with himself. He fancies he is suffering terribly over Maude's relative indifference. In fact, one of the three Misleading Powers as distinguished by Pascal, that of the Imagination, is hard at work in him (the other two being custom and self-love). As Pascal says, "Men often mistake their imaginations for their hearts." Vidal, after all, is not truly in bondage to Maude. (pp. 137-38)

Once it is established that Jean-Louis is a serious Catholic, yet seems neither stupid nor ugly, the game begins. That of setting out to prove he is not a serious man. Pascal is very clear on this psychological point—that as much as we fear the void, we tend to fear truth. Not only do we fear it, we meet it with underlying hatred. Jean-Louis has in effect said he believes there is meaning to life. The context of this meaning is, for him, the silly Catholic Church, but if he himself seemed really silly to them, they would dismiss him, whereupon their own emptiness would not seem so empty. After all, they would then tell themselves, what is there but emptiness? (p. 138)

[To test Jean-Louis, Vidal leaves him alone with Maude.] Now, like an archetypal hero, Jean-Louis will be put to the test. According to Jansen, after the Fall, man was thrown into a conflict between two "delectations"—one of worldly desires, and one of celestial enjoyment. Unless released by liberating Grace, man is in bondage to the more powerful appeal of worldly desire. (p. 139)

[One feels it was Jean-Louis's] night at damned Maude's which made it possible for him to pick up the lost trail to Françoise and his eternity. It was from Maude that he learned to recognize the claims of the finite, to accept human limitation along with perfect abstraction, and to pull these together. One feels that he has more or less come to grips with the demon of spiritual pride. Yet who is damned, and who is saved? According to Pascal, God does not tell. (p. 141)

Whom has Jean-Louis married? We do not know for certain after all. Jean-Louis has made his wager. Rohmer has left everything to the hidden God.

Rohmer is in rebellion against what is typified by Robbe-Grillet's statement that we live in a world of non-signification. In making a film that comes down on the side of a belief, he goes against a tiresomely persistent fashion, one which harks back to the one-dimensional polemics of Voltaire. Rohmer went back further, back past the eighteenth century, to find a believing type with whom a man of his ability and especially of his temperament might imaginatively identify. (pp. 141-42)

Though he is of course psychologically sophisticated in the modern sense, [Rohmer] has no respect for the passive sophistication common in our art, wherein much is sourly understood and little really happens. He is as purposeful as Jean-Louis; his tough-minded elegant films distinguish serious spiritual life from the multifarious mutations of superstition and sentimentality, inverted and otherwise, which substitute for it in filling the void.

If Rohmer's art does not wither in all this welter of ideas and ideology, it is because his feeling for the texture, the actual stuff of people is very strong. His highly organized fictions have real people in them. Of his characters he says, "I consider them to be free." (p. 142)