It is a very different picture we get of the once brilliant Jacqueline. If her father had cherished any hopes of restoring her again to the world, he was destined to disappointment. With her conversion at Rouen, and her association with M. Singlin and Port Royal, her old life seems entirely to have died out. Even her old pleasure in making verses was renounced at the bidding of Port Royal. She was told that it was a talent of which God would not take any accountit was necessary to bury it, and this although she only exerted it now in the service of religion and the Church. While Madame Périer has given us no details, and, indeed, no facts whatever, of her brothers life at this time, she has given us a minute picture of Jacquelines austerities. In everything save in name she had already become a nun. She wore a dress approaching as nearly as possible to a religious habit; she fasted and kept vigils; she spent her whole time either in the house alone, absorbed in religious ecstasy, or abroad in works of active charity; in every way she made it plainly to be known that it was only her fathers wish that kept her in the world at all.

After a stay in Auvergne of seventeen months, the family returned to Paris in November 1650. There we still read of the pious labours and devotion of Jacquelinelittle or nothing of her brother. How far the leisure of country life may have weaned him from his old pursuits, how far the world had begun to exercise a new attraction over him, we learn nothing. It is evident from his letter to M. Périer on his fathers death, nearly a year after this, that he still cherished strongly his religious convictions. Yet there is nothing in all this time to tell of his religious profession; and Madame Périer plainly does not care to dwell upon it, but hurries forward to the later and more edifying period of his career. The impression is left upon us that worldly distractions had already begun to influence his life.

These distractions rapidly acquired force after the fathers death in the autumn of 1651 (September). The devoted Jacqueline attended his last moments with assiduous tenderness; but no sooner was the event over than she renewed her determination to enter Port Royal. The issue cannot be so well described as in Madame Périers words:

Being ill, she says, I was unable to leave Paris till the end of November. In this interval, my brother, who was greatly afflicted, and had received much consolation from my sister, imagined that her affection would make her remain with him at least a year. . . . He spoke to her on the subject, but in such a manner as to convey the impression that she would not so far contradict him for fear of redoubling his grief. This led her to dissemble her intention till our arrival. Then she told me that her resolution was fixed to adopt a religious life as soon as our respective shares [of the fathers property] were arranged. She would, however, spare my brother by leading him to suppose she only meditated a retreat! With this view, she disposed of everything in my presence; our shares were settled on the last day of December; and she fixed upon the 4th of January for carrying out her decision. On the evening before, she begged me to say something to my brother, that he might not be taken by surprise. I did so with all the precaution I could; but although I hinted that it was only a retreat, with the view of knowing something of the sort of life, he did not fail to be deeply touched. He withdrew very sad to his chamber without seeing my sister, who was then in a small cabinet where she was accustomed to retire for prayer. She did not come out till my brother had left, as she feared his look would go to her heart. I told her for him what words of tenderness he had spoken; and after that we both retired. Though I consented with all my heart to what my sister was doing, because I thought it was for her the highest good, the greatness of her resolution astonished and occupied my mind so that I could not sleep all night. At seven oclock, when I saw that my sister was not up, I concluded that she was no longer sleeping, and feared that she might be ill. Accordingly, I went to her bed, where I found her still fast asleep. The noise I made awoke her; she asked me what oclock it was. I told her; and having inquired how she was, and if she had slept well, she said she was very well, and that she had slept excellently. So she rose, dressed, and went away, doing this, as everything else, with a tranquillity and equanimity inconceivable. We said no adieu for fear of breaking down. I only turned aside when I saw her ready to go. In this manner she quitted the world on the 4th January 1652, being then exactly twenty-six years and three months old. {58}

Our readers will not grudge this extract, so touching in its simplicity. What a living picture does it give us of this remarkable family!the elder sisters wakeful anxietythe youngers calm determinationthe brothers half-suppressed yet deeply-moved tendernessthe proud and sensitive reserve of all the three. Jacquelines firmness was heroic, but her heart was full of concern. She had escaped the half-authoritative, half-supplicating entreaties of her brother, and found refuge for her long-cherished solicitudes of heart in the bosom of Port Royal, and the strong counsels both of the Mère Angélique and the Mère Agnès. But after a while this did not satisfy her. When the time came to make her profession, she was anxious to do so, not merely with her own consent, but with her brothers. And accordingly, she addressed him in the following March a remarkable letter, in which, while reminding him that she was her own mistress to do as she wished in a matter so seriously affecting her life, she yet prayed him to give her a kindly greeting in her solemn act, and to come to the ceremony of her taking the vows. The letter breathes at once the affection of a sister and the passion of a saint,the proud firmness so characteristic of the family, with a charming sweetness, blending entreaty with command. She signs herself already Sister of Sainte Euphémie, the name which she adopted as an inmate of Port Royal, addressing her brother for the most part with the grave formal you, but now and then relapsing into the old familiar thou, as if she were still in the family home.

Do not take that away, she says, {59} which you cannot give. If it is true that the world has preserved some impressions of the friendship which it showed for me when I was with it, please God this should not turn me from quitting it, nor you from consenting to my doing so. This ought rather to be my glory, and your joy, and that of all my true friends, as showing the strength of my God, and that it is not the world which quits me, but I that quit the world, and that the effort which it makes to retain me is to be regarded as only a visible punishment of the complacency with which I formerly regarded it, and which it now pleases God to give me power to resist. . . . Do not hinder those who do well; and do well yourself; or if you have not the strength to follow me, at least do not hold me back. Do not render me ungrateful to God for the grace which He has given to one whom you love. . . . I wait this proof of your brotherly friendship, and pray you to come to my divine betrothal, which will take place, God helping, on Trinity Sunday. I wrote also to my faithful one [her sister Gilberte]. I beg you to console her, if there is need, and encourage her. It is only for the sake of form that I ask you to be present at the ceremony; for I do not believe you have any thought of failing me. Be assured that I must renounce you if you do.

The result of this moving appeal was to bring her brother to her side.

He came the following day very much put out, she says, with a bad headache, the result of my letter, yet also very much softened, for instead of the two years which he had formerly insisted on, he wished me merely to wait till All Saints Day. But seeing me firm not to delay, yet willing to give him some further time to think over the matter, he melted entirely, and expressed pity for the trouble which had made me delay so long a result which I had so long and so ardently desired. He did not return at the appointed time; but M. dAndilly, at my request, had the goodness to send for him on Saturday, and undertook the matter with so much warmth, and yet skill, that he consented to everything we wished. {60}

Jacqueline gained her point so far; but painful difficulties still remained, the story of which she herself has also told us. {61} While eager to be admitted to the full privileges of her vocation, she did not wish to enter Port Royal empty-handed. She thought herself free to endow it with the share of her fathers fortune which had fallen to her, and seems not to have doubted her brothers and sisters concurrence in this act of liberality. But they, on the contrary, were both for a time deeply offended that she should apparently prefer strangers to her own kindred. They took the matter in an entirely secular manner. This greatly grieved her in turn; and, balked at once in her wishes and her sisterly trust, she pictures in the most lively colours the distress she endured. La Mère Agnès consoled her in her disappointment, and sought to carry her thoughts beyond the mere chagrin which so obviously mingled with her higher feeling. Her own somewhat resentful obstinacy gradually yielded to the pure passivity of resignationso strong in its seeming weaknesswhich the sister of Arnauld preached to her. At length she is content to make no further demands upon her brother. He and Madame Périer shall do as they wish; the money would not be blessed unless it came from free hearts, and was given for the love of God. She is willing even to be received gratuitously as a sistera feeling evidently not without its bitterness. Her submission became, as may be guessed, her triumph; a result probably not unforeseen by the deeper experience of La Mère Agnès and M. Singlin.

When her brotherhe who had most interest in the affairat last came to see her, she endeavoured to meet him as the Mother advised. But, with all her effort she could not hide the sadness of her heart.

This, she says, was so unlike my usual manner, that he perceived it at once; and there was no need of an interpreter to explain the cause, for though I put on the best face I could, he easily guessed that it was his own conduct which was the cause of my uneasiness. All the same, he was desirous of making the first complaint; and then I learned that both he and my sister felt themselves much aggrieved by what I had written. He dwelt on this, but could hardly go on, seeing I made no complaint on my side. Otherwise, I could have destroyed by a single word all his reasons!

A true family trait! The result of all was, that Pascal yielded to the tender resignation of his sister what he had refused to her arguments. He was so touched, she says, with confusion, that he resolved to put the whole affair in order, and to undertake himself any risks or charges that it might involve.

But the heads of the House required to be satisfied, no less than Jacqueline. They were not disposed to accept any gift which was not freely and piously given. Accordingly, before the final disposition of the property was made, La Mère Angélique took care that Pascal should understand the matter anew from the Port-Royalist point of view. St Cyran had taught them that they were never to receive anything for the house of God but that which came from God. Even he was not a little surprised, according to the statement of his sister, at all this scrupulousnessthe manner in which we deal with such matters; and the men of business whose presence was necessary on the occasion are represented as astonished beyond measure. They had never seen business done in such a way. At length, however, all was completed. Pascal professed the genuineness of his motives, and only regretted that it was not in his power to do more.

If this narrative mainly concerns Jacqueline Pascal, it serves to throw light upon the character and life of her brother at this time. In the course of her relation, Jacqueline, or her interlocutor La Mère Agnès, makes frequent allusion to Pascals worldly life. When she is vexed that he will not carry out her desires in the matter of the dowry, she is reminded that she had far more reason to be distressed by the faults and infidelities into which he had fallen towards God. {63a} He is represented as being so much engrossed with the vanities and amusements of the world as to prefer his own pleasure and advantage to the good of a religious community or the pious gratification of his sister. It was only by some miracle that it could be otherwise; and there was no reason to expect a miracle of grace in a person like him. {63b} All the means at his command were hardly sufficient to enable him to live in the world like others of his condition, and the associates with whom he was known to be mingling. {63c}

Plainly at this time Pascal was abandoned by Port Royal. He had set himself, as his sister briefly says, on the world. As his niece more particularly indicates, {63d} he had given himself up to the amusements of life. Unable to study, the love of leisure and of fashionable society had gradually gained upon him. At first he was moderate in his worldly enjoyments; but a taste for them insensibly sprang up and carried him far away from his old associations and the pious severities of his former life. After his fathers death this change was more clearly marked. He was master of his own affairs, and he plunged more freely into the pleasures of society, although always, it is distinctly said, without any vice or licentiousness. All this, his niece adds, was very grievous to her aunt Jacqueline, who grieved in spirit at seeing him who had been the means of making her learn the nothingness of the world return to its vanities.

Too much is not to be made of such statements, or the still stronger expressions of Jacqueline herself in her letters regarding her brothers final conversion. When she speaks of wretched attachments binding him to the world, and of his being still haunted by the smell of the mud which he had embraced with such empressement, {64} we are to remember that she speaks not only out of the severity of her own youthful judgment, (and what judgment is so severe at times as that of youth?) but out of the mouth of Port Royal. She condemns a world which was no doubt bad enough, but of which she knew nothing. Her allusions to the grandeur of her brothers life and similar indications have led Sainte-Beuve and others to speak of his extravagance at this time. He is supposed not only to have lived in the world, but to have lived in a style above his meansthe companion of men of higher social position than himself, profuse in their habits and expenditure. That he lived in the midst of society of this kind can hardly be doubted. It is more doubtful how far his own habits had become those of an extravagant man of the world. His chief companion was one who remained bound to him through all the rest of his life, Pascals influence having drawn him also from the world when the time of his own change came. This was the Duc de Roannez, a young man of fewer years than himself, who seems to have possessed many attractive qualities. He was devoted to Pascalcould hardly bear him out of his sight, as Marguerite Périer saysand Pascal warmly returned his friendship. It seems as if they had lived together a good deal, or at least that Pascal spent the most of his time with the young Duke; and it was in his house and society no doubt that he tasted the joys and perils of that fashionable and luxurious life of which his sister speaks so bitterly. {65a} It was a life, after all, of thoughtless enjoyment rather than of any deeper folly. Both men were as yet very youngthe Duke only twenty-two years of age, and Pascal twenty-eight. After his simple and severe training, and the society of his Jansenist friends, it must have been a change full of excitement, possibly of moral danger, to the once enthusiastic student; for the society of the time was charged with the elements both of sceptical and moral indifference. It has been even said that no society was ever more grandly dissolute than that of the Fronde, when women like La Barette {65b} and La Couronne took the lead in the least discreet pleasures.

Among the men whom Pascal evidently met at the hotel of the Duc de Roannez, and with whom he formed something of a friendship, was the well-known Chevalier de Méré, whom we know best as a tutor of Madame de Maintenon, and whose graceful but flippant letters still survive as a picture of the time. He was a gambler and libertine, yet with some tincture of science and professed interest in its progress. In his correspondence there is a letter to Pascal, in which he makes free in a somewhat ridiculous manner with the young geometrician already so distinguished. Other names still less reputablethose of Miton and Desbarreaux, for examplehave been associated with Pascal during this period. Miton was undoubtedly an intimate ally of De Méré, and amidst all his dissoluteness, made pretensions to scientific knowledge and attainments as a writer. Desbarreaux was a companion of both, but of a still lower gradea man of open profligacy, and a despiser of the rites of the Church. Along with Miton and other boon companions, he is spoken of as betaking himself to St Cloud for carnival during the Holy Week. {66} The truth would seem to be that all these men came across Pascals path at this time, and were more or less known to him. His allusions to both Miton and Desbarreaux in the Pensées imply this. There is a certain familiarity of knowledge indicated in the very heartiness with which he assails themspeaking of Miton as hateful, {67a} and of Desbarreaux as having renounced reason and made himself a brute. {67b} But it is against all probability, no less than against all the facts known to us, to suppose that Pascal had more connection with such men than meeting them in the society in which he moved during these years, and becoming well acquainted with the intellectual and moral atmosphere which they breathed. It may be too much to say, with Faugère, that he was then consciously imbibing the experience to be afterwards utilised in his great work, or that it was the principles professed by these men which gave him the first idea of such a work; but we may certainly say that the knowledge of them, as well as all the knowledge he acquired at this time, served to deepen and extend his moral intuitions, and to give a finer point to many of his Thoughts. And no student of Pascal can doubt that if his feet touched for a moment the dirt of this dissolute society, his divine wings remained unsoiled. {67c}

A more interesting point than any, however, still remains in connection with this period of his life. It was now, or soon after, that Pascal must have composed the Discours sur les Passions de lAmour, one of the most exquisite fragments which have come from his pen,remarkable both in itself and in the circumstances of its discovery by M. Cousin about thirty years ago. M. Cousin has himself related these circumstances in minute detail, and with a certain self-elation. {67d} According to M. Faugère, there was no particular difficulty, and therefore no particular merit, in the discovery. The fragment was clearly indexed in a catalogue of the Pascal MSS. in the well-known State library of Paris as follows: Discours sur les Passions de lAmour, par M. Pascal, and again in the body of the volume the fragment was entitled, Discours, etc., on lattribue à M. Pascal. The genuineness of the fragment seems admitted on all hands. In the first line, says Cousin, I felt Pascal, and my conviction of its authorship grew as I proceededhis ardent and lofty manner, half thought, half passion, and that speech so fine and grand, an accent which I would recognise amongst a thousand. {68a} The soul and thought of Pascal, says Faugère, shine everywhere in the pages, steeped in a melancholy at once chaste and ardent. {68b}

The following extracts may give some idea of this remarkable paper. It commences in an abstract, aphoristic manner not uncommon with Pascal:

Man is born to think; he is never a moment without thinking. But pure thought, which, if it could be sustained, would make him happy, fatigues and prostrates him. He could not live a life of mere thought; movement and action are necessary to him. He must be agitated by the passions, whose sources he feels deep and strong in his heart. The passions most characteristic of man, and which embrace most others, are love and ambition. They have no affinity, yet they are often united; together, they tend to weaken if not destroy each other. For however grand the human spirit, it is only capable at once of one great passion. When love and ambition meet, each therefore falls short of what it would otherwise be. Age determines neither the beginning nor the end of these two passions. They are born with the first years, they continue often to the last.

Man finds no full scope for love in himself, yet he loves. It is necessary, therefore, for him to seek an object of love elsewhere. This he can only find in beauty. But as he himself is the most beautiful creature that God has made, he must find in himself the type of that beauty which he seeks elsewhere. This defines and embodies itself in the difference of sex. A woman is the highest form of beauty. Endowed with mind, she is its living and marvellous personation. If a beautiful woman wishes to please, she will always succeed. The fascinations of beauty in such a case never fail to captivate, whatever man may do to resist them. There is a spot in every heart which they reach.

Love is of no age; it is always being born. The poets tell us so, and hence we represent it as a child. It creates intelligence, and feeds upon intelligence. . . . We exhaust our power of gratifying it every day, and yet every day it is necessary to renew its gratification.

Man in solitude is an incomplete being; he needs companionship for happiness. He seeks this commonly in a like condition with his own, because habits of desire and opportunity in such a case are most readily found by him. But sometimes he fixes his affections on an object far beyond his rank, and the flame burns the more intensely that he is forced to conceal it in his own bosom. When we love one of elevated condition, ambition may at first coexist with affection. But love soon becomes the master. It is a tyrant which suffers no rival; it must reign alone. Every other emotion must subserve and obey its dictates. A high attachment fills the heart more completely than a common and equal one. Small things are carried away in the great capacity of love.

The pleasure of loving, without daring to say anything of ones love, has its pains, but also its sweetnesses. With what transport do we regulate all our actions with the view of pleasing one whom we infinitely value! . . . The fulness of love sometimes languishes, receiving no succour from the beloved object. Then we fall into misery; and hostile passions, lying in wait for the heart, tear it in a thousand pieces. But anon a ray of hopethe very least it may beraises us as high as ever. Sometimes this comes from mere dalliance, but sometimes also from an honest pity. How happy such a moment when it comes!

The first effect of love is to inspire a great respect. We revere whom we really love. This is right, and we know nothing in the world so grand as this. . . . In love we forget fortune, parents, friends, and the reason of this is that we imagine we need nothing else than the object of our love. The heart is full; there is no room for care nor disquietude. Passion is then necessarily in excess; there is a plenitude in it which resists the commencement of reflection. Yet love and reason are not to be opposed, and love has always reason with it, although it implies a precipitation of thought which carries us away without due examination. Otherwise we should be very disagreeable machines. Do not exclude reason from love, therefore; they are truly inseparable. The poets are wrong in representing love as blind. It is necessary to take away his veil, and give him henceforth the joy of sight.

It is not merely the result of custom, but a dictate of nature, that man should make the first advances in love. . . . Great souls require an inundation of passion to disturb and fill them; but when they begin to love, they love supremely. . . . When we are away from the object of our love we resolve to do and say many things, but when we are present we hesitate. The explanation is, that at a distance the reason is undisturbed, but in presence of the beloved object it is strangely moved. In love we fear to hazard lest we lose all. It is necessary to advance, yet who can tell to what point? We tremble always till we reach this point, and yet prudence does not help us to keep it when we have found it. . . . There is nothing so embarrassing as to be in love, and see something in our favour without daring to believe in it. Hope and fear rage within us, and the last too often triumphs.

The question arises, What interpretation are we to put on these chaste yet glowing sentences? It seems hardly possible to believe that they were not penned out of some real experience. Pascal was not the man to busy himself in writing an imaginary essay on such a subject. Nothing can be conceived less like the sketch of a mere moral analyst standing outside the passion he describes. There may be a tendency here and there to over-analysis, and to the balancing of antitheses now on one side and now on the other; but there is the breath of true passion all through the piece, and touching, as with fire, many of its many fine utterances. Who was then, conceivably, the object of Pascals affections? We have it on the authority of his niece that at this time, when he lived so much as the companion of the Duc de Roannez, he contemplated marrying and settling in the world. {71} This, and the indications of the piece itself, have led to the conjecture that he was in love with the sister of his friend. Charlotte Gouffier de Roannez was then about sixteen years of age, endowed with captivating graces of form and manner, animated by a sweet intelligence and by that charm of spiritual sympathy so likely to prove attractive to a man like Pascal. Occupying rooms in the house of his friend, who, we have seen, could not bear him out of his sight, Pascal and Mademoiselle de Roannez were necessarily much in each others society. What so natural as that he should fall in love, and overlooking all disparity of rank, cherish the secret hope of a union with one so gifted and beautiful?or why may not ambition have mingled with his love, as he himself implies, and carried him for a time into a dreamland from which all shadows fell away?

It is impossible to do more than form conjectures in such a matter. To M. Faugère nothing seems more probable. M. Cousin resents the supposition as derogatory to Pascal, and as utterly inconsistent with the usages of the age of Louis XIV. But even were it impossible, according to the usages of the time, that Pascal should have ever married Mademoiselle de Roannez, this is no proof that he may not have fallen in love with her. There is much in this paper that favours the idea, that while Pascal loved deeply he yet never told his love; and the social obstacles, which for a time may have seemed to him surmountable, at last may have shut out all hope from his heart. Many causes might unite to do this, even supposing his love was returned. It is certain that he continued the warm friend, not only of the Duc de Roannez, but of his sister; and in after-years a correspondence was established betwixt them implying the highest degree of mutual esteem and confidence. We have only the letters of Pascal; nothing is known of those of Mademoiselle de Roannez; the rigidity of the Jansenist copyists have given us only extracts even of the former. All trace of earthly passion, if it ever existed, has gone from the pious page in which the Jansenist saint sets forth his exhortations. Yet it argues no common interest, that Pascal should pause in the midst of his conflict with the Jesuits to advise and direct his former companion; and Faugère professes that even before he had read the Discours he could trace a tender solicitudemore than the mere impulse of Christian charitybeneath all the grave severity of his religious phrases.

The fate of Mademoiselle de Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the worldobeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with extraordinary fervourshe was persuaded to marry and become the Duchesse de la Feuillade. But her marriage proved unfortunate. Her children died young; her own health broke down; she herself at length died under an operation, bequeathing a legacy to Port Royal, which had remained entwined with all dearest associations. Whether Pascal and she had loved each other or not, this sacred Home bound their best thoughts together, and serves to recall their highest aspirations.

It falls to us now to describe how Port Royal claimed the heart of Pascal, and called forth the chief activities of his remaining years.



CHAPTER IV. PORT ROYAL AND PASCALS LATER YEARS.

Whatever day-dreams Pascal may have cherished, God called him, as his sister says, to a great perfection. It was not in his nature to be satisfied with either the enchantments or the ambitions of the world. All the while that he mixed in the luxurious society of Paris, and seemed merely one of its thoughtless throng, there were throbs within him of a higher life which could not be stilled. His conscience reproached him continually amidst all his amusements, and left him uneasy even in the most exulting moments of the love that filled his heart. This is no hypothetical picture, but one suggested by himself in conversation with his sister. She tells us from her retreat how her brother came to see her, fascinated by the steadfastness of her faith, in contrast with his own indifference and vacillation. Formerly it was his zeal which had drawn her to higher thoughts. Now it is the attraction of her piety which sways him, and leaves him unhappy amidst all the seductions of the society in which he mingles. God made use of my sister, says Madame Périer, for the great design, as He had formerly made use of my brother, when He desired to withdraw my sister from her engagements in the world.

The severe Jacqueline tells with unfaltering breath the story of her brothers spiritual anxieties. She had ceased herself to have any worldly thoughts.

She led, says Madame Périer, a life so holy, that she edified the whole house: and in this state it was a special pain to her to see one to whom she felt herself indebted, under God, for the grace which she enjoyed, no longer himself in possession of these graces: and as she saw my brother frequently, she spoke to him often, and finally with such force and sweetness, that she persuaded him, as he had at first persuaded her, absolutely to abandon the world.

Writing to her sister on the 25th of January 1655, she says that Pascal came to see her at the end of the previous September.

At this visit he opened himself to me in such a manner as moved my pity, confessing that in the midst of his exciting occupations, and of so many things fitted to make him love the worldto which we had every reason to think him strongly attachedhe was yet forcibly moved to quit all; both by an extreme aversion to its follies and amusements, and by the continual reproach made by his conscience. He felt himself detached from his surroundings in such a manner as he had never felt before, or even approaching to it; yet, otherwise, he was in such abandonment that there was no movement in his heart to God. Though he sought Him with all his power, he felt that it was more his own reason and spirit that moved him towards what he knew to be best, than any movement of the Divine Spirit. If he only had the Divine sentiments he once had, he believed himself, in his present state of detachment, capable of undertaking everything. It must be, therefore, some wretched ties {76} which still held him back, and made him resist the movements of the Divine Spirit. The confession surprised me as much as it gave me joy; and thenceforth I conceived hopes that I had never had, and thought I must communicate with you in order to induce you to pray on his behalf. If I were to relate all the other visits in detail, I should be obliged to write a volume; for since then they have been so frequent and so long, that I was wellnigh engrossed by them. I confined myself to watching his mood without attempting unduly to influence him; and gradually I saw him so growing in grace that I would hardly have known him. I believe you will have the same difficulty, if God continues His work; especially in such wonderful humility, submission, diffidence, self-contempt, and desire to be nothing in the esteem and memory of men. Such he is at present. God alone knows what a day will bring forth.

Finally, after many visits and struggles with himself, especially as to his choice of a spiritual guide, he became an inmate of Port Royal des Granges, under the guidance of M. de Saci. The questions betwixt him and his sister as to his selection of a confessor or director are very curious, revealing, as they do, the quiet self-possessed decision of the one, the scruples of the other, and the proud self-respect of both. As to one of Pascals difficulties, she says, without misgivingI saw clearly that this was only a remnant of independence hidden in the depth of his heart, which armed itself with every weapon to ward off a submission which yet in his state of feeling must be perfect. M. Singlin was willing to assist the sister with his advice, but was reluctant himself, in his weak state of health, to assume full responsibilities towards the brother. Jacqueline herself appeared to him the best director her brother could have for the time; and there is a charming blending of humility and yet assumption in the manner in which she relates this, and speaks of our new convert. But finally there is found in M. de Saci a director with whom he is delighted, for he comes of a good stock (dont it est tout ravi, aussi est-il de bonne race).

Pascal first sought retirement in a residence of his own in the country. It is particularly mentioned amongst the reasons for his withdrawal from Paris, that the Duc de Roannez, who engaged him almost entirely, was about to return there. Unable to find everything to his wish, however, in his own house, he obtained a chamber or little cell among the Solitaries of Port Royal, from which he wrote to his sister with extreme joy that he was lodged and treated like a prince, according to St Bernards judgment of what it was to be a prince. It is still Jacquelines pen which reports all this to Madame Périer. She continues in the same letter:

He joins in every office of the Church from Prime to Compline, without feeling the slightest inconvenience in rising at five oclock in the morning; and as if it was the will of God that he should join fasting to watching, in defiance of all the medical prescriptions which had forbidden him both the one and the other, he found that supper disagreed with him, and was about to give it up. {77}

Such is the story of Pascals final conversion and retirement from the world. Jacquelines details fill in the briefer sketch of Madame Périer, and both tell the story at first hand. None could have known so well as they did all the circumstances. It is remarkable, therefore, that neither of them says anything of the well-known incident, emphasised by Bossut as the mainly exciting cause of his great change:

One day, it is said, in the month of October 1654, when he went, according to his habit, to take his drive to the bridge of Neuilly in a carriage and four, the two leading horses became restive at a part of the road where there was a parapet, and precipitated themselves into the Seine. Fortunately, the first strokes of their feet broke the traces which attached them to the pole, and the carriage was stayed on the brink of the precipice. The effect of such a shock on one of Pascals feeble health may be imagined. He swooned away, and was only restored with difficulty, and his nerves were so shattered that long afterwards, during sleepless nights and during moments of weakness, he seemed to see a precipice at his bedside, over which he was on the point of falling.

This alarming incident, which comes from nearly contemporary tradition, no doubt contributed to Pascals retirement from the world, and no less probably also a strange vision he had at this time, to which we shall afterwards advert. But it is peculiarly interesting to trace the inner history of Pascals great change. Evidently, from what his sister says, his mind had been for some time very ill at ease in the great world in which he lived. How far this was the working of his old religious convictions continually renewing their influence through the conversation of his sister, how far it was mere weariness and disgust with the frivolities of fashionable life, and how far it may have been baffled hope and the disenchantments of a broken dream of love, we cannot clearly tell. All may have moved him, and brought him to that strange state of isolation which she describes from his own account. But plainly the world-weariness preceded the fresh dawn of divine strength in his heart; and there is a tone of hopelessness in speaking of his detachment from all the things surrounding him, which favours the thought that some new and unwonted smart had entered into his life, and driven him forth to the quiet shelter, where at length he found his old peace with God, and the great mission to which God had called him.

* * * * *

The monastery of Port Royal, in which his sister had already found a home, remains indelibly associated with Pascal. It was founded in the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the reign of Philip Augustus; and a later tradition claimed this magnificent monarch as the author of its foundation and of its name. It is said that one day he wandered into the famous valley during the chase, and became lost in its woods, when he was at length discovered near to an ancient chapel of St Lawrence, which was much frequented by the devout of the neighbourhood, and that, grateful because the place had been to him a Port Royal or royal refuge, he resolved to build a church there. But this is the story of a time when, as it has been said, royal founders were in fashion. More truly, the name is considered to be derived from the general designation of the fief or district in which the valley lies, Porroiswhich, again, is supposed to be a corruption of Porra or Borra, meaning a marshy and woody hollow.

The valley of Port Royal presents to this day the same natural features which attracted the eye of the devout solitary in the seventeenth century. Some years ago I paid a long-wished-for visit to it. It lies about eighteen miles west of Paris, and seven or eight from Versailles, on the road to Chevreuse. As the traveller approaches it from Versailles, the long lines of a level and somewhat dreary road, only relieved by rows of tall poplar-trees, break into a more picturesque country. An antique mouldering village, with quaint little church, its grey lichen-marked stones brightened by the warm sunshine of a September day, and the straggling vines drooping their pale dusty leaves over the cottage-doors, made a welcome variety in the monotonous landscape. How hazy yet cheerful was the brightness in which the poor mean houses seemed to sleep! After this the road swept down a long declivity, crowned on one side by an irregular outline of wood, and presenting here and there broken and dilapidated traces of former habitations. The famous valley of Port Royal lay before us. It was a quiet and peaceful yet gloomy scene. The seclusion was perfect. No hum of cheerful industry enlivened the desolate space. An air rather as of long-continued neglect rested on ruined garden and terraces, on farmhouse and dovecot, and the remains as of a chapel nearer at hand. The more minutely the eye took in the scene, the more sad seemed its wasted recesses and the few monuments of its departed glories. The stillness as of a buried past lay all about, and it required an effort of imagination to people the valley with the sacred activities of the seventeenth century.

A rough wooden enclosure has been erected on the site of the high altar surmounted by a cross. It contained a few memorials, amongst the most touching of which were simple portraits of Arnauld, Le Maitre, De Saci, Quesnel, Nicole, Pascal, the Mère Angélique, the Mère Agnès, Jacqueline Pascal, and Dr Hanlon the physician. Two portraits of the Mère Agnès particularly impressed me. The lines of the face were exquisitely touching in their gentle bravery and patience. As I looked at the noble and sweet countenances grouped on the bare unadorned walls, the sacred memories of the place rose vividly before my mind. It was here alone that the recluses from the neighbouring Grange met the sainted sisterhood, and mingled with them the prayers and tears of penitence. Otherwise they dwelt apart, each in diligent privacy, intent on their works of education or of charity. All the ruin and decay and somewhat dreary sadness of the scene could not weaken my sense of the beautiful life of thought and faith and hope and love that had once breathed there; and never before had I felt so deeply the enduring reality of the spiritual heroism and self-sacrifice, the glory of suffering and of goodness, that had made the spot so memorable.

The monastery was founded, not by Philip Augustus, but by Matthieu, first Lord of Marli, a younger son of the noble house of Montmorency. Having formed the design of accompanying the crusade proclaimed by Innocent III. to the Holy Land, he left at the disposal of his wife, Mathilde de Garlande, and his kinsman, the Bishop of Paris, a sum of money to devote to some pious work in his absence. They agreed to apply it to the erection of a monastery for nuns in this secluded valley, that had already acquired a reputation for sanctity in connection with the old chapel dedicated to St Lawrence, which attracted large numbers of worshippers. The foundations of the church and monastery were laid in 1204. They were designed by the same architect who built the Cathedral of Amiens, and ere long the graceful and beautiful structures were seen rising in the wilderness. The nuns belonged to the Cistercian order. Their dress was white woollen, with a black veil; but afterwards they adopted as their distinctive badge a large scarlet cross on their white scapulary, as the symbol of the Institute of the Holy Sacrament.

The abbey underwent the usual history of such institutions. Distinguished at first by the strictness of its discipline and the piety of its inmates, it became gradually corrupted with increasing wealth, till, in the end of the sixteenth century, it had grown notorious for gross and scandalous abuses. The revenues were squandered in luxury; the nuns did what they liked; and the extravagances and dissipations of the world were repeated amidst the solitudes which had been consecrated to devotion. But at length its revival arose out of one of the most obvious abuses connected with it. The patronage of the institution, like that of others, had been distributed without any regard to the fitness of the occupants, even to girls of immature age. In this manner the abbey of Port Royal accidentally fell to the lot of one who was destined by her ardent piety to breathe a new life into it, and by her indomitable and lofty genius to give it an undying reputation.

Jacqueline Marie Arnauldbetter known by her official name, La Mère Angéliquewas appointed abbess of Port Royal when she was only eight years of age. She was descended from a distinguished family belonging originally to the old noblesse of Provence, but which had migrated to Auvergne and settled there. Of vigorous healthiness, both mental and physical, the Arnaulds had already acquired a merited position and name in the annals of France. In the beginning of the sixteenth century it found its way to Paris in the person of Antoine Arnauld, Seigneur de la Mothe, the grandfather of the heroine of Port Royal. M. de la Mothe, as he was commonly called, was endowed with the energetic will, and with more than the usual talents, of his family. He was specially known as Procureur-général to Catherine de Médicis; but, as he himself said, he wore a soldiers coat as well as a lawyers robe. He was a Huguenot, and nearly perished in the Bartholomew massacre. He had eight sons, every one of whom more or less achieved distinction in the service of their country; but his second son and namesake peculiarly inherited his fathers legal talents, and became his successor in the office of Procureur-général. He more than rivalled his fathers forensic success; and many traditions survive of his great eloquence, and of the pre-eminent ability with which he pleaded on behalf of the University of Paris for the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, under suspicion of having instigated an attempt on the life of Henri IV. in 1593. This great effort has been called the original sin of the Arnauld family against the Jesuit order, which was never forgiven. His eloquence produced such an impression, that it is said the judges rose in their seats to listen to his speech, while crowds assembled at the closed doors of the Court to catch its partial echoes. And yet, like some other great speeches, it cannot now be read without weariness.

Antoine Arnauld married the youthful daughter of M. Marion, the Avocat-général, who became a mother while still only a girl of fifteen, but who grew into a noble and large-hearted woman, full of deeds of piety and charity. In all, the couple had twenty children, and felt, as may be imagined, the pressure of providing for so many. Out of this pressure came the remarkable lot of two of the daughters. The benefices of the Church were a fruitful field of provision, and the avocat-général, the maternal grandfather of the children, had large ecclesiastical influence. The result was the appointment not only of one daughter to the abbey of Port Royal, but also of a younger sister, Agnès, only six years of age, to the abbey of St Cyr, about six miles distant from Port Royal. Difficulties, not without reason, were found in obtaining the papal sanction to such appointments; but these were at last overcome by means, it is said, more creditable to M. Arnaulds ability than to his integrity.

At the age of eleven, in the year 1602, Angélique was installed Abbess of Port Royal. Her sister took the veil at the age of seven. United in the nursery, they had also spent some months together at the abbey of St Cyr, in preparation for their solemn office. They were of marked but very contrasted characters. The elder inherited the strong will and dominant energy of her race. As yet, and for some time afterwards, without any religious bias, she contemplated her prospects with a quiet and proud consciousness of responsibility. The younger sister was of a softer and more submissive nature. She shrank from her high position, saying that an abbess had to answer to God for the souls of her nuns, and she was sure that she would have enough to do to take care of her own. Angélique had no such scruples. She was glad to be an abbess, and was resolved that her nuns should thoroughly do their duty. These sayings have been preserved in the memoirs of the family, and are supposed to indicate happily the firm, persistent spirit and legislative capacity of the one sister, in contrast with the passive rather than active strength, and milder yet no less enduring purpose, of the other.

The remarkable story of Angéliques conversion by the preaching of a Capucin friar in 1608, her strange contest with her parents which followed, the strengthening impulses in different directions which her religious life received, first from the famous St Francis de Sales, and finally, and especially, from the no less remarkable Abbé de St Cyran, all belong to the history of Port Royal, and cannot be detailed here. It is a touching and beautiful story, which can never lose its interest. It is only necessary that we draw attention to the temporary removal of the Abbess with her nuns to Paris in the year 1635, and to the settlement in the valley, during their absence from it, of the band of Solitaries whose piety and genius, no less than the heroic devotion of the sisterhood, have shed such a glory around it. It was the spiritual influence of St Cyran which overflowed in this direction. The religious genius of this remarkable man, of whom we shall speak more particularly in the next chapter, laid its spell upon the social life around him, and brought to his feet some of the most able and distinguished young men of the time. The elder brother of Angélique and Agnès Arnauld, known as M. dAndilly, was amongst his devoted friends; and it was through him that St Cyran first became connected with Port Royal. DAndilly was married, and a courtiera busy man in the political circles of his day; but he had long bowed before the force of St Cyrans religious convictions, and finally he too abandoned the world, and sought the retirement of Port Royal, whither three of his nephews had preceded him; and a younger and yet more distinguished brother, the namesake of his father, soon followed him. It was DAndilly who said of St Cyran, I was under such obligations to him that I loved him more than life. On the other hand, St Cyran said of him, He has not the virtue of a saint or an anchorite, but I know no man of his condition who is so solidly virtuous.

The brotherhood of Port Royal had its beginning in 1637 with the conversion of two of the nephews of DAndilly and the Mère Angélique, children of Arnaulds eldest daughter, who had married unhappily and been soon separated from her husband. These grandsons of Arnauld are known as M. le Maitre and M. de Sercourt, the former of whom, like his ancestors, had greatly distinguished himself at the bar. The latter was no less distinguished as a soldier. In the midst of worldly success, they forsook everything and gave themselves to a life of religious retirement, in which they were by-and-by joined by a younger and still more remarkable brother, known as M. de Saci, trained for the Church, and already mentioned in connection with Pascals conversion. He became Pascals spiritual director, and held with him the famous conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne. To the same group of men belonged Singlin, of whom we have heard so much in former pages, and Lancelot and Fontaine; above all, Antoine Arnauld, the youngest of the large Arnauld family, and the most indefatigable of them all. Singlin was a favourite of St Cyran, and his successor in the office of spiritual director to the monastery, as De Saci was again the successor of Singlin in the same capacity. He was a man of less ability and knowledge than many of the others, the son of a wine merchant, who did not begin his religious studies till a comparatively late period, but of a very direct and simple character, and well skilled in the mysteries of the conscience, which made him a spiritual power in the community. He was withal of singular humility, and would fain have retired from the office of Confessor when St Cyran was set at liberty in 1643 after his long imprisonment; but neither then nor afterwards, on his illustrious friends death, was he allowed to do so. St Cyran warned him that he could not fly from the duties of such a position without incurring the guilt of disobedience. De Saci seems to have been especially remarkable for his quiet self-possession and cautious insight into character. His brother, Le Maitre, brings out in a curious manner the contrast between his own impetuous character and the leisurely efficiency of De Sacis temper. As they sat at their evening meala very modest collation

He had hardly begun his supper when mine was already half digested. . . . Of quick and warm disposition, I had seen the end of my portion almost as soon as the beginning; it rapidly disappeared; and as I was thinking of rising from the table, I saw my brother De Saci, with his usual coolness and gravity, take a little piece of apple, peel it quietly, cut it leisurely, and eat it slowly. Then, after having finished, he rose almost as light as he had sat down, leaving untouched nearly all his very moderate portion. He went away as if he were quite satisfied, and even appeared to grow fat upon fasts. {87}

Claude Lancelot was the schoolmaster of the community, and represents to us perhaps more fully than any other name its famous system of education. Fontaine was one of its chief memoir writers, from whom we derive so much of our knowledge of the society; while the younger Arnauld, of whom we shall afterwards speak, Nicole, and the subject of our present sketch, represent its philosophical and literary activity.

Such was the company to which Pascal joined himself in 1655. They had been settled in divers places,at first, in 1637, when they were still only a few disciples gathered around St Cyran, in the immediate neighbourhood of Port Royal de Paris; and then, when driven from this after their great heads imprisonment, for a short time at a place called Ferté Milon; and then, finally, in 1639, at Port Royal des Champs. Here they made a great change for the better by their assiduous industry. They drained the marshy valley, cleared it of its overgrowth of brushwood, and converted it into a comparatively smiling and salubrious abode. On the return of the sisterhood from Port Royal de Paris in 1648, the nuns found the place improved beyond their expectations. The conventual buildings had been repaired, and the church kept in good preservation. The bells of the church tower pealed a welcome; a large concourse of the neighbouring poor assembled in the courtyard to greet them; while the Solitariesone of their number, a priest, bearing a crosswaited at the church door to enter with them, and swell with their voices the Te Deum with which they celebrated their return. After this they parted, a few of the brotherhood repairing to a house which had been taken for them in Paris, but others retiring to the well-known farm on the hill known as Les Granges. There was, of course, the strictest seclusion maintained in the nunnery, as before, and the inmates of Les Granges were wellnigh as completely severed from it as the brethren who retired to Paris.

The mode of life of the Solitaries was simple in the highest degree. They wore no distinctive dress. Their wants were supplied by the barest necessaries in the shape of lodging and furniture. From early morning, three A.M., to night, they were occupied in works of piety, charity, or industry. They met in the chapel after their private devotions to say matins and lauds, a service which occupied about an hour and a half, after which they kissed the earth in token of a common lowliness, and sought each his own room for a time. The round of devotion thus commenced was continued with a steady uniformity,Prime at half-past six; Tierces at nine, and after this a daily Mass; Sexte at eleven; Nones at two; Vespers at four; and Compline closing the series at a quarter-past seven. {89} The Gospel and Epistles were read daily; and sometimes during or after dinner the Lives of the Saints. They dined together; and a walk thereafter formed the sole recreation of the day. Two hours in the morning, and two in the afternoon, were devoted to work in the fields or in the garden by those who were able for such tasks. Confession and communion were frequent, but no uniform rule was enforced. In this, as in fasting and austerities generally, each recluse was left to his own free will; and, as will be seen in Pascals case, there was no need to stimulate the morbid desire for bodily mortification.

* * * * *

It was in the last month of 1654 that Pascals final conversion and adhesion to Port Royal took place. His mind for some time before had been greatly agitated, as already explainedfilled with disgust of the world and all its enjoyments. Then had come the accident at the Bridge of Neuilly, and about the same time, or a little later, a remarkable vision or ecstasy which he has himself described, and which has given rise to a good deal of useless speculation. During life he never spoke of this matter, unless it may have been to his confessor; {90} but after his death two copies of a brief writing were found upon him,the one written on parchment enclosing the other written on paper, and carefully stitched into the clothes that he had worn day by day. It is beyond question that Pascal must have been deeply touched by the event, whatever may have been its precise nature, the memorial of which he had thus preserved. The footnote shows the writing in the original, as printed by M. Faugère: there are some variations in the copies, but it seems most correctly given as below. It may be translated as follows:

* * * * *

The year of grace 1654. Monday 23d November, day of St Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology. Vigil of St Chrysogone, martyr and others. From about half-past ten oclock in the evening till about half-past twelve.

Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, Not of philosophers and of savants. Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joy. Peace. God of Jesus Christ My God and your God. Thy God will be my God Oblivion of the world and of all save God. He is found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul. Just Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. I have separated myself from Him They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water. My God, will you forsake me?

Oh, may I not be separated from Him eternally! This is life eternal, that they know Thee the only true God, and Him whom Thou hast sent, J.-C. Jesus Christ Jesus Christ I have separated myself from Him; I have fled, renounced, crucified Him. Oh that I may never be separated from Him! He is only held fast by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Renunciation total and sweet, etc. {91}

* * * * *

It is difficult to make much of this document. Are we to suppose that Pascal, on the 23d of November 1654, thought he saw a vision, revealing to him the truth of Christianity, and the vanity of philosophy and the world? Even if Pascal did this, our estimate of the matter could hardly be much affected. But there is no evidence that he himself attached a supernatural character to the incident. He felt, no doubt, that a real revelation had come to him, that his mind had been lifted in spiritual ecstasy away from the love of all that for a time had hid from him the presence of God and of a higher world. The moment of this blessed experience had been sacred to him. He had tried to trace it in these broken characters, and in seasons of doubt or depression he may have sought to awaken a new fervour of faith and love by their contemplation. This seems all the natural meaning of the incident; but, as some have endeavoured to attach to it a supernatural importance, so others, in whom the idea not only of the supernatural but of the spiritual only excites contempt, have tried to give to it a purely superstitious character. It was Condorcet who first applied to the paper the epithet of Pascals Amulette; and Lélut has adopted the epithet, and written a volume more or less relating to it. He supposes the vision to have occurred to Pascal on the evening of the day when the event at Neuilly had upset his nervous systemalways easily disturbedand brought before him a frightful picture of his alienation from God, and the piety of his early manhood. Facts mingled with the dreams of his excited imagination. He saw the horses plunging over the precipice, and an abyss seemed to open beside himthe abyss of eternity; when, lo! from the depths of the abyss there appeared a globe of fire (un globe de feu) encircled with the Cross; and the irresistible impulse was stirred in him to throw aside the world for ever, and embrace God,Not the God of philosophers or of savants, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacobthe God of Jesus Christ, from whom he had been severed, but from whom he felt he never more would be severed; abiding in Him in sweet and total renunciation of all else. The idea, of course, is that Pascals dream or vision was the result of physical derangement; and it may be safely granted that if the reality at all corresponded to Léluts imaginary picture, this is its natural explanation. The story of the vision and the abyss are thus made, not without a certain appearance of probability, to fit into one another, and both into the accident at Neuilly; and a certain congruity of external and internal alarm is hence given to the great crisis of Pascals life. Unhappily, however, there is a lack of evidence regarding the accident itself, {94} and, still more, the accompanying story of the abyss seen by Pascal at his side, which must make the reader cautious who has no theory to support. Voltaire, in his usual manner, made the most of Pascals supposed delusions. In the last years of his life, he said, Pascal believed that he had seen an abyss by the side of his chair,need we on that account have the same fancy? I, too, see an abyss, but it is in the very things which he believed that he had explained. He quotes also the authority of Leibnitz for the statement that Pascals melancholy had led his intellect astraya result, he adds, not at all wonderful in the case of a man of such delicate temperament and gloomy imagination. But Voltaire was not precise here, as in other matters about Pascal. He understood him too little to be a good judge of his mental peculiarities. All that Leibnitz really said was, that Pascal, in wishing to fathom the depths of religion, had become scrupulous even to folly. {95}

Whatever explanation we may give of the supposed incidents attending Pascals conversion, there never was a more absurd fancy than that Pascals mind suffered any eclipse in the great change that came to him. He may have been credulous, he may have been superstitious. The miracle of the Holy Thorn may be an evidence of the one, and the unnatural asceticism of his later years a proof of the other. But to speak of the author of the Provincial Letters, of the problems on the Cycloid, and finally of the Pensées, as if his intellect had suffered from his conversion, is to use words without meaning. All his noblest writings were the product of his religious experience, and he never soared so high in intellectual and literary achievement as when moving on the wings of spiritual indignation or of spiritual aspiration.

The whole interest of Pascals life from this period is concentrated in his writingsfirst the Provincials, and then the Pensées, to which we devote separate chapters. There was only the interval of a year between his conversion and the commencement of his great controversy, and little is known of how he passed his time during this interval. He seems to have remained chiefly at Port Royal under the guidance of M. de Saci, and to have felt an unwonted measure of happiness in his triumph over the world and in the possession of his own quiet thoughts. We have seen how he spoke of being treated like a prince, and even his health seemed to improve, notwithstanding the regularity and severity of his religious devotions. He communicated his feelings of elation to his sister, who replied (19th January 1655) that she was delighted to find him gay in his solitude, as she never was at his happiness in the world. Notwithstanding, she adds, I do not know how M. de Saci adapts himself to so light-hearted a penitent, who professes to find compensation for the vain joys and amusements of the world in joys somewhat more reasonable, and jeux desprit more allowable, instead of expiating them by perpetual tears.

How long Pascals pious elation continued is not said, nor have we any further details of his religious life at Port Royal. He never absolutely took up his abode there as one of the Solitaries, and could therefore say in his sixteenth Provincial Letter, without more than an innocent equivocation, that he did not belong to Port Royal. He was still found there, however, in the beginning of the following year (1655), when the affair of M. Arnauld and the Sorbonne was approaching its crisis, and the idea of his famous letters was started in a meeting, to be afterwards mentioned, between him and Arnauld and Nicole. After this, during the publication of the Letters, Pascal seems chiefly to have resided in Paris, probably with a view to the greater facilities he enjoyed there in prosecuting his assaults upon the Jesuits, which continued till the spring of 1657. During the following year he was busy with the great idea of a work in defence of religion, suggested partly by his own intellectual activity, but partly also by a special incident at Port Royal which made a great impression upon him.

This was the famous miracle of the Holy Thorn. Madame Périers daughter, Marguerite Périerthe same to whom we are indebted for interesting memorials of her uncles lifehad become, with her sister, a pupil at Port Royal. She suffered from an apparently incurable disease of the eye, fistula lachrymalis. On a sudden she was reported to be entirely cured, and the cure was attributed to the touch of a relic which had been brought to the abbey by a priest,a supposed thorn from the crown of Christ. It is remarkable that the Mère Angélique was somewhat slow of belief as to the miracle, and that she marvelled the world should make so much of it. But it secured the credence of Pascal, and became a great fact in the history of Port Royal, staying for a time the hand of persecution, and pointing, as its friends believed, to the visible interposition of heaven. How could the accusations against Port Royal be true, seeing what God Himself had done on its behalf? This place, which men say is the devils temple, God makes His house. Men declare that its children must be taken out of it, and God heals them there. They are threatened with all the furies; God loads them with His favours. This was Pascals own language on the subject, {97} and there can be no doubt that the supposed miracle deeply affected him. He was sensibly touched, it is said, by such a grace, regarding it as virtually done to himself, seeing it was done to one so near to him in kindred, and who was his spiritual daughter in baptism. He was penetrated by a great joy, and much occupied by the thought of what had happened, and the general subject of miracles. There was in this manner awakened in him the extreme desire of employing himself on a work in refutation of the principles and false reasonings of the atheists. He had studied them, his sister continues, with great care, and applied his whole mind to search out the means of convincing them. His last year of work was entirely occupied in collecting divers thoughts on this subject.

Unhappily, in the course of 1658 Pascals old illness returned with redoubled severity, and the last four years of his life became in consequence years of great languor and interruption of his projected work. The practice of continuous composition failed him. Hitherto he had been wont to develop his thoughts completely,to write them out, as it were, mentally before committing them to paper; but now he began the habit of transferring his ideas rapidly, and sometimes imperfectly, to manuscript, as they arose in his mind. In many cases, if not in all, these first sketches remained as originally made, without any revision or further reconstruction; and from the mass of papers accumulated in this manner during these years the Pensées were formedthe story of whose publication will be afterwards told. Strangely, it was in this very year, during a fit of severe toothache, apparently connected with his general illness, that Pascal began his wonderful series of problems on the cycloid, showing how fresh and unimpaired his scientific genius remained under all the changes of his health and of his main intellectual interests.

The last years of Pascals life, in their deep suffering, and in their many traits of pious resignation and self-denial, have been fully sketched by Madame Périer. We do not think it necessary to repeat the sketch here, touching and beautiful as in some respects it is. It is impossible to read her simple and earnest narrative without emotion, and yet the emotion is apt to evaporate in translation. It is impossible, also, to avoid the feeling that, with all the tenderness and humility of Pascals later years, there mingle a strange pride in his very austerities, and something of the nature of religious mania, which, beautiful as may be the forms it sometimes takes, is yet in its spirit, and in not a few of its excesses, essentially unlovely. Pascals care of the poor, his love of themto serve the poor in a spirit of poverty was what appeared to him most agreeable to Godhis wish to die among them, to be carried to the Hospital for Incurables, and breathe his last there; the story of his rescue of the poor girl who asked alms from him on the streets; his unparalleled patience, and even gladness, in suffering, so that he seemed to welcome it and bind it about him as a garment; his wonderful humility and yet his noble courage at the last in the matter of the Formulary,all this goes to the heart of the reader. It must be a cold heart that is not moved by the picture of a great soul striving to renounce all pleasure and all superfluities,to copy literally, like St Francis, the portrait of his Master. But here, as everywhere, the human copy falls infinitely short of the divine Original. There is the loveliness of a true human life beneath all the picture of suffering presented to us in the Gospels. All the hues of natural feeling have gone out of the last years of Pascal. He not only bore sufferinghe preferred it; and he boldly justified his preference. Sickness, he said, is the natural state of the Christian; it puts us in the condition in which we always ought to be. In this spirit he strove to deaden any sensation of pleasure in his food, in the attentions of his relatives and friends, even in his studies. He could not bear to see his sister caressing her children; there seemed to him harm in even saying that a woman was beautiful; the married state was a kind of homicide or rather Deicide. He thought it wrong that any one should find pleasure in attachment to him, for he was not the final object of any being, and had not wherewith to satisfy any. So jealous was he of any surprise of pleasure, of any thought of vanity or complacency in himself and his work, that he wore a girdle of iron next his skin, the sharp points of which he pressed closely when he thought himself in any danger, especially in such moments of intercourse with the world as he still sometimes allowed himself.

Such details are neither interesting in themselves nor do they present Pascal in his highest character. One cannot help feeling that, touching as Madame Périers narrative is, there must have been, even in the Pascal of later years, more than she has drawn for us. One glimpse we get, but not in her pages, of a more natural temper, when he withstood his Jansenist friends in the matter of subscribing the Formulary demanded from the Port Royalists. He had himself previously been willing to subscribe, with certain restrictions, when his sister Jacqueline alone stood out in her resistance to what she deemed a treasonable betrayal of the cause. She signed at last, but against her conscience, and, so to speak, with her blood. She died immediately afterwards, the first victim of the signature, as she has been called, and bequeathing a letter to her fellow-sufferers on the subject. Whether inspired by her words or not, Pascal took a firm stand against any further concessions, and in a famous interview with Arnauld, Nicole, and Sainte-Marthe, he argued the point with such strength and vehemence that he fell fainting to the ground. {101}

This was in the end of 1661, when his sufferings were fast drawing to a close. In the previous summer, when at Clermont, he had written to Fermat that he was so weak as to be unable to walk without a stick, or to hold himself on horseback. His weakness had grown apace, and in June 1662 he was seized with his last illness. It was necessary that his sister should nurse him, and this could only be done by his removal to her house, for he had given up his own house to a poor family, one of whose children had taken smallpox, and he would allow neither the child to be removed nor his sister to run the risk of carrying infection to her children. He left his own home for hers, therefore, on the 27th of June, and never returned. Three days after his removal he was seized with a violent colic, which deprived him of all sleep. His physicians at first were not alarmed, as his pulse continued good, but gradually pain and sleeplessness wore him out. He confessed both to the curé of the parish and to his friend Sainte-Marthe, one of the directors of the community. He wished, as we said, to die in the Hospital for Incurables amongst the poor, but in his state of weakness it was impossible to gratify this wish. After the administration of the last sacrament, which he received with tearful emotion, he thanked the curé, and exclaimed, May God never leave me! These were his last words. Convulsions having returned, he expired on the 19th of August 1662.

It is unnecessary to attempt any estimate of Pascals character. The reader must draw it for himself in the light of these pages. With all enthusiasm for its grandeur and unity of purpose, and that moral and intellectual elevation which it everywhere shows, it may be found lacking in breadth and variety, and that familiar interest and charm which strangely often come from the contemplation of human weakness rather than of human strength. There is certainly less to love in him than to admireless to call forth delight than respect. The play of natural individuality is hidden behind lines of lofty distance, and latterly of Jansenist severity. A proud, ascetic, and worn figure seems to rise before us; but strangely Pascals portrait, as known to us, conveys no idea of asceticism. The face is full-fleshed and expressive, like the face of a child, with large ripe lips and open eyes of wonder,a portrait which suggests the companion of the Duc de Roannez in his years of pleasure, rather than the weary and pain-worn penitent of Port Royal. {102}



CHAPTER V. THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

Pascals Letters to a Provincial represent a great controversy, the nature of which it is necessary to explain. They are, at the same time, the most perfect expression of his literary genius, and touch theological questions with such an inimitable grace and felicity of expression as to have awakened a universal intellectual interest. It may be hard to justify this interest by any analysis of their contents, or by such extracts as can be given from them. No English can convey the exquisite fitness of French polemical expression in its highest form, its mingled force and delicacy, its keenness and yet its lightness. We shall, however, endeavour to give as clearly as we can an account, first, of the controversy out of which the Letters originated, and then of the consummate skill with which Pascal conducted it.

M. de St Cyran is not merely one of the chief figures connected with Port Royal: he was the fountain-head of its special power. To his influence and teaching it was indebted for its chief glory and its most terrible sufferings. Jean Baptist du Vergier dHauranne, better known by the above official designation, was of noble family. He was born at Bayonne in 1581, and early devoted himself to the study of theology at Louvain and Paris. While a student, he is supposed to have first made the acquaintance of Cornelius Jansen, and to have begun with him that co-operation which was destined to bear such remarkable fruits. Their intimacy was one based on spiritual affinity and a common enthusiasm. For Jansen was the son of poor peasants, without even a surname. His father is only known as Jan Ottosen, or John the son of Otto; as the son in his turn was Cornelius Jansen, or the son of John. Jansen was the younger of the two friends, having been born in 1585; but he appears to have exercised a powerful influence over his older companion. The great bond of their union and common enthusiasm was the study of St Augustine. For the purpose of pursuing this study undisturbed, they retired to the seaside near Bayonne, and here they established themselves in scholastic seclusion. Smitten with the desire of attaining theological truth, they found the Schoolmen constantly appealing to St Augustine as their authority, and they consequently resolved to examine this authority for themselves, and so ascend to what they believed to be the source of their favourite science. Had they taken only one step further, they would have approached Protestantism; and as it was, the favourite charge which the Jesuits afterwards made against them was, that they were Calvinists in disguise. Unconsciously they were so, notwithstanding all their disclaimers. The Jesuits were unscrupulous; but their penetration here, as in many other cases, was not at fault. The doctrines so warmly espoused by Jansen and St Cyran were the old doctrines of grace, which Calvin and they alike borrowed from St Augustine, and he in his turn found in the Epistles of St Paul. {105} And the controversy which their labours were destined once more to awaken in the bosom of the Catholic Church was nothing else than the old dispute which, since the days of Augustine and Pelagius, had more than once already agitated it.

The fellow-students continued their studies near Bayonne for five years. So closely did they work, that Jansen is said to have spent days and nights in the same chair, snatching only brief intervals of rest. A game at battledore and shuttlecock occasionally relieved their vigils; but no serious employment divided their attention with the arduous task upon which they had entered, of mastering and digesting the principles of the Augustinian theology. The Bishop of Bayonne offered preferment to DHauranne, and there were projects of settling Jansen also at the head of a college; but it was not till some time afterwards that either of them entered upon official labours. They were left during those years to the uninterrupted studies which subsequently resulted in the great work of Jansen. The system of theological thought associated with his name was then definitely matured.

It is beyond our province to sketch the career of these fellow-students, one of whom became the chief spiritual director of Port Royal, and the other its great theological centre. The abbey of St Cyran was the only preferment which DHauranne ever accepted, notwithstanding Richelieus repeated offers of a bishopric. He was content to exercise from his monastic seclusion an influence far more powerful than that of any bishop of his day. And so penetrating and dangerous did this influence seem to the great Minister whose efforts to bind him to his side had so often failed, that he at length shut him up in Vincennes (May 1638). Here he remained in close confinement for more than four years; but even from this gloomy retreat the impression of his great personal power was spread abroad, and felt in many quarters as steadily as before. He survived his release only a few months. His long imprisonment had broken down his health; and although the enthusiasm of his spirit was strong as ever, his weakened body was no longer able to answer to its demands. He could hardly hold himself up, and a slight attack of illness carried him off.

St Cyrans chief strength seems to have lain in a concentrated enthusiasm and quiet strength of will which enabled him to hold his own against all opposition, and to subdue other minds larger than his own to his purposes. When the Prince de Condé interceded for him after his arrest, Richelieus reply was: Do you know of whom you are speaking? That man is more dangerous than six armies. I say that attrition with confession is necessary: he believes that contrition is necessary. {106} And in the affair of Monsieurs marriage all France has given way to me, and he alone has the hardihood to oppose it. Against all enticements and assaults alike he set a proud and firm faith in his own missiona patience sublime in its calmness, and in the unwavering consciousness of Divine right on his side. I am careful to complain of nothing, he said in his imprisonment. I am ready to remain here a hundred years; to die here, if God will. I am ready for whatever He designsfor action or for suffering. The same faith and quiet assurance gave him his marvellous influence over others, and that fascination which made him a power in the cultivated society of Paris. All the Arnauld family more or less owned his influence; and it was his teaching mainly that peopled Port Royal with the Solitaries who have made it so illustrious.

The life and work of Jansen seem at first far removed from Port Royal. He returned to Louvain after his sojourn at Bayonne, and became a professor of theology in its famous university, on whose behalf he was employed in several political negotiations with the Spanish Court. Finally he was appointed Bishop of Ypres, in which capacity he is chiefly known in the ecclesiastical world. His fame, however, rests not on any political or ecclesiastical labours, but on the results flowing from his original studies at Bayonne. He never forgot his devotion to St Augustine. He is said to have read the whole of his writings ten times, and the treatises against the Pelagians not less than thirty times. The fruit of all this studious devotion was his work known briefly as the Augustinus, {107} published two years after his death (in 1640). Nothing could have seemed more innocent or laudable than the attempt by a bishop of the Church to set forth the doctrine of St Augustine. The book professed to have been undertaken in a humble spirit.

I have avoided error where I could, says the author; for the cases in which I could not, I implore the readers pardon. . . . Let the knowledge of my sincerity make amends for the simplicity of my error. I know that if I have erred, it is not in the assertion of Catholic truth, but in the statement of the opinion of St Augustine; for I have not laid down what is true or false, what is to be held or rejected according to the faith of the Catholic Church, but only what Augustine taught and declared was to be held.

A task of such a character, carried out in such a spirit, might have seemed a harmless one.

But the Jesuits had long marked both St Cyran and Jansen as theological foes, opposed to their special doctrines. They endeavoured therefore, first of all, to prevent the publication of Jansens work; and failing in this, they directed all their efforts to procure a condemnation of the book from the Court of Rome. Never, it has been said, did any book receive a more stormy welcome. Within a few weeks of its appearance the University, the Jesuits, the executors of Jansen, the printer of the Augustinus, the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, and the Papal Nuncio were engaged in a warfare of pamphlets, treatises, pasquinades, pleadings, synods, audiences, which it would be impossible to set forth in historical sequence. {108} In the midst of all this, Jansens old fellow-student received the book, in the preparation of which he also had had some share, in his prison at Vincennes, as if an echo of his own thoughts. It would last as long as the Church, he said. After St Paul and St Augustine, no one had written concerning grace like Jansen.

The Jesuits were resolved in their hostility. They knew that the book, while assuming a historical form, and professing in the main to represent the doctrine of Augustine as directed against the errorists of his own time, had a side reference to the opinions of certain modern authors, understood to be well-known theologians of their own school. This was in fact acknowledged in an appendix. Unable any longer to wreak their vengeance on the author himself, they were resolved to put his work under ban; and accordingly, a Bull was obtained from Rome in the summer of 1642, condemning Jansen by name, and declaring that the Augustinus contained many propositions already condemned by the Holy See. It was doubted whether the Pope, Urban VIII., designed to go the length announced in the bull, and the terms of the condemnation were rumoured to have been inserted by a Papal officer in the interests of the Jesuits. The Universities of Louvain and Paris therefore did not take any steps to carry out the condemnation. They remained spectators of the controversy which raged around them, in which the Archbishop of Paris on one side, and the youngest of the Arnauld family on the other, were conspicuous.