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Everyone knows Pascal's overwhelming sentence: 'Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. It is overwhelming, obviously and immediately; it, so to speak, knocks one down.

The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life. He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle. He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant

A profound inquietude did indeed devour him. He turned desperately from the pride of his intellect to the consolations of his religion. But even there ? Beneath him, as he sat or as he walked, a great gulf seemed to open darkly, into an impenetrable abyss. He looked upward into heaven, and the familiar horror faced him still: 'Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie!

"The silence of those infinite spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "the silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me" Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence.