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But that does not prevent this little girl here from owing you and me a fine taper!" "Well, that is the pure truth! And she knows it, M. Pascal. There is not a day that she does not say that but for you she would be at this time like her brother Valentin." "Bah! We will save him, too. He is getting better, Valentin is. I have just been to see him."
As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.
He wrote many letters, sometimes with his own hand, and sometimes employing that of his friend, Monsieur Pascal, who, with his wife, resided with the Ouvertures. Toussaint also received many letters, and a perpetual succession of visitors of applicants about matters of business, as it seemed. The only mystery was, how all his despatches were sent to their destination.
Their whole moral philosophy, if we may believe Arnauld and Pascal, was a tissue of casuistry; truth was obscured in order to secure popularity; even the most diabolical persecution was justified if heretics stood in the way. Father Le Tellier rejoiced in the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew, and Te Deums were offered in the churches for the extinction of Protestantism by any means.
He had heard a slight movement there; and he trembled with fear lest Pascal, maddened with anger and jealousy, should rush in and throw himself upon the marquis. Plainly enough, this perilous situation could not last much longer.
If Pascal had entered on his literary career when intelligence was more general, and abuses at the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see a dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against monarchy and Christianity.
With the exception of Bacon, we have no writer of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference between Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference between Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of Hamlet.
It is not within the limits of reason to expect women to rival, in literature, the great writers such as Corneille, Racine, Molière, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Descartes, Pascal—most of whom were but little influenced by femininity; there were those, however, among the sex, who were conspicuous for elevation of thought, dignity in manner and bearing, and brilliancy in conversation—attributes which they have left to posterity in numberless exquisite and charming letters, in interesting and invaluable memoirs, or in consummate psychological and social portraitures incorporated into the form of novels.
The infinite spaces, as Pascal said, are "frightful." That way madness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drug themselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of the experience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, and here alone, they may be permitted to forget the Outer Terror.
I hold the Jansenists already no better than dead men by the doctrine of Father Launy.” “Aha, sir, you are caught; for Caramuel deduces the very opposite conclusion from the same principles.” “How so?” said Pascal. “Observe his words, n. 1146 and 1147, p. 547 and 548. The Jansenists call the Jesuits Pelagians; may they be killed for so doing?
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