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"Unthinking creatures," he said, "I have come from my gloomy rocks up yonder to open your eyes. You all adore this Franconnette. Behold, she is accursed! While in her cradle her father, the Huguenot, sold her to the devil. He has punished Pascal and Laurent for the light embrace she gave them. He warned in time and avoid her. The demon alone has a claim to her."
To Pascal, looking back upon the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama, hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings, that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.
The name of Maxime arrested his attention, and he wrote: "Died of ataxia in 1873," in the certainty that his nephew would not live through the year. Then Clotilde's name, beside it, struck him and he completed the note thus: "Has a son, by her Uncle Pascal, in 1874." But it was his own name that he sought wearily and confusedly.
Though Pascal was both a great mathematician and a great writer, though Beaumarchais was a good man of business, and Zamet a profound courtier, these rare exceptions prove the general principle of the specialization of brain faculties.
To apply a test similar to that by which Pascal tries the Koran and the Scriptures: what is the character of those portions, the meaning of which is plain? Are they wise or foolish? If the former, the presumption is that the obscurity of other parts is caused not by opacity, but profundity.
Things apparently trifling may stand for much in biography as well as history, and slight circumstances may influence great results. Pascal has remarked, that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would probably have been changed.
"I know it, my boy," replied Canon Pascal; "you have found out how true it is, 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. Ah! "You know it?" stammered Felix. "Phebe told me," he interrupted, "six months since. And now you and I can understand Felicita. There was no prejudice against our Alice in her mind; no unkindness to either of you.
"We are following," said Monsieur Pascal, who had his wife and Euphrosyne on either arm. "Pardon me," said General Brunet. "Our orders extend only to General Toussaint and his family. You must remain. Reverend father," he said to Father Laxabon, "you will remain also to comfort any friends of General Toussaint whom you may be able to meet with to-morrow. They will be all inconsolable, no doubt."
In much of his that seems burlesque, the most audacious, there are hidden springs of thought and tears. Often, when most he seems as the grimed and grinning clown in a circus girded by gaping spectators, he stops to pour out satire as passionate as that of Juvenal, or morality as eloquent and as pure as that of Pascal. And this he does without lengthening his face or taking off his paint.
Other writers have sought, for instance, our great classical authors, Pascal, Bossuet and perhaps Corneille, to influence the thought of their time; some, like Molière, La Fontaine, and La Bruyère, to correct customs. Others still, such as our romantic writers, Hugo or De Musset, desired only to express their personal conception of the world and of life.
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