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In my despair I hired the sorcerer to frighten you with his mischievous tale, and chance did the rest. When we both demanded her, she confessed her love for you. It was more than I could bear, and I resolved that we should both die. "But your mother has disarmed me; she reminds me of my own. Live, Pascal, for your wife and your mother! You need have no more fear of me.
"If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you to erect a colossal statue to Blaise Pascal; to found a prize of a hundred thousand francs to be offered every ten years for the solution of the grandest problem of mechanical science effected during the interval; to find dowries for all your cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an asylum on purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians."
This thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a philosopher in France!
And this dream of the future, this theory, confusedly perceived, filled him with bitterness at the thought that now his life was a force wasted and lost. At the very bottom of his grief Pascal had the dominating feeling that for him life was ended. Regret for Clotilde, sorrow at having her no longer beside him, the certainty that he would never see her again, filled him with overwhelming grief.
The divine ideals of virtue and renunciation were drowned in a sea of selfishness and materialism. The austere devotion of Pascal was out of fashion. The spiritual teachings of Bossuet and Fenelon represented the out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. It was Voltaire who gave the tone, and even Voltaire was not radical enough for many of these iconoclasts.
It behooves us therefore to get rid of imaginations that emanate only from our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight emanate only from low places. Pascal has said, once and for all: "The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view."
It is an inevitable mood to any who dare to shake the kaleidoscopic fragments out of their conventional and accepted combination. Who does not remember deep traces of such a mood in Plato, Shakespeare, Pascal, Goethe? And Diderot, who went near to having something of the deep quality of those sovereign spirits, did not escape, any more than they, the visitation of the misanthropic spectre.
We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been," wrote Pascal, "there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever."
Probably the most finished talking and writing of modern times has been done in and about the French court in the seventeenth century; and it is accordingly there that we find men like Pascal and Bossuet writing a prose which for precision, purity, and dignity has never since been surpassed.
Pascal has the reputation of being a remarkable man, and people supposed he would rise very high in his profession." "But now he is ruined; his career is finished." "Certainly! You can be quite sure that by this evening all Paris will know what occurred here last night." He paused, meeting Madame Argeles's look of withering scorn with a cleverly assumed air of astonishment. "You are a villain!
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