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Updated: June 7, 2025
So wonderfully did Pascal master the resources of the great instrument which he had forged, that it is true to say that no reader who wishes to realize once for all the great qualities of French prose could do better than turn straight to the Lettres Provinciales.
Who knows what he may be reduced to? I remember the great Irish liberator telling how, when once detained in an inn in Switzerland, he could find no book to beguile the time with but the Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. I have no doubt that the coerced perusal of them to which he had to submit did him a deal of good.
But the work of genius which in itself summed up the perfections of prose and set the mould of language was Pascal's "Lettres Provinciales." The age was characterised by the eloquence of Bossuet. The "Télémaque" of Fénelon, the "Caractères" of La Bruyère, were works of an order entirely original and without precedent.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between Jansenists and Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal's immortal Lettres Provinciales, and by Quesnel's Réflexions Morales which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation.
Afterwards, to relax his mind, he took a French book. It was one of the works of Blaise Pascal, his "Lettres Provinciales." He admired their originality, the trenchant satire, and the galling blows of this man whom Châteaubriand called a "frightful genius."
Then suddenly one day a small pamphlet in the form of a letter appeared on the bookstalls of Paris; and with its appearance the long reign of confused ideals and misguided efforts came to an end for ever. The pamphlet was the first of Pascal's Lettres Provinciales the work which ushered into being the great classical age the Grand Siècle of Louis XIV.
It is a difference visible even to-day and is well expressed by the chronicler Raoul de Caen, who speaks of the Provençal Crusaders, saying that the French were prouder in bearing and more war-like in action than the Provençals, who especially contrasted with them by their skill in procuring food in times of famine: "inde est, quod adhuc puerorum decantat naenia, Franci ad bella, Provinciales ad victualia". Only a century and a half later than Charlemagne appeared the first poetical productions in Provençal which are known to us, a fragment of a commentary upon the De Consolatione of Boethius and a poem upon St Foy of Agen.
In the Lettres Provinciales PASCAL created French prose the French prose that we know to-day, the French prose which ranks by virtue of its vigour, elegance and precision as a unique thing in the literature of the world.
If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement would have survived. His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in his Lettres Provinciales: clarity, simplicity and wit these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree.
Excepting Bossuet's Histoire des Variations and Pascal's Provinciales, I do not think there are many books left to read if you insist on eliminating all those in which illicit love is mentioned." "Much loss that would be!" said Monsieur de Clagny.
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