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Where else can so crowded and so short a career be found? It is scarcely possible to repress a smile in reading this work and discovering the patient care with which M. Cousin avoids speaking of the "Provinciales."
No library which contains Pascal's "Provinciales" and "Pensées" should be without it. "Of all the monuments of the French language," says M. Cousin, in the Avant-propos to this new edition, "none is more celebrated than the work 'Les Pensées, and French literature possesses no artist more consummate than Pascal.
Among the most remarkable printed books are:—A series of Bibles, 1480 to 1690; Caxton’s Legenda Aurea, 1483; Higden’s Polychronicon, by Caxton, 1495; Lyndewode, Super Constitutiones Provinciales, 1475; Nonius Marcellus, De proprietate sermonum, 1476, printed at Venice by Nicolas Jenson; and the Nuremberg Chronicle, completed July 1493.
But she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de Sablé deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her fervent cultivation of precise language.
Ibid., Memoire au roi sur l'establissement des administrations provinciales, 25. Necker abolished the vingtieme d'industrie applied to manufactures and commerce. Compte rendu, 64. In his later book he speaks of it as subsisting in a few provinces only. De l'Administration, i. 159. Turgot, iv. 289.
"I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for its purpose," said he, "and I think you are right; but you who are young," and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, "you ought to do something." This was the origin of the Lettres Provinciales. For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics.
The views had authority from Augustine and Chrysostom, but Arnauld was condemned. The two establishments of Port Royal refused to sign the formularies condemning Jansen's book, and they had on their side the brilliant pen of Pascal. On the other were the Jesuits. Pascal, in the "Lettres Provinciales," made the Jesuits ridiculous with his incomparable wit.
If you would know their 'morale' read Pascal's 'Lettres Provinciales', in which it is very truly displayed from their own writings. Upon the whole, this is certain, that a society of which so little good is said, and so much ill believed, and that still not only subsists, but flourishes, must be a very able one.
His Provinciales rendered abstruse questions of theology more or less intelligible, and invited the general public to pronounce an opinion on them. His lucid exposition interested every one in the abstruse problem, Is man's freedom such as not to render grace superfluous? But Pascal perceived that casuistry was not the only enemy that menaced the true spirit of religion for which Jansenism stood.
Moreover, they did not reside regularly in the part of the country which they governed, but made only flying visits to it, and spent most of their time near the centre of influence, in Paris or Versailles. Yet their opportunities for doing good or harm were almost unlimited. Ibid., Memoire au roi sur l'etablissement des administrations provinciales, passim.
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