is opinion was decidedly in favor of
resistance. It was the moment when MM. Arnauld and Nicole had discovered
a restriction, as it was then called, which allowed of subscribing with a
safe conscience. "M. Pascal, who loved truth above all things," writes
his niece, Marguerite Perier; "who, moreover, was pulled down by a pain
in the head, which never left him; who had exerted himself to make them
feel as he himself felt; and who had expressed himself very vigorously in
spite of his weakness, was so grief-stricken that he had a fit, and lost
speech and consciousness. Everybody was alarmed. Exertions were made to
bring him round, and then those gentlemen withdrew. When he was quite
recovered, Madame Perier asked him what had caused this incident. He
answered, 'When I saw all those persons that I looked upon as being those
whom God had made to know the truth, and who ought to be its defenders,
wavering and falling. I declare to you that I was so overcome with grief
that I was unable to support it, and could not help breaking down.'"
Blaise Pascal was the worthy brother of Jacqueline; in the former, as
well as the latter, the soul was too ardent and too strong for its
covering of body. Nearly all his relatives died young. "I alone am
left," wrote Mdlle. Perier, when she had become, exceptionally, very
aged. "I might say, like Simon Maccabeus, the last of all his brethren,
All my relatives and all my brethren are dead in the service of God and
in the love of truth. I alone am left; please God I may never have a
thought of backsliding!"

Pascal was unable to finish his work. "God, who had inspired my brother
with this design and with all his thoughts," writes his sister, "did not
permit him to bring it to its completion, for reasons to us unknown."
The last years of Pascal's life, invalid as he had been from the age of
eighteen, were one long and continual torture, accepted and supported
with an austere disdain of suffering. Incapable of any application, he
gave his attention solely to his salvation and the care of the poor.
"I have taken it into my head," says he, "to have in the house a sick
pauper, to whom the same service shall be rendered as to myself;
particular attention to be paid to him, and, in fact, no difference to be
made between him and me, in order that I may have the consolation of
knowing that there is one pauper as well treated as myself, in the
perplexity I suffer from finding myself in the great