es of his later years are indirectly
a discovery of what seems one leading quality of the natural man in
him, a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion. And, like another
rich young man whom Jesus loved, he lacked nothing to make the world
also love and confide in, as it already flattered, him. He turned from
it, decided to live a single life. Was it the mere oddity of genius?
Or its last fine dainty touch of difference from ordinary people and
their motives? Or that sanctity of which, in some cases, the world
itself instinctively feels the distinction, though it shrinks from the
true explanation of it? Certainly, all things considered, on the
morrow of the "Letters," Blaise Pascal, at the age of thirty-three, had
a brilliant worldly future before him, had he cared duly to wait upon,
to serve it. To develop the already considerable position of his
family among the gentry of Auvergne would have been to follow the way
of his time, in which so many noble names had been founded on
professional talents. Increasingly, however, from early youth, he had
been the subject of a malady so hopeless [74] and inexplicable that in
that superstitious age some fancied it the result of a malign spell in
infancy. Gradually, the world almost loses sight of him, hears at
last, some time after it had looked for that event, that he had died,
of course very piously, among those sombre people, his friends and
relations of Port-Royal, with whom he had taken refuge, and seemed
already to have been buried alive. And in the year 1670, not till
eight years after his death, the "Pensees" appeared--"Pensees de M.
Pascal sur la Religion et sur quelques autres sujets"--or rather a
selection from those "Thoughts" by the Port-Royalists, still in fear of
consequences to the struggling Jansenist party, anxious to present
Pascal's doctrine as far as possible in conformity with the Jesuit
sense, as also to divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely into
their own. The incomparable words were altered, the order changed or
lost, the thoughts themselves omitted or retrenched. Written in short
intervals of relief from suffering, they were contributions to a large
and methodical work--"Pensees de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur
quelques autres sujets"--on a good many things besides, as the reader
finds, on many of the great things of this world which seemed to him to
come in contact or competition with religion. In the true version of
the "Thoughts