who are
malade in the same way. "La maladie est l'etat naturel des Chretiens,"
says Pascal himself. And we concede that every one of us more or less
is ailing thus, as another has told us that life itself is a disease of
the spirit.

From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the
"Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living
death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of
disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, we
are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, those
sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them in Pascal's
genius and work. Well! the light cast indirectly on the literary work
of Pascal by Mme. Perier's "Life" is of a similar kind. It is a
veritable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have truly a
beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined cases even
of cerebral disturbance. That he should [79] have sought relief from
his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the second
stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal becomes almost a
sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad heaven of the
Catholic Church. He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of
pieties which do not make a winning picture, which always have about
them, even when they show themselves in men physically strong,
something of the small compass of the sick-chamber. His medieval or
oriental self-tortures, all the painful efforts at absolute detachment,
a perverse asceticism taking all there still was to spare from the
denuded and suffering body, might well, you may think, have died with
him, but are here recorded, chiefly by way of showing the world, the
Jesuits, that the Jansenists, too, had a saint quite after their mind.

But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minute
pieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the wholeness
of Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his immense
sincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The seventeenth
century presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of the Middle
Age, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations of
Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. In Pascal they are
original, and have all their seriousness. Que je n'en sois [80] jamais
separe--pas separe eternellement, he repeats, or makes that strange
sort of MS. am