Pascal’s early death, the reserve of his friends under the assaults which the ‘Provincial Letters’ provoked, and his very fame, as a writer, have served in some degree to obscure his personality. To many a modern reader he is little else than a great name. The man is hidden away behind the author of the ‘Pensées,’ or the defender of Port Royal. Some might even say that his writings are now more admired than studied. They have been so long the subject of eulogy that their classical character is taken for granted, and the reader of the present day is content to look at them from a respectful distance rather than spontaneously study them for himself. There may be some truth in this view. Pascal is certainly, like many other great writers, far more widely known than he is understood or appreciated. The old, which are still the common, editions of the ‘Pensées,’ have also given a certain commonplace to his reputation. It were certainly a worthy task to set him more clearly before our age both as a man and as a writer.
It is no easy task, however, to do this; and to tell the full story of Pascal’s life is no longer possible. Its records, numerous as they are, are incomplete; all fail more or less at an interesting point of his career. They leave much unexplained; and the most familiar confidences of his sisters and niece, who have preserved many interesting details regarding him, have not entirely removed the veil from certain aspects of his character. The well-known life by Madame Périer, his elder sister, is of course the chief authentic source of his biography. It was written shortly after his death, although not published for some time later; and nothing can be more lively, graphic, and yet dignified, than its portraiture of his youthful precocity, and, again, of the devotions and austerities of his later years. But it leaves many gaps unsupplied. Like other memoirs of the kind, it is written from a somewhat conventional point of view. No one, as M. Havet says, was nearer to him in all senses of the expression, or could have given a more true and complete account of all the incidents in his life; but she was not only his sister, but his enthusiastic friend and admirer, in whose eyes he was at once a genius and a saint—a man of God, called to a great mission. It was from a consciousness of this mission, and the full glory of his religious fame, that she looked back upon all his life; and the lines in which she draws it are coloured, in consequence, too gravely and monotonously. Certain particulars she drops out of sight altogether. These are to be found scattered here and there, sometimes in his own letters, more frequently in the letters of his younger sister, Jacqueline, and in a supplementary memoir, written by his niece, Marguerite Périer, all of which have been carefully published in our time, and made accessible to any reader. { 3} The researches of M. Cousin, M. Faugère, and M. Havet, the curious and interesting monograph of M. Lélut, { 4a} have thrown light on various points; while the copious portraiture of Sainte-Beuve { 4b} has given to the whole an animation and a desultory charm which no English pen need strive to imitate.