It is only necessary to add, that Pascal continued to maintain his sentiments on this subject unchanged to the last. On his death-bed, M. Beurrier, his parish priest, administered to him the last rites of his Church, and came to learn, after having confessed him, that he was the author of the “Provincial Letters.” Full of concern at having absolved the author of a book condemned by the pope, the good priest returned, and asked him if it was true, and if he had no remorse of conscience on that account. Pascal replied, that “he could assure him, as one who was now about to give an account to God of all his actions, that his conscience gave him no trouble on that score; and that in the composition of that work he was influenced by no mad motive, but solely by regard to the glory of God and the vindication of truth, and not in the least by any passion or personal feeling against the Jesuits.” Attempts were made by Perefixe, archbishop of Paris, first to bully the priest for having absolved such an impenitent offender,[[53]] and afterwards to force him into a false account of his penitent’s confession. It was confidently reported, on the pretended authority of the confessor, that Pascal had expressed his sorrow for having written the Provincials, and that he had condemned his friends of Port-Royal for want of due respect to papal authority. Both these allegations were afterwards distinctly refuted—the first by the written avowal of M. Beurrier, and the other by two depositions formally made by Nicole, showing that the real ground of Pascal’s brief disagreement with his friends was directly the reverse of that which had been assigned.[[54]]
Few books have passed through more editions than the Provincials. The following, among many others, may be mentioned as French editions:—The first, in 1656, 4to; a second in 1657, 12mo; a third in 1658, 8vo; a fourth in 1659, 8vo; a fifth in 1666, 12mo; a sixth in 1667, 8vo; a seventh in 1669, 12mo; an eighth in 1689, 8vo; a ninth in 1712, 8vo; a tenth in 1767, 12mo.[[55]] The later editions are beyond enumeration. The Letters were translated into Latin, during the lifetime of Pascal, by his intimate friend, the learned and indefatigable Nicole, under the assumed name of “William Wendrock, a Saltzburg divine.”[[56]] Nicole, who was a complete master of Latin, has given an elegant, though somewhat free version of his friend’s work. He has frequently added to the quotations taken from the writings of the Jesuits and others; a liberty which he doubtless felt himself the more warranted to take, from the share he had in the original concoction of the Letters. Nicole’s preliminary dissertation and notes were translated by Mademoiselle de Joncourt, a lady, it is said, “possessed of talents and piety, who, to the graces peculiar to her own sex, added the accomplishments which are the ornament of ours.”[[57]] Besides this, the Provincials have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe. Bayle informs us that he had seen an edition of them in 8vo, with four columns, containing the French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish.[[58]] The Spanish translation, executed by Gratien Cordero of Burgos, was suppressed by order of the Inquisition.[[59]] But all the efforts made for the suppression of the Provincials only served to promote their popularity; and their enemies found that, if they would silence, they must answer them.
Forty years elapsed after the publication of the Provincials before the Jesuits ventured on a reply. At length, in 1697, appeared an answer, entitled Entretiens de Cleandre et d’Eudoxe, sur les Lettres au Provincial. The author is known to have been Father Daniel, the historiographer of France. This learned Jesuit undertook the desperate task of refuting the Provincials, in a form somewhat resembling that of the Letters themselves, being a series of supposed conversations between two friends, aided by an abbé, “who is excessively frank and honest, one who never could bear all his life to see people imposed upon.” The dialogue is conducted with considerable spirit, but is sadly deficient in vraisemblance. The author commences with high professions of impartiality. Cleander and Eudoxus are supposed to be quite neutral—somewhat like the free-will of Molina, “in a state of perfect equilibrium, until good sense and stubborn facts turn the scale.” But, alas! the equilibrium is soon lost, without the help either of facts or of sense. The friends have hardly uttered two sentences, till they begin to talk as like two Jesuits as could well be imagined. Party rage gets the better of literary discretion; the Port-Royalists are “honest knaves,” “true hypocrites,” “villains animated with stubborn fury;” Arnauld’s “pen may be known by the gall that drops from it;” Nicole “swears like a trooper,” and as to Pascal he is all these characters in turn, while his book is “a repertory of slander,” and is “villainous in a supreme degree!”
The whole strain of Daniel’s reply corresponds with this specimen of its spirit. Avoiding the error of Pirot, and yet without renouncing the favorite dogmas of the Society, such as probabilism, equivocations, and mental reservations, which he only attempts to palliate, Father Daniel has exhausted his skill in an attack on the sincerity of Pascal. His main object is to convey the impression that the Provincials are a libel, written in bad faith, and full of altered texts and false citations. In selecting this plan of defence, the Jesuit champion evinces considerably more ingenuity than ingenuousness. He was well aware that, at the time of their publication, the Letters had been subjected to a sifting process of examination by the most clear-sighted Jesuits, who had signally failed in proving any falsifications. But he knew also, that, during the forty years that had elapsed, the writings of the casuists had fallen into disuse and contempt, mainly in consequence of the scorching which they had received from the wit and eloquence of Pascal, and that it would be now a much easier and safer task to call in question the fidelity of citations which none would give themselves the trouble of verifying. In this bold attempt to turn the tables against the Jansenists, by accusing them of chicanery and pious fraud, the very crimes which they had succeeded in establishing against their opponents, the unscrupulous Jesuit could be at no loss to find, among the voluminous writings of the casuists, some plausible grounds for his charges. At all events, he could calculate on the readiness with which certain minds, fonder of generalizing than of investigating facts, would lay hold of the mere circumstance of a book having been written in defence of his order, as sufficient to show that a great deal may be said on both sides. As to the manner in which Daniel has executed his task, it might be sufficient to say, that it has been acknowledged by the Jesuits themselves to be a failure. Even at its first appearance, great efforts were made to suppress it altogether, as likely to do more harm than good to the Society; and in their references to it afterwards, we see the disappointment which they felt. “There was lately published,” says Richelet, “an answer to the Lettres Provinciales, which professes to demolish them, but which, nevertheless, will not do them much harm. Do you ask how? The reason is, that although this answer shows the horrid injustice, the abominable slanders, and injurious falsehoods of the Provincials, against one of the most famous societies in the Church, yet these Letters have so long, by their facetious touches, got the laughers of all denominations on their side, that they have acquired a credit and authority of which it will be difficult to divest them. It must be confessed that prejudice, on this occasion, is very unjust, very cruel, and very obstinate in its verdict; since, though these Letters have been condemned by popes, bishops, and divines, and burnt by the hands of the hangman, yet they have taken such deep root in people’s minds as to bid defiance to all these powers.”[[60]] “The reply,” says another writer, “as may be easily imagined, was not so well received as the Letters had been. Father Daniel professed to have reason and truth on his side; but his adversary had in his favor what goes much further with men, the arms of ridicule and pleasantry.”[[61]] This, however, is a mere begging of the question. Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat? It is quite possible that Father Daniel may be lugubriously in the wrong, and Pascal laughingly in the right. This was very triumphantly made out in the answer to Daniel’s work, which appeared in the same year with the Entretiens, under the title of “Apology for the Provincial Letters, against the last Reply of the Jesuits, entitled Conversations of Cleander and Eudoxus.” The author was Don Mathieu Petitdidier, Benedictine of the congregation of St. Vanne, who died bishop of Macra.[[62]] In this masterly performance, the accusations of Daniel are shown to be totally groundless, his answers jesuitical and evasive, and his arguments untenable. The “Apology” was never answered, and Daniel’s work sank out of sight.
Subsequent apologists of the Jesuits have followed the line of defence adopted by Father Daniel. The continued repetition of his charges, though they have been long since disposed of, renders it necessary to advert to them. For the strict fidelity of Pascal’s citations, we have not merely the testimony of contemporary witnesses, but what will be to many a sufficient guarantee, the solemn assertion of Pascal himself. In a conversation that took place within a year of his death, and which has been preserved by his sister, he thus answers the chief articles of accusation that had been brought against the Provincials:—
“I have been asked, first, if I repented of having written the Provincial Letters? I answered that, far from repenting, if I had it to do again, I would write them yet more strongly.
“I have been asked, in the second place, why I named the authors from whom I extracted these abominable passages which I have cited? I answered, If I were in a town where there were a dozen fountains, and I knew for certain that one of them was poisoned, I should be under obligation to tell the world not to draw from that fountain; and, as it might be supposed that this was a mere fancy on my part, I should be obliged to name him who had poisoned it, rather than expose a whole city to the risk of death.
“I have been asked, thirdly, why I adopted an agreeable, jocose, and entertaining style? I answered, If I had written dogmatically, none but the learned would have read my book; and they had no need of it, knowing how the matter stood, at least as well as I did. I conceived it, therefore, my duty to write, so that my Letters might be read by women, and people in general, that they might know the danger of all those maxims and propositions which were then spread abroad, and admitted with so little hesitation.
“Finally, I have been asked, if I had myself read all the books which I quoted? I answered, No. To do this, I had need have passed the greater part of my life in reading very bad books. But I have twice read Escobar throughout; and for the others, I got several of my friends to read them; but I have never used a single passage without having read it myself in the book quoted, without having examined the case in which it is brought forward, and without having read the preceding and subsequent context, that I might not run the risk of citing that for an answer which was in fact an objection, which would have been very unjust and blamable.”[[63]]
If this solemn declaration, emitted by one whose heart was a stranger to deceit, and whose shrewdness placed him beyond the risk of delusion, is not accepted as sufficient, we might refer to the mass of evidence collected at the time in the Factums of the curés of Paris and Rouen, to the voluminous notes of Nicole, and to the Apology of Petitdidier, in which the citations made by Pascal are authenticated with a carefulness which not only sets all suspicion at rest, but leaves a large balance of credit in the author’s favor, by showing that, so far from having reported the worst maxims of the Jesuitical school, or placed them in the most odious light of which they were susceptible, he has been extremely tender towards them. But, indeed, the truth was placed beyond all dispute, through the efforts of the celebrated Bossuet, in 1700, when, by a sentence of an assembly of the clergy of France, the morals of the Jesuits, as exhibited in their “monstrous maxims, which had been long the scandal of the Church and of Europe,” were formally condemned, and when it may be said that the Provincial Letters met at once their full vindication and their final triumph.[[64]]