It has been said in this History that Louis XIV. had the fortune to find himself at the culminating point of absolute monarchy, and to profit by the labors of his predecessors, reaping a portion of their glory; he had likewise the honor of enriching himself with the labors of his contemporaries, and attracting to himself a share of their lustre; the honor, be it said, not the fortune, for he managed to remain the centre of intellectual movement as well as of the court, of literature and art as well as affairs of state. Only the abrupt and solitary genius of Pascal or the prankish and ingenuous geniality of La Fontaine held aloof from king and court; Racine and Moliere, Bossuet and Fenelon, La Bruyere and Boileau lived frequently in the circle of Louis XIV., and enjoyed in different degrees his favor; M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king; Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art, as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King. The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the nation are in harmony.
Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in which Louis XIV. began to govern. Born at Clermont, in Auvergne, educated at his father’s and by his father, though it was not thought desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at her brother, said to M. Pascal, the two children’s father, who had come to thank him for a favor, “Take care of them; I mean to make something great of them.” This was the native and powerful instinct of genius divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without having done anything for the children who had impressed him beyond giving their father a share in the superintendence of Rouen; he thus put them in the way of the great Corneille, who was affectionately kind to Jacqueline, but took no particular notice of Blaise Pascal. The latter was seventeen; he had already written his Traite des Coniques (Treatise on Conics) and begun to occupy himself with “his arithmetical machine,” as his sister, Madame Perier calls it. At twenty-three he had ceased to apply his mind to human sciences; “when he afterwards discovered the roulette (cycloid), it was without thinking,” says Madame Perier, “and to distract his attention from a severe tooth-ache he had.” He was not twenty-four when anxiety for his salvation and for the glory of God had taken complete possession of his soul. It was to the same end that he composed the Lettres Provinciales, the first of which was written in six days, and the style of which, clear, lively, precise, far removed from the somewhat solemn gravity of Port-Royal, formed French prose as Malherbe and Boileau formed the poetry. This was the impression of his contemporaries, the most hard of them to please in the art of writing. “That is excellent; that will be relished,” said the recluses of Port-Royal, in spite of the misgivings of M. Singlin. More than thirty years after Pascal’s death, Madame de Sevigne, in 1689, wrote to Madame de Grignan, “Sometimes, to divert ourselves, we read the little Letters (to a provincial). Good heavens, how charming! And how my son reads them! I always think of my daughter, and how that excess of correctness of reasoning would suit her; but your brother says that you consider that it is always the same thing over again. Ah! My goodness, so much the better! Could any one have a more perfect style, a raillery more refined, more natural, more delicate, worthier offspring of those dialogues of Plato, which are so fine? And when, after the first ten letters, he addresses himself to the reverend Jesuit fathers, what earnestness, what solidity, what force! What eloquence! What love for God and for the truth! What a way of maintaining it and making it understood! I am sure that you have never read them but in a hurry, pitching on the pleasant places; but it is not so when they are read at leisure.” Lord Macaulay once said to M. Guizot, “Amongst modern works I know only two perfect ones, to which there is no exception to be taken, and they are Pascal’s Provincials and the Letters of Madame de Sevigne.”
Boileau was of Lord Macaulay’s opinion; at least as regarded Pascal. “Corbinelli wrote to me the other day,” says Madame de Sevigne, on the 15th of January, 1690: “he gave me an account of a conversation and a dinner at M. de Lamoignon’s: the persons were the master and mistress of the house, M. de Troyes, M. de Toulon, Father Bourdaloue, a comrade of his, Despredaux, and Corbinelli. The talk was of ancient and modern works. Despreaux supported the ancient, with the exception of one single modern, which surpassed, in his opinion, both old and new. Bourdaloue’s comrade, who assumed the well-read air, and who had fastened on to Despreaux and Corbinelli, asked him what in the world this book could be that was so remarkably clever. Despreaux would not give the name. Corbinelli said to him, ‘Sir, I conjure you to tell me, that I may read it all night.’ Despreaux answered, laughing, ‘Ah! sir, you have read it more than once, I am sure.’ The Jesuit joins in, with a disdainful air, and presses Despreaux to name this marvellous writer. ‘Do not press me, father,’ says Despreaux. The father persists. At last Despreaux takes hold of his arm, and squeezing it very hard, says, ‘You will have it, father; well, then, egad! it is Pascal.’ ‘Pascal,’ says the father, all blushes and astonishment; ‘Pascal is as beautiful as the false can be.’ ‘False,’ replied Despreaux: ‘false! Let me tell you that he is as true as he is inimitable; he has just been translated into three languages.’ The father rejoined, ‘He is none the more true for that.’ Despreaux grew warm, and shouted like a madman: ‘Well, father, will you say that one of yours did not have it printed in one of his books that a Christian was not obliged to love God? Dare you say that that is false?’ ‘Sir,’ said the father, in a fury, ‘we must distinguish.’ ‘Distinguish!’ cried Despreaux; ‘distinguish, egad! distinguish! Distinguish whether we are obliged to love God!’ And, taking Corbinelli by the arm, he flew off to the other end of the room, coming back again, and rushing about like a lunatic; but he would not go near the father any more, and went off to join the rest of the company. Here endeth the story; the curtain falls.” Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of Boileau, to exalt Pascal.
The provincials could not satisfy for long the pious ardor of Pascal’s soul; he took in hand his great work on the Verite de la Religion. He had taken a vigorous part in the discussions of Port-Royal as to subscription of the formulary: his 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 affluence of every sort in which I do find myself.” The spirit of M. de St. Cyran is there, and also the spirit of the gospel, which caused Pascal, when he was dying, to say, “I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it. I love wealth, because it gives the means of assisting the needy.” A genius unique in the extent and variety of his faculties, which were applied with the same splendid results to mathematics and physics, to philosophy and polemics, disdaining all preconceived ideas, going unerringly and straightforwardly to the bottom of things with admirable force and profundity, independent and free even in his voluntary submission to the Christian faith, which he accepts with his eyes open, after having weighed it, measured it, and sounded it to its uttermost depths, too steadfast and too simple not to bow his head before mysteries, all the while acknowledging his ignorance. “If there were no darkness,” says he, “man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would have no hope of remedy. Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery, and to know his own misery without knowing God.” The lights of this great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs. “One can be quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is,” says he.
In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing prose which established the superiority of the French language. At sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological examinations. He was already famous at court as a preacher and a polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin. A difficult and an irksome task for him who had already written for Turenne an exposition of the Catholic faith, and had delivered the funeral orations over Madame Henriette and the Queen of England. “The king has greatly at heart the dauphin’s education,” wrote Father Lacoue to Colbert; “he regards it as one of his grand state-strokes in respect of the future.” The dauphin was not devoid of intelligence. “Monseigneur has plenty of wits,” said Councillor Le Gout de Saint-Seine in his private journal, “but his wits are under a bushel.” The boy was indolent, with little inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the superintendence of a prince’s education. “O,” cried Monseigneur, when official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria, “we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want to make me learn ancient geography any more!” Bossuet had better understood what ought to be the aim of a king’s education. “Remember, Monseigneur,” he constantly repeated to him, “that destined as you are to reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy.” He was in despair at his pupil’s inattention. “There is a great deal to endure with a mind so destitute of application,” he wrote to Marshal Bellefonds; “there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St. Paul says, hoping against hope.” He had written a little treatise on inattention, De Incogitantia,—in the vain hope of thus rousing his pupil to work. “I dread nothing in the world so much,” Louis XIV would say, “as to have a sluggard (faineant) dauphin; I would much prefer to have no son at all!” Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the way of his labors. “I perceive, as I think,” he wrote to his friends, “in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God. You would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and the desire he shows to be a good servant of God. But the world! the world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples! Save us, Lord! save us! Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace, but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I? Humility, trepidation, absorption into one’s own nothingness!”
It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the difficult task of a royal education. Fenelon encountered in the Duke of Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind and a warmer heart; the preceptor, too, was more proper for the work. Bossuet, nevertheless, labored conscientiously to instruct his little prince, studying for him and with him the classical authors, preparing grammatical expositions, and, lastly, writing for his edification the Traite de la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-mime (Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Self), the Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (Discourse on Universal History), and the Politique tiree de l’Ecriture Sainte (Polity derived from Holy Writ). The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear by the king as well as by his governor. The dauphin was nineteen when his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of Meaux.
Neither the assembly of the clergy and the part he played therein, nor his frequent preachings at court, diverted Bossuet from his duties as bishop; he habitually resided at Meaux, in the midst of his priests. The greater number of his sermons, written at first in fragments, collected from memory in their aggregate, and repeated frequently with divergences in wording and development, were preached in the cathedral of Meaux. The dauphin sometimes went thither to see him. “Pray, sir,” he had said to him, in his childhood, “take great care of me whilst I am little; I will of you when I am big.” Assured of his righteousness as a priest and his fine tact as a man, the king appealed to Bossuet in the delicate conjunctures of his life. It is related that it was the Bishop of Meaux who dissuaded him from making public his marriage with Madame de Maintenon. She, more anxious for power than splendor, did not bear him any ill-will for it; amidst the various leanings of the court, divided as it was between Jansenism and Quietism, it was to the simple teaching of the Catholic church, represented by Bossuet, that she remained practically attached. Right-minded and strong-minded, but a little cold-hearted, Madame de Maintenon could not suffer herself to be led away by the sublime excesses of the Jansenists or the pious reveries of Madame Guyon; the Jesuits had influence over her, without her being a slave to them; and that influence increased after the death of Bossuet. The guidance of the Bishop of Meaux, in fact, answered the requirements of spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue, susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother Angelica Arnauld, “I am of all saints’ order, and all saints are of my order;” but his preferences always inclined towards those saints and learned doctors who had not carried any religious tendency to excess, and who had known how to rest content with the spirit of a rule and a faith that were practical. A wonderful genius, discovering by flashes, and as if by instinct, the most profound truths of human nature, and giving them expression in an incomparable style, forcing, straining the language to make it render his idea, darting at one bound to the sublimest height by use of the simplest terms, which he, so to speak, bore away with him, wresting them from their natural and proper signification. “There, in spite of that great heart of hers, is that princess so admired and so beloved; there, such as Death has made her for us!” Bossuet alone could speak like that.