But the heads of the House required to be satisfied, no less than Jacqueline. They were not disposed to accept any gift which was not freely and piously given. Accordingly, before the final disposition of the property was made, La Mère Angélique took care that Pascal should understand the matter anew from the Port-Royalist point of view. St Cyran had taught them that they were never “to receive anything for the house of God but that which came from God.” Even he was not a little surprised, according to the statement of his sister, at all this scrupulousness—“the manner in which we deal with such matters;” and the men of business whose
presence was necessary on the occasion are represented as astonished beyond measure. “They had never seen business done in such a way.” At length, however, all was completed. Pascal professed the genuineness of his motives, and only regretted that it was not in his power to do more.
If this narrative mainly concerns Jacqueline Pascal, it serves to throw light upon the character and life of her brother at this time. In the course of her “relation,” Jacqueline, or her interlocutor La Mère Agnès, makes frequent allusion to Pascal’s “worldly life.” When she is vexed that he will not carry out her desires in the matter of the dowry, she is reminded that she had far more reason to be distressed by the “faults and infidelities” into which he had fallen towards God. [63a] He is represented as being so much engrossed with the vanities and amusements of the world as to prefer his own pleasure and advantage to the good of a religious community or the pious gratification of his sister. It was only by some miracle that it could be otherwise; and there was no reason to “expect a miracle of grace in a person like him.” [63b] All the means at his command were hardly sufficient to enable him to live in the world “like others of his condition,” and the associates with whom he was known to be mingling. [63c]
Plainly at this time Pascal was abandoned by Port Royal. He had “set himself,” as his sister briefly says, “on the world.” As his niece more particularly indicates, [63d] he had given himself up to the amusements of life. Unable to study, the love of leisure and of
fashionable society had gradually gained upon him. At first he was moderate in his worldly enjoyments; but a taste for them insensibly sprang up and carried him far away from his old associations and the pious severities of his former life. After his father’s death this change was more clearly marked. He was master of his own affairs, and he plunged more freely into the pleasures of society, although always, it is distinctly said, “without any vice or licentiousness.” All this, his niece adds, was very grievous to her aunt Jacqueline, who grieved in spirit at seeing him who had been the means of making her learn the nothingness of the world return to its vanities.
Too much is not to be made of such statements, or the still stronger expressions of Jacqueline herself in her letters regarding her brother’s final conversion. When she speaks of “wretched attachments” binding him to the world, and of his being still “haunted by the smell of the mud which he had embraced with such empressement,” [64] we are to remember that she speaks not only out of the severity of her own youthful judgment, (and what judgment is so severe at times as that of youth?) but out of the mouth of Port Royal. She condemns a world which was no doubt bad enough, but of which she knew nothing. Her allusions to the “grandeur” of her brother’s life and similar indications have led Sainte-Beuve and others to speak of his extravagance at this time. He is supposed not only to have lived in the world, but to have lived in a style above his means—the companion of men of higher social position than himself, profuse in their habits and expenditure.
That he lived in the midst of society of this kind can hardly be doubted. It is more doubtful how far his own habits had become those of an extravagant man of the world. His chief companion was one who remained bound to him through all the rest of his life, Pascal’s influence having drawn him also from the world when the time of his own change came. This was the Duc de Roannez, a young man of fewer years than himself, who seems to have possessed many attractive qualities. He was devoted to Pascal—could hardly “bear him out of his sight,” as Marguerite Périer says—and Pascal warmly returned his friendship. It seems as if they had lived together a good deal, or at least that Pascal spent the most of his time with the young Duke; and it was in his house and society no doubt that he tasted the joys and perils of that fashionable and luxurious life of which his sister speaks so bitterly. [65a] It was a life, after all, of thoughtless enjoyment rather than of any deeper folly. Both men were as yet very young—the Duke only twenty-two years of age, and Pascal twenty-eight. After his simple and severe training, and the society of his Jansenist friends, it must have been a change full of excitement, possibly of moral danger, to the once enthusiastic student; for the society of the time was charged with the elements both of sceptical and moral indifference. It has been even said that “no society was ever more grandly dissolute” than that of the Fronde, “when women like La Barette [65b]
and La Couronne took the lead in the least discreet pleasures.”
Among the men whom Pascal evidently met at the hotel of the Duc de Roannez, and with whom he formed something of a friendship, was the well-known Chevalier de Méré, whom we know best as a tutor of Madame de Maintenon, and whose graceful but flippant letters still survive as a picture of the time. He was a gambler and libertine, yet with some tincture of science and professed interest in its progress. In his correspondence there is a letter to Pascal, in which he makes free in a somewhat ridiculous manner with the young geometrician already so distinguished. Other names still less reputable—those of Miton and Desbarreaux, for example—have been associated with Pascal during this period. Miton was undoubtedly an intimate ally of De Méré, and amidst all his dissoluteness, made pretensions to scientific knowledge and attainments as a writer. Desbarreaux was a companion of both, but of a still lower grade—a man of open profligacy, and a despiser of the rites of the Church. Along with Miton and other boon companions, he is spoken of as betaking himself to St Cloud for carnival during the Holy Week. [66] The truth would seem to be that all these men came across Pascal’s path at this time, and were more or less known to him. His allusions to both Miton and Desbarreaux in the Pensées imply this. There is a certain familiarity of knowledge indicated in the very
heartiness with which he assails them—speaking of Miton as “hateful,” [67a] and of Desbarreaux as having renounced reason and made himself a “brute.” [67b] But it is against all probability, no less than against all the facts known to us, to suppose that Pascal had more connection with such men than meeting them in the society in which he moved during these years, and becoming well acquainted with the intellectual and moral atmosphere which they breathed. It may be too much to say, with Faugère, that he was then consciously imbibing the experience to be afterwards utilised in his great work, or that it was the principles professed by these men which gave him the first idea of such a work; but we may certainly say that the knowledge of them, as well as all the knowledge he acquired at this time, served to deepen and extend his moral intuitions, and to give a finer point to many of his Thoughts. And no student of Pascal can doubt that “if his feet touched for a moment the dirt of this dissolute society, his divine wings remained unsoiled.” [67c]