to be immortal, all the mutilation which an exaggerated prudence or a misdirected zeal could suggest, with the view not only of guarding their orthodoxy, but of embellishing their style—the style of the author of the ‘Provincials’!” “There are not,” he adds, “twenty successive lines which do not present some alteration, great or small. As for total omissions and partial suppressions, they are without number.” M. Cousin is equally emphatic. “There are,” he says, “examples of every kind of alteration—alteration of words, alteration of phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions, arbitrary compositions, and, what is worse, decompositions more arbitrary still.”
It is impossible to defend the first editors of the ‘Pensées.’ But it should be remembered that their task was one not only of theological perplexity, but of great literary difficulty. Pascal’s manuscripts were a mere mass of confused papers, sometimes written on both sides, and in a hand for the most part so obscure and imperfectly formed as to be illegible to all who had not made it a special study. The papers were pasted or bundled together without any natural connection, parts containing the same piece being sometimes intersected and sometimes widely separated from one another. If the editors, therefore, did their work ill, it was partly no doubt from incompetency, but partly from its inherent difficulty, and from the fact that being so near to Pascal they could hardly appreciate the feelings of the modern critic as to the sacredness of his style, and of all that came from his pen.
The edition of 1669 continued to be reprinted with little alteration for a century. Various additional
fragments were brought to light, especially the famous conversation between De Saci and Pascal regarding Epictetus and Montaigne; but the form of the fragments remained unchanged. It was not till the edition of Condorcet in 1776 that they can be said to have undergone any new rédaction. Unhappily Pascal suffered in the hands of the Encyclopedists, as he had previously suffered in the hands of the Jansenists and the Sorbonne. The first editors had expunged whatever might seem at variance with orthodoxy. Condorcet suppressed or modified whatever partook of a too lofty enthusiasm or a too fervent piety. It became a current idea among the Encyclopedists that the accident at Neuilly had affected Pascal’s brain. We have already seen how Voltaire spoke of this; and he directed an early attack (1734) upon the doctrine of human nature contained in the ‘Pensées.’ Now, in his old age, he hailed Condorcet’s edition, and reissued it two years later, with an Introduction and Notes by himself.
In the following year, 1779, appeared the elaborate and well-known edition of Pascal’s works by the Abbé Bossut, accompanied by an admirable “Discours sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Pascal.” In this edition the remains are found for the first time in some degree of completeness. All the fragments published by Port Royal, and all those subsequently brought to light by Des Molets and others, are included and arranged in a new order. But meritorious as were Bossut’s editorial labours as a whole, they did not attempt any restoration of the ‘Pensées’ to their original text; and even the new fragments published by him were not left untouched. He embodied, for example, the famous conversation with
De Saci, but without giving De Saci’s part of the dialogue. In short, he reproduced, as M. Havet says, all the faults of the first editors, and made others of his own. This is the more remarkable that he is said to have had in his possession a copy of the original manuscripts. Condorcet, however, consulted the original manuscripts themselves, without any thought of doing justice to Pascal’s text.
So matters remained till 1842, when M. Cousin published his famous Report on the subject to the French Academy. The French public then found to their astonishment that, with so many editions of the ‘Pensées,’ they had not the ‘Pensées’ themselves. While philosophers had disputed as to his ideas, and critics admired his style, the veritable Pascal of the ‘Pensées’ had all the time lain concealed in a mass of manuscripts in the National Library. Such a story, it may be imagined, did not lack any force in the manner in which M. Cousin told it; and an eager desire arose for a new and complete edition of the fragments. Cousin had prepared the way, but he did not himself undertake this task, which was reserved for M. Faugère, whose great edition appeared two years later, in 1844. Nothing can deprive M. Faugère of the credit of being the first editor of a complete and authentic text of the ‘Pensées.’
Other editions of distinctive merit have since appeared; and it may be admitted that, in the natural reaction from the laxity of former editions, he gave a too literal transcript of the manuscripts, including some things of little importance, and others more properly belonging to an edition of the ‘Provincial Letters’ than of the ‘Pensées.’ But, whether it be the result of early association or of
greater familiarity with M. Faugère’s pages, I own still a preference for this edition, while admitting the admirable perspicuity and intelligence of many of M. Havet’s notes, and the splendour of the edition of M. Victor Rochet, the most recent (1873) that has come under my notice.
The principle observed by M. Faugère is strongly defended in his preface. He allowed himself no discretionary powers of emendation, because “the limits of such a power might,” he says, “be too easily overstepped, and would have left room for belief that greater liberties had been taken than was actually the case.” “The manuscripts,” he adds, “have been read, or rather studied, page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, to the end; and, with the exception of illegible words (which, however, are carefully indicated), they have passed completely into the present edition.”