style. I reply... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know
the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then
universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself
read all the books which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so,
I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad
books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my
friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single
passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is
cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and
without having read what went before and followed, so that I might
run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have
been blameworthy and unfair.
Of the wit of the "Provincial Letters," their wit and their
controversial effectiveness, the specimens given will have afforded
readers some approximate idea. We must deny ourselves the gratification
of presenting a brief passage, which we had selected and translated for
the purpose, to exemplify from the same source Pascal's serious
eloquence. It was Voltaire who said of these productions: "Moliere's
best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet
in sublimity." Something of Bossuet's sublimity, or of a sublimity
perhaps finer than Bossuet's, our readers will discover in citations to
follow from the "Thoughts."
Pascal's "Thoughts," the printed book, has a remarkable history. It was
a posthumous publication. The author died, leaving behind him a
considerable number of detached fragments of composition, first jottings
of thought on a subject that had long occupied his mind. These precious
manuscripts were almost undecipherable. The writer had used for his
purpose any chance scrap of paper,--old wrapping, for example, or margin
of letter,--that, at the critical moment of happy conception, was
nearest his hand. Sentences, words even, were often left unfinished.
There was no coherence, no sequence, no arrangement. It was, however,
among his friends perfectly well understood that Pascal for years had
meditated a work on religion designed to demonstrate the truth of
Christianity. For this he had been thinking arduously. Fortunately he
had even, in a memorable conversation, sketched his project at some
length to his Port Royal friends. With so much, scarcely more, in the
way of clew, to guide their editorial work, these friends prepared and
issued a volume of Pascal's "Thoughts." With the most loyal intentions,
the Port-Royalists unwisely edited too much. They pieced out
incompletenesses, they provided clauses or sentences of connection, they
toned down expressions deemed too bold, they improved Pascal's style!
After having suffered such things from his friends, the posthumous
Pascal, later, fell into the hands of an enemy. The infidel Condorcet
published an edition of the "Thoughts." Whereas the Port-Royalists had
suppressed to placate the Jesuits, Condorcet suppressed to please the
"philosophers." Between those on the one side, and these on the other,
Pascal's "Thoughts" had experienced what might well have killed any
production of the human mind that could die. It was not till near the
middle of the present century that Cousin called the attention of the
world to the fact that we had not yet, but that we still might have, a
true edition of Pascal's "Thoughts." M. Faugere took the hint, and
consulting the original manuscripts, preserved in the national library
at Paris, produced, with infinite editorial labor, almost two hundred
years after the thinker's death, the first satisfactory edition of
Pascal's "Thoughts." Since Faugere, M. Havet has also published an
edition of Pascal's works entire, by him now first adequately annotated
and explained. The arrangement of the "Thoughts" varies in order,
according to the varying judgment of editors.
We use, for our extracts, a current translation, which we modify at our
discretion, by comparison of the original text as given in M. Havet's
elaborate work.
Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a sceptic of
the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:--
'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which
reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better
acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these
appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find
myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without
knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or
why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at
this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has
preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.
'I see nothing but infinities on every side, which enclose me like
an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and
returns no more.
'All that I know, is that I am soon to die; but what I am most
ignorant of, is that very death which I am unable to avoid.
'As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I
know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing
which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
state,--full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.
'And from all this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the days
of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall
me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment;
but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in
search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex
themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward
without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and
passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my
future condition.'
Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his
affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions?
And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?
The central thought on which the projected apologetic of Pascal was to
revolve as on a pivot, is the contrasted greatness and wretchedness of
man,--with Divine Revelation, in its doctrine of a fall on man's part
from original nobleness, supplying the needed link, and the only link
conceivable, of explanation, to unite the one with the other, the human
greatness with the human wretchedness. This contrast of dignity and
disgrace should constantly be in the mind of the reader of the
"Thoughts" of Pascal. It will often be found to throw a very necessary
light upon the meaning of the separate fragments that make up the
series.
We now present a brief fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the
same time the fragility of man's frame and the majesty of man's nature.
This is a very famous Thought:--
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking
reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to
crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.
But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble
than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and
knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
knows nothing of it.
Our whole dignity consists, then, in thought.
One is reminded of the memorable saying of a celebrated philosopher: "In
the universe there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing
great but mind."
What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of
Caesar, as conqueror, is made to suffer when looked at in the way in
which Pascal asks you to look at it in the following Thought! (Remember
that Caesar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was fifty-one
years of age:)--
Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or
Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop;
but Caesar ought to have been more mature.
That is as if you should reverse the tube of your telescope, with the
result of seeing the object observed made smaller instead of larger.
The following sentence might be a Maxim of La Rochefoucauld. Pascal was,
no doubt, a debtor to him as well as to Montaigne:--
I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of
them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:--
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed,
into three short sentences:--
The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find
God and our misery.
The prevalent seeming severity and intellectual coldness of Pascal's
"Thoughts" yield to a touch from the heart, and become pathetic, in such
utterances as the following, supposed to be addressed by the Saviour to
the penitent seeking to be saved:--
Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found
me.
I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.
It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as
follows:--
Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the
pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What
do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by
seeking it?
But we must take our leave of Pascal. His was a suffering as well as an
aspiring spirit. He suffered because he aspired. But, at least, he did
not suffer long. He aspired himself quickly away. Toward the last he
wrought at a problem in his first favorite study, that of mathematics,
and left behind him, as a memorial of his later life, a remarkable
result of investigation on the curve called the cycloid. During his
final illness he pierced himself through with many sorrows,--unnecessary
sorrows, sorrows, too, that bore a double edge, hurting not only him,
but also his kindred,--in practising, from mistaken religious motives, a
hard repression upon his natural instinct to love, and to welcome love.
He thought that God should be all, the creature nothing. The thought was
half true, but it was half false. God should, indeed, be all. But, in
God, the creature also should be something.
In French history,--we may say, in the history of the world,--if there
are few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of
Pascal.
IX.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE.
1626-1696.
Of Madame de Sevigne, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a
paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman
of letters, but only a woman of--letters. For Madame de Sevigne's
addiction to literature was not at all that of an author by profession.
She simply wrote admirable private letters, in great profusion, and
became famous thereby.
Madame de Sevigne's fame is partly her merit, but it is also partly her
good fortune. She was rightly placed to be what she was. This will
appear from a sketch of her life, and still more from specimens to be
exhibited of her own epistolary writing.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness.
She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she
was afterward early left a widow,--not too early, however, to have
become the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter
grew to be the life-long idol of the widowed mother's heart. The letters
she wrote to this daughter, married, and living remote from her, compose
the greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which
Madame de Sevigne became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or
probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French
language.
Madame de Sevigne was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have
been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her
substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs
who managed her property well. During her long and stainless
widowhood--her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but
twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy--she divided her time
between her estate, The Rocks, in Brittany, and her residence in Paris.
This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis XIV.,
perhaps, upon the whole, the most memorable age in the history of
France.
Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least brilliantly
witty, Madame de Sevigne was virtuous--in that chief sense of feminine
virtue--amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her
social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to
her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being
once led out to dance by the king--her own junior by a dozen years--no
vulgar king, remember, but the "great" Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin,
himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable
proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her
husband,--we mean Count Bussy,--says, in a scurrilous work of his, that
Madame de Sevigne remarked, on returning to her seat after her
dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and
would certainly obscure the lustre of all his predecessors. "I could not
help laughing in her face," the ungallant cousin declared, "seeing what
had produced this panegyric." Probably, indeed, the young woman was
pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing
can rob Madame de Sevigne of the glory that is hers, in having been
strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many
dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant
aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added, that, besides
access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar
acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld and other high-bred wits, less famous,
not a few, enough will have been said to show that her position was such
as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French history of
the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid and the
most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters.
We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sevigne no less) first of all
to let them see a specimen of the affectionate adulation that this
French woman of rank and of fashion, literally in almost every letter of
hers, effuses on her daughter,--a daughter who, by the way, seems very
languidly to have responded to such demonstrations:--
THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.
You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I
have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style I did
it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others,
not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so
often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other,
has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your
correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in
your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to
me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I
once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan;
but I little thought at that time, that all these beauties were one
day to be at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having
given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in
reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in
me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or
friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken
to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought
yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to
us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from
others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
afford me. It is a fine thing, truly, to play the great lady, as
you do at present.
Conceive the foregoing multiplied by the whole number of the separate
letters composing the correspondence, and you will have no exaggerated
idea of the display that Madame de Sevigne makes of her regard for her
daughter. This regard was a passion, morbid, no doubt, by excess, and,
even at that, extravagantly demonstrated; but it was fundamentally
sincere. Madame de Sevigne idealized her absent daughter, and literally
"loved but only her." We need not wholly admire such maternal affection.
But we should not criticise it too severely.
We choose next a marvellously vivid "instantaneous view," in words, of a
court afternoon and evening at Versailles. This letter, too, is
addressed to the daughter--Madame de Grignan, by her married name. It
bears date, "Paris, Wednesday, 29th July." The year is 1676, and the
writer is just fifty:--
I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three
the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame
[that brother's wife], Mademoiselle [that brother's eldest
unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together
with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and
train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies,--all, in short,
which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the
beautiful apartment of the king's, which you remember. All is
furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is
unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest
pressure. A game at _reversis_ [the description is of a gambling
scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skilful gamester]
gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de
Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by
Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party,
Langlee and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d'ors; they
have no other counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools
we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the
game; he wins where others lose; he neglects nothing, profits by
every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short, his
science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten
days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty
memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to
say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat.
I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it
as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand
kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorges
attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short,
_tutti quanti_ [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a
word from everybody you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of
Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did
me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of
her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and
yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever.
She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand
ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black
ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de
l'Hopital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four
bodkins--nothing else on the head; in short, a triumphant beauty,
worthy the admiration of all the foreign ambassadors. She was
accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king;
she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot
conceive the joy it has given all the world, and the splendor it
has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without
confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three
till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the
despatches, and returns. There is always some music going on, to
which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with
such of the ladies as are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At
six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with
Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest
d'Heudicourt in a fool's paradise on the stool. You know how these
open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all
looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess;
and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then
gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and
then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper;
and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often
you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without
waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little
they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the _iniqua
corte_ [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it
never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last.
There is your picture. Picture, pure and simple, it is--comment none,
least of all, moralizing comment. The wish is sighed by "everybody,"
that such pleasant things may "last." Well, they did last the writer's
time. But meanwhile the French revolution was a-preparing. A hundred
years later it will come, with its terrible reprisals.
We have gone away from the usual translations to find the foregoing
extract in an article published forty years ago and more, in the
"Edinburgh Review." Again we draw from the same source--this time, the
description of a visit paid by a company of grand folks, of whom the
writer of the letter was one, to an iron-foundery:--
FRIDAY, 1st Oct. (1677).
Yesterday evening at Cone, we descended into a veritable hell, the
true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging,
not arms for AEneas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes
redoubled so justly, nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in
the middle of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us,
all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage
mustaches, and hair long and black,--a sight enough to frighten
less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not
comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these
gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at
last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to
refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit.
Once more:--
PARIS, 29th November (1679).
I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I
describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all
gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of
flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted
torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a
distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing
what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet
entangled in trains. From the midst of all this, issue inquiries
after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning,
the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of
ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made.
O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the
small-pox. O vanity, et caetera!
Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend's
frankly writing to her, "You are old." To her daughter:--