Paris, that the Duc de Roannez, “who engaged him almost entirely,” was about to return there. Unable to find everything to his wish, however, in his own house, “he obtained a chamber or little cell among the Solitaries of Port Royal,” from which he wrote to his sister with extreme joy that he was lodged and treated like a prince, “according to St Bernard’s judgment of what it was to be a prince.” It is still Jacqueline’s pen which reports all this to Madame Périer. She continues in the same letter:—
“He joins in every office of the Church from Prime to Compline, without feeling the slightest inconvenience in rising at five o’clock in the morning; and as if it was the will of God that he should join fasting to watching, in defiance of all the medical prescriptions which had forbidden him both the one and the other, he found that supper disagreed with him, and was about to give it up.” 2
Such is the story of Pascal’s final conversion and retirement from the world. Jacqueline’s details fill in the briefer sketch of Madame Périer, and both tell the page 78story at first hand. None could have known so well as they did all the circumstances. It is remarkable, therefore, that neither of them says anything of the well-known incident, emphasised by Bossut as the mainly exciting cause of his great change:—