“One day,” it is said, “in the month of October 1654, when he went, according to his habit, to take his drive to the bridge of Neuilly *in a carriage and four*, the two leading horses became restive at a part of the road where there was a parapet, and precipitated themselves into the Seine. Fortunately, the first strokes of their feet broke the traces which attached them to the pole, and the carriage was stayed on the brink of the precipice. The effect of such a shock on one of Pascal’s feeble health may be imagined. He swooned away, and was only restored with difficulty, and his nerves were so shattered that long afterwards, during sleepless nights and during moments of weakness, he seemed to see a precipice at his bedside, over which he was on the point of falling.”
This alarming incident, which comes from nearly contemporary tradition, no doubt contributed to Pascal’s retirement from the world, and no less probably also a strange vision he had at this time, to which we shall afterwards advert. But it is peculiarly interesting to trace the inner history of Pascal’s great change. Evidently, from what his sister says, his mind had been for some time very ill at ease in the great world in which he lived. How far this was the working of his old religious convictions continually renewing their influence through the conversation of his sister, how far it was mere weariness and disgust with the frivolities of fashionable life, and how far it may have been baffled hope and the disenchantments of a broken dream of love, we cannot clearly tell. All may have moved him, and brought page 79him to that strange state of isolation which she describes from his