CHAPTER IV. PORT ROYAL AND PASCAL’S LATER YEARS.

had upset his nervous system—always easily disturbed—and brought before him a frightful picture of his alienation from God, and the piety of his early manhood. Facts mingled with the dreams of his excited imagination. He saw the horses plunging over the precipice, and an abyss seemed to open beside him—the abyss of eternity; when, lo! from the depths of the abyss there appeared a globe of fire (un globe de feu) encircled with the Cross; and the irresistible impulse was stirred in him to throw aside the world for ever, and embrace God,—“Not the God of philosophers or of savants,” but “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob—the God of Jesus Christ,” from whom he had been severed, but from whom he felt he never more would be severed; abiding in Him in “sweet and total renunciation” of all else. The idea, of course, is that page 94Pascal’s dream or vision was the result of physical derangement; and it may be safely granted that if the reality at all corresponded to Lélut’s imaginary picture, this is its natural explanation. The story of the “vision” and the “abyss” are thus made, not without a certain appearance of probability, to fit into one another, and both into the accident at Neuilly; and a certain congruity of external and internal alarm is hence given to the great crisis of Pascal’s life. Unhappily, however, there is a lack of evidence regarding the accident itself,⁷ and, still more, the accompanying story of the abyss seen by Pascal at his side, which must make the reader cautious who has no theory to support. Voltaire, in his usual manner, made the most of Pascal’s supposed delusions. “In the last years of his life,” he said, “Pascal believed that he had seen an abyss by the side of his chair,—need we on that account have the same fancy? I, too, see an abyss, but it is in the very things which he believed that he had explained.” He quotes also the authority of Leibnitz for the statement that Pascal’s melancholy had led his intellect astray—a result, he adds, not at all wonderful in the case of a man of such delicate temperament and gloomy imagination. But Voltaire was not precise here, as in other matters about Pascal. He understood him too little to be a good judge of his mental peculiarities. All that Leibnitz really said was, that Pascal, “in page 95wishing to