They are threatened with all the furies; God loads them with His favours.” This was Pascal’s own language on the subject,9 and there can be no doubt that the supposed miracle deeply affected him. He was “sensibly touched,” it is said, “by such a grace, regarding it as virtually done to himself, seeing it was done to one so near to him in kindred, and who was his spiritual daughter in baptism.” He was penetrated by a great joy, and much occupied by the thought of what had happened, and the general subject of miracles. There was in this manner awakened in him “the extreme desire of employing himself on a work in refutation of the principles and false page 98reasonings of the atheists.” “He had studied them,” his sister continues, “with great care, and applied his whole mind to search out the means of convincing them. His last year of work was entirely occupied in collecting divers thoughts on this subject.”
Unhappily, in the course of 1658 Pascal’s old illness returned with redoubled severity, and the last four years of his life became in consequence years of great languor and interruption of his projected work. The practice of continuous composition failed him. Hitherto he had been wont to develop his thoughts completely,—to write them out, as it were, mentally before committing them to paper; but now he began the habit of transferring his ideas rapidly, and sometimes imperfectly, to manuscript, as they arose in his mind. In many cases, if not in all, these first sketches remained as originally made, without any revision or further reconstruction; and from the mass of papers accumulated in this manner during these years the ‘Pensées’ were formed—the story of whose publication will be afterwards told. Strangely, it was in this very year, during a fit of severe toothache, apparently connected with his general illness, that Pascal began his wonderful series of problems on the cycloid, showing how fresh and unimpaired his scientific genius remained under all the changes of his health and of his main intellectual interests.
The last years of Pascal’s life, in their deep suffering, and in their many traits of pious resignation and self-denial, have been fully sketched by