“Et ancien ami Blaise Pascal, Auvergnat, fils de Étienne Pascal.” There can be no doubt that he took a distinct pleasure in the anonymous wounds which he inflicted. He had a certain love of controversy from the beginning, a feeling of self-assertion when he took up a cause, and a personal ambition to triumph in it, which carried him forward, and which come out with almost painful vividness in the closing letters.
The rage of the Jesuits may be imagined. At first they hardly knew whether to laugh with the world or to be indignant. The first Letter was read in the dining-hall of the Sorbonne itself. Some were amused, others greatly provoked. But, as the Letters proceeded, there was no room for any feeling but indignation. It was so difficult to set forth any direct reply to productions mingling such a page 133subtle irony with grave attack. They could only say of them, as they afterwards more formally did—Les menteurs immortelles. Of the first Letters it is said that 6000 copies were printed; but, as they were easily passed from hand to hand, this gives no idea of the numbers who actually read them. Their fame grew with each successive issue. More than 10,000 copies were printed of the seventeenth Letter; and editions of the earlier ones were so frequently reprinted, that it can no longer be told which belonged really to the first edition.