upon his friends and himself, contemptible as they were in their nature, left scars upon a mind and temper so sensitive and reserved as his. The “insufferable audacity” with which “holy nuns and their directors” had been charged with disbelieving the mysteries of the faith was “a crime which God alone was capable of punishing.” To bear such a charge required a degree of humility equal to that of the nuns themselves—to believe it, “a degree of wickedness equal to that of their wretched defamers.” As for himself, it seemed enough to say of him that he belonged to Port Royal, as if it were only at Port Royal that there could be found those capable of defending the purity of Christian morality. He knew and honoured the work page 137of the pious recluses who had retired to that monastery, although “he had never had the honour of belonging to them.” And in the seventeenth Letter he says:—
“I have no more to say than that I am not a member of that community, and to refer you to my letters, in which I have declared that ‘I am a private individual;’ and again in so many words that ‘I am not of Port Royal.’ . . . You may touch Port Royal if you choose, but you shall not touch me. You may turn people out of the Sorbonne, but that will not turn me out of my lodging.”
These statements, of course, are to be received as so far a part of the disguise under which Pascal pursued his task. It was true that he had no official connection with Port Royal, that he was under