CHAPTER V. THE ‘PROVINCIAL LETTERS.’

no rule to live in its retirements, and that he was only occasionally found there. He was singularly free, “without engagements, entanglement, relationship, or business of any kind.” All the same he was a Port Royalist in sympathy and community of opinion. The interests of Port Royal were his interests, and its friends his friends. His own sister was one of its zealous inmates. There is a certain force, therefore, in the taunt that Pascal, in “unmasking the duplicity of the Jesuits, did not hesitate to imitate it.” His statements are not beyond the licence accorded to those who would drive an enemy off the scent, and shelter themselves within an anonymity which they have chosen to assume; but they are none the less artful and misleading. They justify themselves as the fence of the littérateur, hardly as the armour of the moralist. But the truth is, that long before this Pascal had warmed to his work as a controversialist. He was determined to give no advantage, and to spare no weapons page 138within the bounds of decency, that might make the Jesuits feel the force of his assault. Their accusation of heresy especially exasperated him.