CHAPTER V. THE ‘PROVINCIAL LETTERS.’

Pascal himself evidently thought highly of his success.  He liked the controversy, its excitement, and the applausive echo which followed each Letter.  Like every true artist, he felt the joy and yet the gravity of his work.  He took up his pen with a pleasurable sense of mastery, and yet he wrote some of the Letters six or seven times over.  He spared no pains, yet he never wearied.  All his intellectual life for the time was thrown into the controversy, and his most finely-tempered strokes made music in his own mind, while they carried confusion to his adversaries and triumph to his friends.  The sensation made by the Letters was, of course, mainly confined to France; but the nervous Latinity of Nicole soon communicated something of the same sensation to a wider page 156circle. ²¹  Pascal has himself told us that he never repented having written them, nor “the amusing, agreeable, ironical style” in which they were written.  Even the condemnation of the Papal See, abject in some respects as was his devotion to his Church, did not move him on this point.  He left on record, amongst his Thoughts, the following solemn declaration: “If my Letters are condemned in Rome, what i condemn in them is condemned in heaven.  Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello.”