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Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh–well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know their own business. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are serious, and disinterested, because sincerely interested, in these great questionings. Jalousie de metier, the reader may suspect, has something to do with the Professional leaders on both sides of the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then, it was against the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal’s charges came home in full force. And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere in great matters–faults promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in some easy way quite other than Pascal’s high, fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what one thinks with the glove thrown down. He supposes a Jansenist to turn upon his opponent who uses the term “sufficient” grace, while really meaning, as he alleges, insufficient, with the words:–“Your explanation would be odious to men of the world. They speak more sincerely than you on matters of far less importance than this.” With the world, Pascal, in the “Provincial Letters,” had immediate success. “All the world,” we read in his friend’s supposed reply to the second “Letter,” “sees them; all the world understands them. Men of the world find them agreeable, and even women intelligible.” A century later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of the “Apology” of Socrates; the style which secured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the subjects there treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the “Apologia” of Newman.

The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, is expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion to the justice, the nicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and their writer succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or florid, simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style because, as his sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderful natural facility a dire ce qu’il voulait en la maniere qu’il voulait.

Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which caused Pascal to write the “Letters” was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to say in them led to the development of all those qualities that are summed up in the French term l’esprit. Voltaire declared that the best comedies of Moliere n’ont pas plus de sel que les premieres lettres. “Vos maximes,” Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, “ont je ne sais quoi de divertissant, qui rejouit toujours le monde,” and they lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, so much so that it was clear from the first that the world in general would never ask whether Pascal had been quite fair to his opponents: “N’etes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Peres? Qu’on satisfait au precepte d’ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!” When you have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n’y porte davantage qu’une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu’on attend et ce qu’on voit.

He has “salt” also, of another kind. He drives straight at the Jesuits, for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them, because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source. What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable! And the “Letters” abound in such things.