After two months of seeking God, Pascal suddenly, when alone in his room on Nov. 22, underwent conversion, the mystic experi ence suffered and described by many of the great religious think ers. His record of it, written in disjointed sentences, he wore thenceforward as a kind of amulet. At the time he said nothing of his conversion, but he presently decided (Jan. 7, 1655) to go into retreat for a time at Port Royal. He was thirty-two, prema turely aged by suffering.
Though Pascal lived much at Port Royal, and partly at least observed its rule, he was never of it. At the end of 1655 a motion was brought forward to expel Antoine Arnauld from the Sorbonne, the immediate cause of the attack being Arnauld's Lettres a un duc et pair on the refusal of absolution by his parish priest to the duc de Liancourt on account of his alleged Jansenist leanings. Pascal undertook Arnauld's defence against the Jesuits.
The first of the Provinciales (Provincial Letters, properly Lettres ecrites par Louis de Montalte a un provincial de ses amis) was written in a few days. It appeared on Jan. 27, 1656, and was followed by others to the number of eighteen. The Provincial Letters are the first example of French prose which is at once considerable in bulk, varied and important in matter, perfectly finished in form. They owe not a little to Descartes, for Pascal's indebtedness to his predecessor is unquestionable from the literary side, whatever may be the case with the scientific. The first exam ple of polite controversial irony since Lucian, the Provinciales have continued to be the best example of it during more than two centuries in which the style has been sedulously practised, and in which they have furnished a model to generation after generation.
Shortly after the appearance of the Provinciales, on May 24, 1656, occurred the miracle of the Holy Thorn, a fragment of the crown of Christ preserved at Port Royal, which cured the little Marguerite Perier of a fistula lacrymalis. The Jesuits were much mortified by this Jansenist miracle, which, as it was officially recognized, they could not openly deny. Pascal and his friends rejoiced in proportion. The details of his later years after this incident are somewhat scanty, though in 1658 he lectured to the leaders of Port Royal on Christian apologetics, embodying the substance of a work which he had been considering since the Provinciales. Two drafts of the lecture were made by friends, and one of these, by his nephew Etienne Perier, is pre ferred to the Port Royal editions of the Pensees. For years before his death we hear only of acts of charity and of, as it seems to modern ideas, extravagant asceticism. Thus Mme. Perier tells us that he disliked to see her caress her children, and would not allow the beauty of any woman to be talked of in his presence.
What may be called his last illness began as early as 1658, and as the disease progressed it was attended with more and more pain, chiefly in the head. In June 1662, having given up his own house to a poor family who were suffering from small-pox, he went to his sister's house to be nursed, and never afterwards left it. His state was, it seems, mistaken by his physicians, so much so that the offices of the Church were long put off. For the last year of his life he had relinquished his questions, and had been preparing himself, as a humble Christian, for death. He was able, however, to receive the Eucharist, and soon afterwards died in convulsions on Aug. 19. A post mortem examination was held, which showed not only grave derangement in the stomach and other organs, but a serious lesion of the brain.
Eight years after Pascal's death, in 167o, appeared what purported to be his Pensees. The editing of the book was peculiar. It was submitted to a committee of influential Jansen ists, with the duc de Roannez at their head. It does not appear that there was much suspicion of the garbling which had been practised, but as a matter of fact no more entirely factitious book ever issued from the press. The fragments which it professed to give were in themselves confused and incoherent enough, nor is it easy to believe that they all formed part of any single and coherent design. The editors omitted. altered, added, separated, combined at their pleasure. This rifacimento remained the standard text with a few unimportant additions for nearly two centuries, except that, by a truly comic revolution of public taste, Condorcet in 1776 published, after study of the original, which remained accessible in manuscript, another garbling, conducted this time in the interests of unorthodoxy. In 1842 Victor Cousin drew attention to the absolutely untrustworthy condition of the text, and in 1844 A. P. Faugere edited that text from the ms. in something like a condition of purity, though, as subsequent editions have shown, not with absolute fidelity. The subjects dealt with concern more or less all the great problems of thought on what may be called the theological side of metaphysics— the sufficiency of reason, the trustworthiness of experience, the admissibility of revelation, free will, foreknowledge, and the rest. Speaking generally, the tendency of the Pensees is towards the combating of scepticism by a deeper scepticism, or, as Pascal himself calls it, Pyrrhonism, which occasionally goes the length of denying the possibility of any natural theology. Pascal explains all the contradictions and difficulties of human life and thought by the doctrine of the Fall, and relies on faith and revelation alone to justify each other.