Annonce au Provincial, Toujours de la grippe

TOUJOURS DE LA GRIPPE

Charles Péguy

The doctor was the first to recall that his profession was not to remain under the impression of the most beautiful testimonies, but to analyze them as best he could, and to critique them.

— We shall not have the presumption, my friend, of interpreting this story. You have perfectly understood it. It gives you incompletely right. It gives me right complementarily.

— Before we divide between us, doctor, the incomplete or complementary portions of this story, if you still dare to do so, permit me.

— I permit you.

— As you advanced in the narration we owe to the fraternal and severe piety of Madame Périer, I felt within myself a double sentiment, two neighboring sentiments not at first reconcilable. I perceived that these facts were new to me. I recognized that these facts were known to me.

I perceived that these facts were truly new to me. And yet I had read, or at least I had gone through, in the days when I was a student, this long text printed fine, small and dense, while I was preparing indispensable examinations and useful competitive tests. But the narration had not entered my deep memory.

— That is not surprising, my friend.

— That is not surprising. The competitive tests and examinations we must endure and in which we help to envenom the ancient emulation, all the rivalries of childhood, all the scholastic competitions where we make ourselves accomplices of the old rivalry give, despite ourselves, to all the work we do in preparation not only a superficial character, but I know not what of hostile and foreign, of pernicious, of bad, of malignant, of unhealthy. The authors are no longer the same, and there is always some hesitation when Blaise Pascal is an author on the curriculum. This incommunication is also a grave impediment to all teaching, primary, secondary, or higher. I recall very well that throughout my studies I set aside most of my authors for when I could read them man to man, sincerely. We have just done so, in first reading, for some passages of a story that is indeed a natural introduction to the Pensées. Shall we be able one day to do the following readings, the second, third and subsequent readings, ever more profound. Shall we ever do some reading that is definitive?

— I do not think our readings will ever be final. And first of all, do we know what it is to read, and to read well, and to read poorly?

— I do not know; but I know that then I was not reading my authors well, that I was setting them aside, and that now, when I have the time, I read them better. But it was not that, doctor, which struck me most while I was listening to you. In these facts, which were new to me, I profoundly recognized the ancient events that had obscurely struck my contemporary childhood. The story of the great Blaise and the story of the poor lady, innocent and aged in devotion, which I permitted myself to tell you, are very nearly the same story. Admit that for the moment I set aside the elements of this story that I believe pertain to your interrogations. Admit that I leave aside the details. On the whole this story is the same. The poor lady with the lung congestion, wonder of the women who went to wash the laundry, edification of the sour devout Bees, illustration of the countryside and the faubourg, scandal of easy minds, ignorant though she was, bourgeois, old, poor in spirit, ugly no doubt, insignificant, insane if you will, provincial unknown in the depths of a provincial faubourg, the poor lady “wrapped up by the priests,” as they said, nonetheless had all the passions, all the sentiments and almost all the thoughts of a Pascal. Truly they were the same faithful. Doctor, I wonder if that is not the whole strength of Christian communion, and in particular of Catholic communion. The unhappy faithful woman had the same faith, the same outpourings, the same charity, the same sacraments. She too received at last him whom she had so desired, whom she had desired in the same way. And without playing immorally with assimilations, I wonder if one or several similar socialist communions would not be powerfully effective in preparing the revolution of health.

— I hear you poorly, and badly.

— I am proposing to you there, doctor, poorly prepared imaginings. I shall represent them to you later. But here, quite simply, is what I meant: I observed or believed I observed that the close kinship of Christian sentiments of those we call the great to the Christian sentiments of those we call the humble [Cahier of April 5, 1900] gave a formidable strength to the religion we have renounced; thus I desired that a close kinship be established or remain from the socialist sentiments of those we call the learned to the socialist sentiments of those we call the simple citizens. I count much on certain simple ideas. I count much on the diffusion, through teaching, of simple revolutionary ideas. I hope that the revolution will be accomplished above all by the universal free adherence, the universal free conversion to a few simple moralist socialist ideas. That is why I have sometimes been called obscurantist, or ignorantist.

— Let us leave these miseries. Neither do I believe that socialism is as cunning as we are often told. Let us leave these debates for today. You were able to distinguish in the narration of which I truly gave you knowledge two Christian tendencies, and two methods that compose themselves. First method: the sick person cares for his body, works at healing his body as best he can, for reasons we shall give. But as this first method is the only one that concerns us today, we shall first eliminate the second. Second method: the sick person perceives that the care given to his body or that the attenuation of natural suffering constitutes a pleasure of the senses, or simply, if you will, the sick person, instead of considering the care and remedies as necessary for healing, considers them as a pleasure of the senses; then, by spirit of penitence, either he deprives himself of certain cares, or else, which for us amounts to the same, he gives himself certain severities that attenuate, balance, or surpass the effect of remedies and cares. We shall leave penitence for today. But we shall not neglect the first method. According to this method the Christian gives all his cares to the health of his body just as well as you do. God created him. God placed him in the world. God keeps him in the world. God will recall him from the world. When he wished. As he wishes. When he shall wish. Human life is in one sense a deposit. It is in one sense a trial. It is in one sense an exile, a residence of captivity:

“On the land of exile why do I yet remain? There is nothing in common between the earth and me.”

The earth is a place of punishment. The Christian is a depositary. He is one being tried. He is an exile, a punished one, a condemned man for a time. He can become one condemned in perpetuity, one damned for eternity, a reprobate. He is not the master of the hour. There is no hesitation on this point: that the Church, commanding for God, interpreting the commandment of God, the fifth law, Thou shalt not kill, forbids suicide. Now to neglect the health of one’s body is exactly to commit a partial suicide, a preparatory suicide, a beginning of execution of suicide. It is to advance the hour of the rendering of accounts, the end of the trial, the return from exile, to advance the nostos always longed for; it is to diminish the time of punishment, to advance the hour of liberation. It is to make some miserable human fantasy intervene at the heart of the divine decree. It is to encroach upon the power of the Creator. It is to commit a sacrilege and to fall into mortal sin. If your poor lady truly contributed to her own death, I greatly fear that, immediately afterward, her God received her very badly.

— You cite Greek, doctor, no less abundantly than citizen Lafargue.

— Citizen Lafargue is a learned man and I am not surprised that all the intellectuals together have conspired to envy him his universal erudition, being unable to rob him of it. In the Researches he conducted on the Origin of the Idea of Justice, and which he was kind enough to give for insertion in the Revue socialiste, and which we thus came to know in July 1899, he unveiled to us an intellectual loyalty no less impeccable than that which is transparent in the contemporary Manifesto. But what the best-informed gazes would not be able to see in the Manifesto, which he drafted for one third, the least intellectual gazes are forced to observe in the Researches, which doubtless he drafted for all three thirds. I speak here of that incomparable erudition, of that universal knowledge. One would already say an exposition, before the one to come. The author knows the savage and the barbarian; he knows the Redskins according to the American historian Adair; he knows the Fijian; the Slavic women of Dalmatia; the Afghan proverb; the Semitic God; the Moabites; the Ammonites; the Hebrew as well as the Scandinavian; the Erinyes of Greek Mythology; the chorus of the grandiose trilogy of Aeschylus, crying to Orestes; Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, the Achaeans, Hector and Troy; Clytemnestra; again the Erinyes and the shadowy Erebus; again the Erinyes of Aeschylus, and Orestes; and Attica; and the Semitic God and the poetic imagination of the Greeks…

— Stop, doctor, I beg you!

— I still have twenty-three pages of it, monsieur!

— Have pity on a sick man!

— I shall have pity. What I have told you, and which was so long, took up only two pages. Do not believe, my friend, that ever Monsieur Alfred Picard, the general commissioner, will make the universe fit in so little space. And do not believe either that ever Monsieur Pierre Larousse, of happy memory, distributing human knowledge by the chance of alphabets, has so rapidly passed from the poles to the equator. If only I could continue my citations of these citations. You would have heard Vico in his Scienza nuova; you would have heard Aristotle and known the Word, and you would have known the Hecatoncheires of Greek Mythology, and Fison and Howitt, those conscientious and intelligent observers of Australian customs, and the wehrgeld, and Sir G. Grey, Dalmatia, the Scandinavians and the Eddas, Jesus Christ, Saint Paul and the Apostles. I pass over Lord Carnarvon, Reminiscences of Athens and Morea, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, and the ordinances of Edward I of England, and Cain, driven from his clan after the murder of Abel, in Genesis (IV, 13, 14). I pass over the Australian, and Fraser; and the shades of Achilles, and Polyxena, the sister of Paris; and Darwin recounting in his Voyage of a Naturalist a characteristic anecdote: he saw a Fuegian; Caesar and the barbarians he had before his eyes; the greatest chief of the Redskins according to Volney. We would have continued with Plutarch, Aristides and Philopoemen; the thar, law of blood of the Bedouins and of almost all the Arabs; and we would have returned to the Germans and the Scandinavians. And we would have returned to Jehovah, who does not fear contradicting himself, and to Deuteronomy (XXIV, 16). Then we would have returned once more to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, lately abandoned. But Cailliaud would have boldly led us to certain tribes of the African desert. And Fraser to Persia. And Lafargue to Norway. As for Athens, the civil power undertook to strike the guilty one, the nearest relative attended the execution. And we would have departed from Athens again, without eating or drinking, without sleeping or thinking, ignoring the ancient hospitality. Barely stopped at the Egyptians by Diodorus Siculus, G.-W. Steller was carrying us off, quite exhausted, all the way to the Itelmen of Kamchatka. But you yourself, citizen convalescent, must I be tiring you?

— Not at all: I am not listening. When I saw that you were passing over my prayers, when I saw that you were resorting to that miserable figure of rhetoric, called, I believe, preterition or pretermission, a figure, as far as I remember, hypocritical, and which, as far as I recall, consists in pretending to pass over in silence all that one wants nonetheless to inflict upon the listener, I went on a listener’s strike.

— That is a pity, monsieur. We would have continued. We would have devoured raw all this erudition. We would have instructed ourselves. And then we would have exclaimed: How beautiful science is! And we would have finished with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, of the revolutionary bourgeois of 1789, and with Pope Leo XIII, in his famous encyclical on the condition of workers. But you do not wish to listen to me. Would it be true that you were an ignorantist?

— Citizen Lafargue is not an ignorantist. He is not an ignoramus. And in all that you have cited to me, doctor, there are almost no spelling errors. I prefer to your ironic or serious citations the modest Greek that you spontaneously, and doubtless without meaning to, introduced into the fabric of your discourses.

— Honorable professors, severe, gentle and punctual, purely academic, taught me this Greek at the lycée. From the fifth form to rhetoric, slowly and commonly, guessing and stammering, we read the Hellenic poets, at once foreign to us and youthfully hospitable to our young imaginations. The customs of ancient men, of heroes, of kings, of cities and of gods were new to us, for they differed notably from the bourgeois customs then flourishing in the good city of Orléans: the ancient poets seemed to us all the more beautiful. I recall very well that the ancient exile then inspired in the wretched a singular terror and that the return, the nostos, was desired as the great happiness, as a rebirth. It seems to me that the Christians inherited these sentiments, but that they divinized the terror and the desire. When the city had become, as you know, the universal, eternal city of God, the earth, which we plow, became, as we have said, the residence of exile, residence of terror, and death, which we dread, became the supreme return. But by what right return to the celestial city before the Master of the city had restored your rights of citizenship, or had conferred upon you the rights of the citizen? Otherwise, what an intrusion. Will it suffice for the wretched intruder to embrace the altars of the gods or to invoke Zeus the Hospitable. Truly, I repeat to you: If your poor lady truly contributed to her death, I greatly fear that her God received her badly.

— No, doctor, I am certain that her God forgave her; for this God, killer of gods, inherited from the gods he killed; he became after Zeus the God of hosts; and his hospitality is infinite; and he welcomes the wretched. He became infinitely hospitable, infinitely merciful, and he will indeed have wished to consider that since the beginning of grace he had admitted many female saints and many male saints fallen into the same sin, of having hastily desired the celestial city.

— The Christian is not to count on mercy so as to give himself the margin to fall into mortal sin. Thus Pascal believed himself obliged to do all that would be possible for him to restore his health. I hold to this expression. He was submitted to God. He had an admirable patience. But he put precisely his submission, and he exercised precisely his admirable patience in receiving well and in giving himself and having given to himself the treatments, the remedies and the cares that the doctors who came to visit him had prescribed for him. In which doing he conducted himself as a perfect geometer and as a perfect Christian. He saw no less clearly then in the ordering of his piety than he saw clearly, despite the assurances of the doctors, in the course and in the worsening of his extraordinary illness.

— What strange doctors these doctors of Pascal. What tranquility! and what misrecognition. But we would be wrong to imagine that we would have said everything when we had said that they are also the doctors of Molière. Unwarned, modern or contemporary doctors would have been no less mistaken. They awaited in Pascal common, ordinary illnesses. I do not know if he labored under these illnesses; but it seems to me that he labored above all under the illness of thinking and of believing; he had begun with the illness of thinking; he continued with the illness of thinking aggravated by the illness of believing: these are formidable ills, if not inexpiable, and which the good doctors did not take into consideration. We who have the Pensées, we have thereby on the life and on the death of Blaise Pascal, on the suffering and the dilapidation of his body, information that his doctors did not have; we have glimmers they did not have; we have new understandings; and, without doing metaphysics, we know that his body labored under the suffering of his soul. The illness of believing is given to everyone, and my poor lady had it just as Pascal had had it. It is an illness that has become rarer. The illness of thinking is not yet given to everyone. It has remained a little more professional. It is, to say the word, an intellectual illness. I do not believe it is dishonorable. The excess of intellectual work dilapidates the soul and the body without dishonoring the person just as the excess of manual work dilapidates the body and the soul without dishonoring the person. An intellectually brutalized worker is as wretched and no more contemptible than an infirm mason or a hunchbacked vintner. But he is no more commendable. Or rather the intellectual illness is no more commendable than the manual illness or accident.

For all workers, and for citizen Pascal himself, health, alone harmonious, is also the only thing that is commendable.

— Let us suspend, my friend, these rash and vaguely religious affirmations. We are still on the doctors of Pascal.

— They were good people, and I could not say more. I wanted to make you observe with me, doctor, how dangerous it would be to cut too sharply the methods we believe distinguished in reality. Your first and second methods compose themselves for Christians by associating, by reinforcing themselves, even by confusing themselves much more often than they contradict each other. The treatments, the remedies and the cares, the tisanes, the nauseating drugs and the insipid potions serve them for two ends: naturally the cares prepare or accomplish the healing; morally, or rather religiously, since the drugs are disagreeable, painful, dolorous, they furnish an exercise of penitence.

— The value of which is diminished by as much for the faithful who would naturally fear, like you, illness and death. Inversely, did you for a single instant, at the moment of danger, dread what a sincere Christian can dread?

— No, doctor, not for a single instant did I dread the Judgment and the Reprobation. The thirteen or fourteen centuries of Christianity introduced among my ancestors, the eleven or twelve years of Catholic instruction and sometimes education sincerely and faithfully received passed over me without leaving traces. All the comrades I had at primary school, whether they have become manual workers or intellectual workers, whether they have become peasants or workmen, whether they have or have not become socialists and republicans, are no less rid of their Catholicism than I am. That is what makes so disquieting the incontestable invasion of the Catholic Church, and so formidable. Whatever the beauty of several individual Catholics, all the power of the contemporary Church is founded either on interested hypocrisy, or on interested cynicism. See Jaurès: “To inoculate in the nascent people the religious hypocrisy of the dying bourgeoisie.” Not only has this crime been attempted: its perpetration is not badly advanced. Will they go to the consummation? Must we be, upon my faith, tartuffied? That too is a collective illness.

— One of the gravest, and one of those that leads us most ignobly to collective death. Most ignobly and most surely.

— I have a friend who has remained Catholic.

— You have a friend who has remained Catholic?

— I have a friend who has remained Catholic, or, what amounts to the same, a Catholic has remained my friend. I see him a few hours every two or three years, when he passes through Paris. For he too is a provincial. My friend is a priest.

— You have a friend who is a Catholic priest?

— I have a friend who became a Catholic priest. He has remained my friend. It is a friendship that, for today, does not concern you. If I had remained Catholic, doubtless I would have become a priest with him. When I say he became a priest, I am not well informed about that. We see each other so rarely. He was a seminarian. He advanced by degrees regularly, ritually, from the taught Church to the teaching Church. I do not know where he is at. I believe he has finished. I do not even know these degrees. In which I am wrong.

My friend was ill. I recall now very well that he cared for himself punctually. He is still very young. He was deeply damaged. Chest and nervous system. For weeks and months, for years, furnished with his gentle austere and wise temperament, with his unalterable and informed patience, with his long and high submission, clothed in his upright, invulnerable and slow fidelity, not only did he take care to treat himself with determined remedies and cares, as in the time of Pascal, but piously adopting the most properly scientific data of modern science, he followed with the same submission and fidelity what we call a regimen. That is to say that instead of having in his endangered life hours when he would have lived and minutes when he would have medically cared for his body, far from it, all his minutes were given to cares, and life itself was incorporated into the cares. He followed a regimen. Hygiene inseparably was confused for him with medicine. He had submitted his whole life to the command of this regimen. He left his comrades, his friends, his masters, his parents, his country and went to shut himself away for entire half-years in the Luxembourg establishment where a Luxembourg doctor had introduced the latest arrangements for the sick. He abandoned for a long time his studies, which were however sacred studies. He tempered, he diminished regularly and considerably his exercises, which were however exercises of piety. I do not know if he had to request dispensations for that from the ecclesiastical authorities. But what I know well is that his prayer itself was submitted to the commands of his regimen. And what I know for certain is that he had no natural attachment to life and that he had a religious detachment from it, and that prayer was infinitely precious to him. But evidently he thought and believed that he must deprive himself of praying to God in order to remain faithfully on the earth where God had sent him.

— Do not believe, my friend, that the institution of the regimen is exclusively modern. The ancients already thought that it was necessary for the athlete to follow a regimen. And in what I read to you about the life and death of Blaise Pascal appears in fragments the preoccupation with a regimen. The sick man did not only exercise his patience and his submission in moments of crisis in well accepting the painful and dolorous remedies as he accepted the sufferings themselves: he exercised patience and the same submission in ordinary periods; he then regulated his nourishment according to contestable laws, but which seemed good to him, wise, which doubtless corresponded roughly in his mind to what we call the laws of hygiene. He did not eat beyond a certain quantity, even when he was still hungry, and he always ate a certain quantity, even when he had no appetite.

— I admit, doctor, that these laws seemed to him to intervene roughly as what we call the laws of hygiene and the laws of a regimen seem to us to intervene. I only remark that these laws now seem to us crude in their brutality.

— No, my friend: they are properly neither crude nor brutal. But they are as one had to and as one could make them in the time of Pascal. Do not forget that then the sciences we call natural were so to speak not yet born; natural history was not yet born and human history was poorly pursued; and chemistry too had not been instituted. On the contrary mathematics, physics, mathematical physics, mathematical mechanics had suddenly given extraordinary results. Celestial mechanics had given admirable justifications. You cannot deny that the admirable coincidence of celestial phenomena with human calculations, that the fidelity of the planets, vagabonds, to astronomical appointments had given to most of these philosophers and these savants a satisfaction still unheard of and sometimes like a new pride. They were doubtless proudly geometers, and the resonance of this pride, equally inadmissible to Christians, to moralists and to naturalists, resounds from Cartesian physics, metaphysics, anatomy and physiology to Leibnizian philosophy and even to the critique of Kant. Pascal escaped from it as a Christian, by the contemplation of sanctity:

“The infinite distance from bodies to minds figures the infinitely more infinite distance from minds to charity, for it is supernatural.

“All the splendor of greatnesses has no luster for people who are engaged in researches of the mind. The greatness of men of mind is invisible to kings, to the rich, to captains, to all these great ones of the flesh.

The greatness of Wisdom, which is nowhere except in God, is invisible to the carnal and to men of mind. These are three orders differing in kind.

“The great geniuses have their empire, their splendor, their greatness, their victory and their luster, and have no need of carnal greatnesses, where they have no connection. They are seen not by eyes, but by minds; that is enough. The saints have their empire, their splendor, their victory, their luster, and have no need of carnal or spiritual greatnesses, where they have no connection, for they neither add to nor take away from them. They are seen by God and by angels, and not by bodies, nor by curious minds: God suffices them.

“Archimedes, without splendor, would be held in the same veneration. He did not give battles for the eyes, but he furnished all minds with his inventions. Oh! how he shone for minds! Jesus Christ, without goods, and without any production outwardly of science, is in his order of sanctity. He gave no invention, he did not reign; but he was humble, patient, holy, holy, holy to God, terrible to demons, without any sin. Oh! how he came in great pomp and in prodigious magnificence, to the eyes of the heart, who see Wisdom!”

“We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.”

“Those we see as Christians without knowledge of the prophecies and proofs nonetheless judge of them as well as those who have this knowledge. They judge of them by the heart as the others judge by the mind. It is God himself who inclines them to believe; and thus they are very efficaciously persuaded.”

That is why your poor lady had the same sentiments and so to speak the same thoughts as Pascal. You see that Pascal was not unaware of it.

— I do not wish, doctor, to let myself be seduced again by comparisons that I would make into displaced assimilations. But I know at present many men and many citizens: Those we see as socialists without knowledge of the prophecies and proofs nonetheless judge of them as well as those who have this knowledge. They judge of them by the heart, as the others judge by the mind. It is solidarity itself that inclines them to believe, and thus they are very efficaciously persuaded.

— I hear you honestly and without any complacency and without accepting an exaggeration, but I am not surprised, my friend, that solidarity seems to you to have for socialists, and making the suitable mutations in the respective attributions, the same function that God himself had for Christians. For their God acted in them only by the natural ways, which we call natural laws, and by the supernatural ways of grace, to which charity corresponded. You know what perfectly effective sense Pascal gives to this word charity, which so many Christians have diverted to vulgar senses. We too, my friend, nothing prevents us from restoring to the word solidarity, which so many socialists have vulgarly coined, a sense no less perfectly effective, no less precise, no less valid. Thus understood, thus loved, thus willed, thus known, thus exercised, thus profound and free, socialist solidarity springs up frequently in the heart of the humble and the poor, in the heart of the ignorant.

— That is indeed what I meant: we have our saints and we have our doctors.

— But we must not neglect for all that reasoning, patient work and knowledge. There are saints who are doctors, there have been saints among the Fathers of the Greek Church and of the Latin Church and of the Middle Ages. The two compose themselves:

“And that is why those to whom God has given religion by sentiment of the heart are quite happy and quite legitimately persuaded. But those who do not have it, we can only give it to them by reasoning, while waiting for God to give it to them by sentiment of heart, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.”

— I hear you as is fitting.

— I continue:

“It would have been useless for Archimedes to play the prince in his books of geometry, although he was one. It would have been useless for our Lord Jesus Christ, to shine forth in his reign of sanctity, to come as a king: but how well he came with the splendor of his order!

“It is quite ridiculous to be scandalized by the lowliness of Jesus Christ, as if this lowliness were of the same order as the greatness he came to make appear. Let one consider this greatness in his life, in his passion, in his obscurity, in his death, in the election of his own, in their abandonment, in his secret resurrection, and in the rest; one will see it so great, that one will have no occasion to be scandalized by a lowliness that is not there. But there are those who can only admire carnal greatnesses, as if there were no spiritual ones; and others who admire only the spiritual, as if there were not infinitely higher ones in Wisdom.

“All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the least of minds; for it knows all that, and itself; and bodies, nothing.”

— “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe would crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage the universe has over him the universe knows nothing of.

“All our dignity then consists in thought. It is from there that we must raise ourselves, not from space and duration, which we could not fill. Let us labor then to think well: that is the principle of morality.”

“It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but it is from the regulation of my thought. I shall have no more by possessing lands. By space, the universe comprises me and swallows me as a point; by thought, I comprise it.”

— The passage you cite to me, my friend, is the best known.

— I shall cite it nonetheless, citizen. I am perfectly resolved to cite even the stanzas of Polyeucte, if they reside on the path of our conversations. We are not running after the unpublished; we are not running after the unknown; we are not running after the extraordinary: we are seeking the just and the fitting, and much that is just and much that is fitting was said before us better than we could say it.

— It is not I, my friend, who will reproach you for it. Neither do I run after the bizarre as such. But when the bizarre is just, true, fitting, harmonious, I welcome the bizarre and even I seek it; and when it is the known, the banal that is just, true, fitting, harmonious, I welcome this banal that I did not have to seek. I was only telling you that the passage you cited to me is the best known. The vigor, the justness, the novelty, the freshness of the metaphor has installed it in the memory of men and good examiners have often given it to be developed for the baccalaureate: Develop this thought of Pascal: Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. Then one had to say again in six pages of bad French all that the great Blaise had said so well in twelve lines. This exercise conferred entry to the apprenticeship of the liberal arts. From the baccalaureate it rose to the licentiate, thus dispensed with military service for two years, conferred university entry and the official right to teach. I am not certain that it has not risen even higher, up to the august agrégation, where the good are decidedly distinguished from the bad. Provisionally kept away from these greatnesses, my friend, we do not have to develop this thought of Pascal. We shall only remark that it bears only on the distance from the first to the second order, on the distance from bodies to minds, and that finally this gap interests Pascal much less than the last distance from the second to the third order, than the distance from minds to charity. To the point that in the piece I began to read to you, and that I shall continue, a longer piece, without metaphor, more important, the infinite distance from bodies to minds figures only the infinitely more infinite distance from minds to charity, for it is supernatural. And believe well that if Pascal had known that the use of the metaphor would later displace in the memory of men the importance he wanted to give respectively to these two distances, he would doubtless have neglected the metaphor, for he was not a man to prefer the most beautiful of comparisons to the most humble reason. I continue:

“All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their productions, are not worth the least movement of charity; that is of an infinitely more elevated order.

“From all bodies together, one could not make succeed one small thought: that is impossible, and of another order. From all bodies and minds, one could not draw one movement of true charity: that is impossible, and of another order, supernatural.”

— I hear all that as is fitting, doctor. It is true that socialist solidarity is in secularity as Christian charity is in Christendom, no less profound, no less interior, if one may speak thus, no less entire, no less primary, no less differing in kind, and no less situated in a proper order. Thus science, the history of men and societies can lead and often leads to the sentiment of solidarity, but it is not the sentiment of solidarity itself and cannot replace the sentiment of solidarity.

— We shall speak of it, my friend, when we speak of teaching: for the frequent and happy introduction of science to solidarity, but sometimes the incommunication from knowledge to action, this contrariety resides at the heart of teaching and manifests itself above all at the heart of teaching. Pascal had vividly and profoundly felt what leap must be made, at least in theory, by whoever wants to pass from the second order to the third, to go from knowledge to action, from science to religion, from geometry to charity, which is human sanctity. He had felt all the more properly what the intermediate gap was in that he had been himself, and that he had remained nonetheless a geometer, having abandoned the matter rather than the method and the sense of his former geometry. And it is here that we find ourselves again. As he remained what we call a mathematician in the rigorously exact exercise of charity, so and doubtless involuntarily he remained an arithmetician in the administration of his stomach. Always the same quantity of nourishment, whether the stomach wanted more or less of it, whether it wanted any or did not want any. Evidently he considered his stomach as a simple machine, and not as an organ, that is to say that he did not consider it as a living machine, piece of a living being, of a larger living machine. To confer with the Cartesian, simplistic anatomy and physiology. And he wanted to govern his stomach by the mathematical, arithmetical mechanical laws by which mechanicians govern inanimate, inorganic machines. It is because he had escaped from universal mathematics only by the contemplation of sanctity, by the sense of charity. Whereas we, who escaped from mathematics and from universal mechanics by the consideration of morality, by the will to action, by the sense of solidarity, besides that we escaped from universal mechanics, or rather humanity escaped from universal mechanics by the progress of physics itself and, a little more, of chemistry, and above all by the institution and by the progress of the independent natural sciences, by the liberty of natural history and of human history. And that is why we would not have the idea at present of treating our stomachs as one treats, or rather as one would not dare treat a boiler of a steam engine.

— Let us conclude, doctor.

— No, my friend, let us not conclude. What would it be, to conclude, if not to flatter oneself that one is enclosing and making fit in two or three short, awkward, inexact, false formulas all the events of the interior life that we have so lengthily and so carefully tried to elucidate a little. Let us not permit ourselves to make one of those summaries that are convenient to read when one is preparing for an examination. We are not speaking for hurried people, for busy citizens, who willingly read tables of contents. We are speaking for those who are willing to read us patiently.

— Let us leave that, doctor, for when I shall tell you of the institution of these cahiers.

— I admit that one tries to gather in formulas, which are simple, all the simple events, which are numerous enough, and all the simple duties, which are much more numerous. I admit in particular that one tries to establish formulas for practice, for morality. But how to formulate all the nuances we have tried to respect; how to formulate all the complexities, all the turnings back, all the surprises, all the reversals, all the underlying things and all the undergroundings we have tried to respect. At most we could say, quite roughly, that it is properly Christian to care for one’s body as best one can, but that the attraction of Paradise seduces many Christians, among the best. Thus Christianity would be characterized in this regard by an exact official resistance opposed to illness and death, but the application of Christianity would be compromised to the point of presenting to us often an incontestable complicity with illness and with death.

— My conclusions, doctor, if you permit me to employ this word, would be, if you will, much less favorable to Christianity. It seems to me that we have neglected an important consideration. Let us leave the more or less involuntary attractions that can seduce the Christian from the earth and the more or less unconscious effect of these attractions on the illness and on the death of Christians. It seems to me that we still have to make an important consideration. It seems to me that besides this Christianity also disarms the Christian before illness and before death. Permit me, doctor, to remind you of what our good philosophy professors called the influence of the moral on the physical.

— I recall perfectly, citizen: there was also the influence of the physical on the moral. That furnished us fine antitheses.

— For this time, doctor, the antithesis corresponded to a real contrariety. It does not seem to me that I am advancing inconsiderately, if I claim that the moral dispositions of a sick person considerably influence his illness and his return to good health. Sadness, boredom, embarrassment, despair collaborate in decline as joy and happiness work at recovery. I believe I felt it myself in the time when I was in danger. It seems to me that I feel it very well now that I am convalescing. And it seems to me that it is here that Christians are disarmed, profoundly weak. Those among them with somewhat effective imaginations must represent beatitude to themselves with such an outpouring that, even warned, even wishing to, even trying to, they must not have this profound taste for life and health that is doubtless a capital element of longevity.

— Yes, you are right. A good Christian must lack a certain profound attachment to life, animal, and I would almost say a vegetal rootedness. Whence doubtless a certain hesitation in the best-intentioned defense, a certain uncertainty, inexactitude and clumsiness at life. Besides it would not be difficult for me to find in Christianity a remedy for that. It is said that there will be few elect, and if Christians were not presumptuous the fear of appearing would incite them to push back as far as they could the hour of death. But many Christians are presumptuous. Besides a certain terror, at the same time as it wants to escape death, can weaken the sick person to the point of delivering him inert, whereas a certain security, at the same time as it desires death, can comfort the sick person and contribute to his recovery. You see how all this is always complicated. There are always crossings and bifurcations. — There are always crossings and bifurcations in our passions and in our sentiments. But it seems to me incontestable that Christianity is in particular complicated. It embraces so many interior or introduced contradictions that it can of itself give answer to everything. It embraces almost all excesses, and thus the excesses that give answer to contrary excesses, and it also envelops the temperaments, which give answer to all excesses, and it embraced the excesses, which give answer even to the excess of temperament. It appears at first sight as complicated, as rich as life. And that is why it often appears to suffice unto itself. It only appears to suffice unto itself, citizen, by the insufficiency of its exigency. Many men have imagined that it was a whole life. But it is barely a whole world. And it is only a semblance of life, a crude image, a strange combination of unreasonable infinity and rather sick life. I shall go so far as to say that it is a counterfeit, a mismaking of life. Under the pretext that what is not living is in general much less complex than what is living, we are in general much too inclined to imagine that complexity — or even that interior contradiction — guarantees life. No: it is necessary to it, at least to life as we know it. But it is not sufficient to it.

— Remark, my friend, that these Christians whom you reproach for having loved illness and death loved human illness and death, loved martyrdom — suffering, illness and death for witness — only to introduce themselves to eternal life and thus to eternal health.

— Do not be afraid, citizen: cite the Polyeucte.

— I shall cite it:

Sweet saintly heavenly joys, adorable ideas,
You fill a heart that can receive you.
Souls possessed by your sacred charms
No longer conceive anything that can move them.
You promise much and give more,
Your goods are not inconstant.
And the happy death that I await
Serves us only as a gentle passage
To introduce us to the portion
That renders us forever content.

— Remark, doctor, for it is time to say it, that these Christians whom I reproach for having loved or well received human illness and death also admitted, above all admitted that there was an eternal suffering, and an eternal illness, and an eternal death contemporary, or, to speak exactly, coeternal with all their happiness, with their eternal life, with their beatitude and their health.

— That, my friend, is an article of their faith.

— I shall attack therefore the Christian faith. What is most foreign to us in it, and I shall say the word, what is most odious to us, what is barbarous, what we shall never consent to, what has haunted the best Christians, what the best Christians have evaded from, or silently turned away from, my master, it is this: this strange combination of life and death that we call damnation, this strange reinforcement of presence by absence and reinforcement of everything by eternity. Never will consent to that any man who has received as his portion, or who has given himself humanity. Never will consent to that whoever has received as his portion or has given himself a profound and sincere sense of collectivism. Every citizen who will have simple solidarity will not consent. As we are in solidarity with the damned of the earth:

Arise! the damned of the earth.
Arise! the convicts of hunger.

just so, and without letting ourselves be led by words alone, but modeling ourselves on reality, we are in solidarity with the eternally damned. We do not admit that there are men who are treated inhumanly. We do not admit that there are citizens who are treated uncivically. We do not admit that there are men who are pushed back from the threshold of any city. There is the profound movement by which we are animated, this great movement of universality that animates Kantian morality and that animates us in our demands. We do not admit that there is a single exception, that the door is shut in anyone’s face. Heaven or earth, we do not admit that there are pieces of the city that do not reside within the city. Certainties, probabilities or dreams, realities or dreams, those of us who dream, we are as perfectly collectivists in our dreams and in our desires as we are in our actions and in our teachings. Never shall we consent to a prolonged exile of some wretch. All the more shall we not consent to an eternal exile en bloc. It is not only the individual, particular, national, international, political and social events that have opposed the socialist revolution to the reaction of the Church. But these events are the expression and almost I would say that this opposition is the symbol of an invincible fundamental contrariety. The imagination of an exile is the one that is most repugnant to all socialism. Never shall we say yes to the supposition, to the proposition of this living death. An eternity of living death is a perverse, inverse imagination. We have quite enough of human life and human death.

— For living death the ancients had begun, not only those you do not love, the barbarians, but those you prefer to them. In order that the city of Thebes might resist the ravages of anarchy — already — King Creon had judged it indispensable that the fraternal and guilty Antigone be enclosed alive in a natural dungeon,

With provisions in just quantity
So that her death cannot taint the city.

Do you have a Sophocles, my friend?

— Of course I have one, doctor.

We searched a long time for the Sophocles I thought I had. There was none.

— I beg your pardon, doctor, for having been thus presumptuous. I really thought I had a Sophocles. I recall the one I had at school, an old thin book bound in marbled paper, an old and bad edition that I read passionately. Since then I have such a present memory of the Greek text, such a clear representation that I thought I had the text itself on some shelf of my library.

— Your present memories would not even permit you to make me from memory a correct citation.

— That is true.

— A good memory is not worth a good text. When you go to Paris you will buy for a few sous a new small classic edition.

— I shall not fail to. Let us not confuse, doctor: having a faithful representation of a statue or a text, with: being able to reproduce them. These are two distinct operations. To identify them would suppose that the representation of a statue is a small statue and that the representation of a text is a small text. Many ancients commonly represented it thus to themselves. But we have renounced these somewhat childish psychologies. Often I prefer the representation I have to the object itself, which amounts to saying that I prefer the representation I have in my memory, the image where all my memories have worked, to the new presentation I would have. But if you prefer texts, I shall buy a small Sophocles. The first time I go to Paris, I shall go buy one at the Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 17, rue Cujas.

— Why there, my friend?

— For many reasons I shall give you later, doctor, but above all because this house is, to my knowledge, the first and the only cooperative of production and consumption that works in the industry and commerce of books. While waiting for us to have the original text, let us content ourselves, doctor, with what we have: Antigone staged in French by Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie, and we also have the music of Saint-Saëns, score for voice and piano. I fear the verses will seem very bad to you.

— I shall content myself with them all the more willingly for today in that this rather faithful adaptation was happily performed for us at the Français. Let us hear this Creon:

I know in a mournful place far from any path
An underground cave surrounded by terror.
I shall have Antigone enclosed there alive…

Movement of fright from the Chorus. Creon continues:

Perhaps by her dear god Pluto she will obtain
That her airless prison not be mortal to her.
If not, she will learn that they do not serve us
The sterile honors rendered to the Gods below!

Antigone laments:

Walled up in a rock! oh! what cruel death!
The mournful Niobe
Perished thus welded to the stone.

Antigone laments and her lamentation seems to me related to the Christian lamentation:

What! their laughter follows me
Without pity or remorse,
Into my tomb prison, dead to those who live.
Living for the dead!

The condemnation pronounced, announced by Creon seems to me like an indication of future damnations:

Do you not know that this funeral song
Will cease only when death has silenced it!
Come! execute my sovereign order;
Let her be carried at once to the underground vault
And, there, leave her alone and close the entrance.
Then, let her die there! or else let her live there buried!
We shall not have her blood upon us. But let her eyes
Henceforth have nothing more to see with the heavens!

Antigone laments, and the expression of her lamentation itself is at once pagan with Christian indications:

Tomb! my wedding bed! O underground couch
Where death drags me for the eternal night!

And the chorus rather opportunely reminds her that this kind of torment, which you will not prevent me from considering as a sketch of hell, had often been inflicted on great personages:

You are not the first
Who lost the light
And life at the same time.
The misfortune that tries you
Terrible is found again
Among gods and kings.

The chorus gives examples:

Condemned like you
Danaë was dragged
She too, far from the day
And harshly captive
Saw herself buried alive
In the bronze of a tower.

Which we can read at will, for there is a variant:

Like you in the stone
Danaë all proud
That the sovereign God
Great Zeus had loved her
Yet was enclosed
In a tower of bronze.

After a salutary reflection on the force of Destiny, the well-informed chorus gives a new example:

He had what is given you
This son of the king of Edonia
Insulter of the altar.
And Bacchus silenced him
By enclosing him underground
In a cruel rock.

New salutary reflection and new and last example:

On the treacherous shore
Where one sees Salmydessus
Prey to all the winds
The frenzied stepmother
Of Phineus’s two sons
Buried them alive.
And their mother, my daughter,
Was of the family
Of Erechtheus! and her games,
Boreas being her father,
Braved the thunder
On the stormy mountains!
On the ice, intrepid
And proud and faster
Than a furious horse
She went fearing nothing.
The Fate knew how to reach
This daughter of the Gods!

Antigone exits.

My friend these lyric verses of messieurs Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie are not worth the stanzas of Pierre Corneille. You know the causes of this disparity. Messieurs Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie are not or were not poets comparable to the ancient Pierre Corneille. Besides it is more difficult to translate as a poet than to give, to produce, oneself, as a poet. I assure you that these plaints and these consolations, if one may so call them, were formidable when they were sung on stage, and when they were accompanied.

— I heard them, doctor, in the time when I was young. The harmonious lamentations of Antigone and the cowardly harmonious consolations of the chorus seemed formidable to me, but in no way as terrifying as the imaginations of Christian hell. Never the pagans, who loved life and beauty, could or would succeed in such terrors. There must be at the bottom of the Christian sentiment a terrifying complicity, a hideous complacency toward illness and death. You will not make me unsay it.

— The ancient lamentations and the consolations of the chorus seemed harmonious to you when performed on stage at the Français. No doubt they were harmonious when performed before the Athenians. But I am afraid that even then, my friend, illness and suffering, death and exile were not harmonious to the wretches who endured them in reality. It is far from tragic pain to the uglinesses of reality. You have not forgotten all the horrors of ancient history, the barbarous horrors, that the Hellenes knew, and, also, the Hellenic horrors, the hatreds and civil wars among the cities and in the cities, the massacres and ravages, then the hatred and war of the poor and the rich, the tyrannies, the oligarchies and the demagogies, and, already, the sad hard resignation of Hesiod. No, my friend, I am not fascinated by the memory of my Greek translations to the point of having forgotten that.

— Nor am I, doctor, and I did not want to institute a harmonious and factitious ancient city. But you are not going to institute for me either an ancient city identical to the Middle Ages of Christendom. Without doing any kind of metaphysics, I am quite forced to accept that there was an ancient genius and a Christian genius and that the Christian genius is in many respects different from the ancient genius. That being admitted, I claim, and I maintain, and I shall always maintain that the Christian genius is much more favorable to every illness. When we say that the Catholic Church is opposed to socialism — and that is what makes so delicate the situation of sincere Christian socialists, very few in number in France — we do not only mean by that that it wants to keep militants exiled from the goods of this world: we mean more profoundly that it wants to keep former militants exiled from eternal goods, that it admits side by side a Church triumphant and a Hell, a residence of beatitude and a residence of illness and death. There is truly the non possumus. Imagined or not to terrify sinners, hell has even more terrified the best Christians.

— You have already said that to me.

— I beg your pardon. But this terror holds my heart.

— It prevents you from noting that we do not believe in the propositions of the Catholic faith because it is not true.

— I was only trying to compare, doctor, the idea we have of what we want with regard to illness and death to the idea Christians have of what they believe in the same regards. Their terror holds my soul. There is not only, from Catholics to us, the distance from a vain imagination to a sincere universal critique; that would be nothing in comparison to what there is: but truly there is the irreconcilability of a perverse imagination to a modest reason friendly to health. I thought much about that during several years when my friends Marcel and Pierre Baudouin were working on a drama in three pieces which they finished writing in June 1897 and which the printers finished printing in December of the same year.

— Goodbye, my friend, said the doctor to me, and take care of yourself. I shall come to see you once more, for I know the honors that well people owe to convalescents. Then it is you who will come back to my place.

— For I know the honors that simple citizens owe to moralists. Come back quickly, honorable sir, come back soon.

— I could not, for I have many errands to do in Paris.

— Make haste, mister errand boy, make haste, for I am expecting my cousin.

— Who is this cousin?

— And when my cousin is there, doctor, one can no longer talk quietly. My cousin will not much like the slownesses and the lengths of our attentive dialectics. He is an impatient fellow.

— But who is this cousin?

— I tell you he is impatient like you. Know then, O doctor, that I have in the provinces a cousin whom I respectfully and familiarly call my big cousin, and who less respectfully, and more familiarly, reciprocally calls me his little cousin. This title comes from his being older than me and thus when I was little he on the contrary was big. And we have continued to title ourselves thus all the more conveniently in that he is tall and strong, broad in the shoulders, while I am small and low. He is by trade a stove-fitter.

— Stove-fitter?

— Stove-fitter. As the name indicates, he works on all the apparatuses that produce smoke, chimneys, stoves, furnaces and heaters. He is not coming to Paris at all, as an astute reader might falsely suspect him of, to introduce some variety into our debates. For we have no need to vary ourselves, doctor? — We are not talking to vary ourselves, but we are seeking the truth. He is rushing to Paris for the Exposition.

— Naturally, since he comes from the provinces.

— He is rushing to Paris for the Universal Exposition. That is to say interprovincial, international, and also intermetropolitan. He has been told that there are at the Exposition monumental chimneys, not counting the Eiffel Tower, extraordinary stove pipes, complicated furnaces, footwarmers arranged for the greater glory of national industry and heaters well made to bear witness to the greatness of the human spirit. As a man, as a Frenchman, as a stove-fitter, my cousin is rushing to the Exposition, already glorious with the common glory and the professional glory. My big cousin is a fellow who likes to see for himself. He was to arrive this week.

— This week? The Exposition opens only on April 14.

— Precisely. My cousin claims that to see these machines well one must see them before they have started. An idea of his own.

— How would he have gotten in?

— There are arrangements. Some comrade in stove-fitting would have lent him his exhibitor’s card. My cousin was planning to come this week. He was counting on the usual softening of the temperature at this season. When the temperature is milder, stove-fitting is less urgent. But the expected softening has not come. My cousin will arrive as soon as he can leave his work for a while.

— What is his character?

— I do not know if you will please him.

— I do not know either if he will please me.

— He is a big good shrewd fellow. Former pupil of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he has for the dear Brothers a little gratitude and many bad words. He got his certificate of studies. He has read many bad novels, serials, which have so to speak left no trace in his imagination. He has a fine gentle handwriting that does not resemble him. He calculates perfectly, and it is he who does his employer’s accounts. A good primary education. A good worker, as a worker. Skilled with his hands. As he works in a very small shop in the provinces — the boss, two journeymen, one or two laborers — he does a bit of all trades: mason, tiler, plasterer, marble-worker, locksmith, sheet-metal worker, and not only pure stove-fitter. Bold, and even reckless: so the trade requires. Stove-fitters are even more reckless than roofers, since chimneys are higher than roofs. Besides what seems recklessness to us in them is a particular species of serenity, an accustomedness to remaining in the heights. He likes to talk. You speak to him, you go on, you go on, you speak in front of him. Finally at a word, at a gesture, you perceive that he was making a fool of you, that he was leading you on, that he was playing dumb, that he knew perfectly well what he made you say. It is a kind of humor that seemed to me very frequent among workers, at least in this province, in particular among building workers. Building workers are naturally makers of palavers, organizers of conferences. The public square and the street are natural to them. Much banter, often good banter, above all deadpan banter. Every day he buys his Petite République, at the newspaper seller’s, who also saves for him the popular novels appearing in installments. He must also buy the Histoire Socialiste, because it is socialist, because he loves history, because it appears in identical installments, because the publisher is the same, it is still Rouff. My cousin reads all this while eating, at lunch, reads the Petite République and believes fairly well that it happened, reads his installments and knows perfectly well that it did not happen, reads his Histoire and believes entirely that it happened. My cousin is a classified socialist. He is coming to call me to account.

— Call you to account?

— Call me to account. My cousin is, you may well think, a member — and a very active member — of the Social Studies Group of Orléans, adherent to the French Workers’ Party. A regular vote of the group, in which my cousin had taken part, had instituted me delegate of this group to the future former General Congress of French Socialist Organizations. Fortunately the National Council was watching. There arrived the good Guesdist, the duly recommended faithful. The group had a second meeting, much more regular than the first, then proceeded to a second vote, much more regular than the first. The minority remained faithful to me. But the majority denied me. My cousin, having been part of the minority, claims that I was morally his delegate to the Congress.

— I do not quite know what a moral delegate is.

— Nor do I. But my cousin is stubborn. He will tell us what he means.

— And how large was this faithful minority?

— Though absent, I obtained four votes.

— Admit that is very few. The unfaithful majority was doubtless at least equal to five votes?

— Equal to five votes, doctor, it would have been valid. But it was much more considerable: it rose up to six votes — out of ten voters. There was no abstention. — Goodbye.

The doctor having gone came back on his steps:

— I was about to leave you the book I had brought. I was no longer thinking of it. I must return it before the Easter holidays to the library where I borrowed it. It is the Provinciales. When your cousin calls you to account, you will be able to make him some interesting citations:

“And if I got curious to know if these propositions are in Jansenius, his book is not so rare, nor so big, that I could not read it all to enlighten myself, without consulting the Sorbonne.”

— Do not believe, doctor, that my big cousin or his comrades understand these allusions.

— If he is as you have told me, I am certain that he will understand at least what follows: “There was never a judgment less juridical, and all the statutes of the Faculty of Theology were violated. M. Arnauld was given as commissioners his declared enemies, and no regard was paid either to his challenges or to his defenses; he was even refused to come in person to state his reasons. Although by the statutes monks must not find themselves in assemblies in a number greater than eight, there were always found more than forty, and to prevent M. Arnauld’s [that is to say the friends, the partisans of Arnauld] from saying all they had prepared for his defense, the time each doctor was to give his opinion was limited to half an hour. For this purpose a clepsydra was placed on the table, that is to say a sand clock, which was the measure of this time; an invention no less odious on such occasions than shameful in its origin, and which, according to Cardinal Pallavicini, having been proposed at the Council of Trent by some, was rejected by the whole council. Finally, in the design of entirely taking away the liberty of votes, Chancellor Séguier, despite his great age and his infirmities, had orders to attend all these assemblies.

Nearly eighty of the most celebrated doctors, seeing such an irregular procedure, resolved to absent themselves, and preferred to leave the Faculty rather than subscribe to the censure. M. de Launoy himself, so famous for his great erudition, although he publicly professed to be on grace of a different opinion than Saint Augustine, also left like the others, and wrote against the censure a letter where he complained with much force of the overturning of all the privileges of the Faculty.”

Come, goodbye, goodbye. What I have read to you is not by Pascal. It is an account that Racine made in a History of Port-Royal that he left in manuscript, and that has since been placed in his works. M. Havet gave us this account at the beginning of the remarks on the first provincial letter. When the government and the pope were in agreement, no account was taken of the rule made against the monks.