Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/297

Rh style a more shining clearness than Descartes' in dealing with equally abstract themes, a higher eloquence than Balzac's, and a suppleness and variety which no French prose had obtained previously and in which it has remained unsurpassed. Blaise Pascal's (1623-1662) life, and its intimate connection with his writings, have been made the subject of many critical investigations, and eloquently summarised by Chateaubriand. The early development of his mathematical genius, and his researches and discoveries in mathematics and physics; his conversion and that of his family, under the influence of the Jansenist Guillebert, curé of Rouville, in 1646; his "worldly period," in which he opposed the pious desire of his sister to enter Port Royal, and turned from the study of geometry to the study of men, under the guidance of de Méré and Milton as well as Montaigne; his passionate return to religion and settlement at Port Royal in 1653; the composition and publication of the Lettres Provinciales (1656), begun as a defence of Arnauld but