om hints in his _Discours sur les Passions
de l'Amour_ that he loved the sister of his friend, the Duc de Roannez,
and had the vain hope of making her his wife.

The spirit of religion, however, lived within his heart, and needed
only to be reawakened. The reawakening came in 1654 through the
persuasions of his sister, Jacqueline, who had abandoned the world
two years previously, and entered the community of Port-Royal. The
abbey of Port-Royal, situated some seven or eight miles from
Versailles, was presided over by Jacqueline Arnauld, the Mere
Angelique, and a brotherhood of solitaries, among whom were several
of the Arnauld family, had settled in the valley in the year 1637.
With this unvowed brotherhood Pascal, though never actually a
solitary, associated himself at the close of 1654. An escape from
sudden danger in a carriage accident, and a vision or ecstasy which
came to him, co-operated in his conversion. After his death, copies
of a fragmentary and passionate writing referring to this period--the
so-called "amulet" of Pascal--were found upon his person; its words,
"renonciation totale et douce," and "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de
joie," express something of his resolution and his rapture.

The affair of the _Provinciales_, and the design of an apology for
Christianity with which his _Pensees_ are connected, together with
certain scientific studies and the deepening passion of religion,
make up what remained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but
in his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted by his
ascetic practices and the inward flame of his soul, Pascal died on
August 19, 1662. "May God never leave me" were his last words.

With Pascal's work as a mathematician and a physicist we are not here
concerned. In it "we see," writes a scientific authority, "the
strongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, and
seizing upon, mastering, and pursuing further everything that was
fresh and unfamiliar in his time. After the lapse of more than two
hundred years, we can still point to much in exact science that is
absolutely his; and we can indicate infinitely more which is due to
his inspiration."

Jansenism and Jesuitism, opposed as they were, have this in common,
that both were movements in that revival of Roman Catholicism which
was stimulated by the rivalry of the Protestant Reformation. But the
Jesuits sought to win the world to religion by an art of piety, in
which a system of