st whom Pascal set himself, from the time
of his first conversations with M. de Saci at Port-Royal, was Montaigne.
One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors Montaigne is
one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by
flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid,
insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and
influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some
other design upon you than to convince you by his argument. It is
hardly too much to say that Montaigne is the most essential author to
know, if we would understand the course of French thought during the
last three hundred years. In every way, the influence of Montaigne was
repugnant to the men of Port-Royal. Pascal studied him with the
intention of demolishing him. Yet, in the _Pensees_, at the very end of
his life, we find passage after passage, and the slighter they are the
more significant, almost "lifted" out of Montaigne, down to a figure of
speech or a word. The parallels[A] are most often with the long essay of
Montaigne called _Apologie de Raymond Sebond_--an astonishing piece of
writing upon which Shakespeare also probably drew in _Hamlet_. Indeed,
by the time a man knew Montaigne well enough to attack him, he would
already be thoroughly infected by him.

[A] Cf. the use of the simile of the _couvreur_. For comparing
parallel passages, the edition of the _Pensees_ by Henri Massis (_A
la cite des livres_) is better than the two-volume edition of
Jacques Chevalier (Gabalda). It seems just possible that in the
latter edition, and also in his biographical study (_Pascal_; by
Jacques Chevalier, English translation, published by Sheed & Ward),
M. Chevalier is a little over-zealous to demonstrate the perfect
orthodoxy of Pascal.

It would, however, be grossly unfair to Pascal, to Montaigne, and indeed
to French literature, to leave the matter at that. It is no diminution
of Pascal, but only an aggrandisement of Montaigne. Had Montaigne been
an ordinary life-sized sceptic, a small man like Anatole France, or even
a greater man like Renan, or even like the greatest sceptic of all,
Voltaire, this "influence" would be to the discredit of Pascal; but if
Montaigne had been no more than Voltaire, he could not have affected
Pascal at all. The picture of Montaigne which offers itself first to our
eyes, that of the original and independent