Jansenius

“Monseigneur étudie,” “the monsignor is studying,” were the only words to be heard outside Jansenius’s door.

He died of a plague that he alone in the town had been struck down by. It was rumored among his enemies that he had contracted it through touching infected documents in the archives.

At the Frankfurt Fair of September 1640, everyone was talking about Jansenius’s Augustinus.

The Superintendent of Gardens

He sent sealed baskets of fruit that held the fragrance of certain pears selected with great care from hundreds of trees, and packed in such a way that they would not bruise the other pears around them.

Hamon

Orans, legens, latens, silens.

At Port-Royal, he was the physician par excellence. He was known as one of the brightest examples of the calm, sad beauty of a Christian heading toward decline, who contemplates and meditates upon the immutable harmonies of nature, but nonetheless devours the heart of charity with childish self-denial. His general manner of expression was that of smiling humility. Austerity combined with elegance. He was suspected of talking about Grace through riddles, using medical terms.

As the night of his death approached, he was heard from time to time to repeat the word silence. And sometimes: “Jesus, Maria, sponsus et sponsa,” Jesus, Mary, groom and bride.

In his final years he was seen traveling from village to village on a donkey, with an open book on a lectern fixed to the saddle. Among the pages were small slips of red paper that marked the passages most dear to him. Even if all around was featureless glade, he always imagined himself in an enchanted forest where every object concealed another object that was more real.

He had been the tutor of Racine, who had asked in his will to be buried beside him.

Pascal

He was to be found, above all, in the rock of the mind: a logical, geometrical spirit, a scrutinizer of causes, transparent, torrid, eloquent, he found new ways of measuring the desert of the sky. It was not hard to recognize in him the perfection of the human intellect at its clearest, its most distinct, its most detached in relation to the universe, from which he was separated by a dark moat that made it impossible to glimpse any analogy between the automatic existence of nature and the incursions of Grace.

Madame de Genlis used to describe with verve how, sometime around 1789, the Duc d’Orléans, toiling away with his experiments in alchemy, needed a skeleton, and they could find nothing better to offer him than that of pauvre Pascal, buried at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

—I had no difficulty putting into practice my great fencing skill, covering my arm with the clerical cassock. What did I care about circumstance and disguise, provided that this was a duel to the death?

—If his perception of the immeasurable was so factious, no form of harmonious mediation could affect it. And yet there is one such form of mediation that, in its proportions, adapts finite terms to the infinite and, without thereby creating an impossible bridge between them, establishes there a circulation, allowing that occasional void through which the breath of the supernatural penetrates into the world.