Unhappily Madame Périer had too much cause for alarm. Editors and Approvers alike had claimed the liberty, not only of arranging but of modifying both the matter and the style of the ‘Pensées,’ and this notwithstanding a statement in the preface that, in giving, as they professed to do, only “the clearest and most finished” of the fragments, they had given them as they found them, _without adding or changing anything_. “These fragments,” says M. Faugère, “which sickness and death had left unfinished, suffered, without ceasing to be immortal, all the mutilation which an exaggerated prudence or a misdirected zeal could suggest, with the view not only of guarding their orthodoxy, but of embellishing their style—the style of the author of the ‘Provincials’!” “There are not,” he adds, “twenty successive lines which do not present some alteration, great or small. As for total omissions and partial suppressions, they are without number.” M. Cousin is equally emphatic. “There are,” he says, “examples of every kind of alteration—alteration of words, alteration of phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions, arbitrary compositions, and, what is worse, decompositions more arbitrary still.”
It is impossible to defend the first editors of the ‘Pensées.’ But it should be remembered that their task was one not only of theological perplexity, but of great literary difficulty. Pascal’s manuscripts were a mere mass of confused papers, sometimes written on both sides, and in a hand for the most part so obscure and imperfectly formed as to be illegible to all who had not made it a special study. The papers were pasted or bundled together without any natural connection, parts containing the same piece being sometimes intersected and sometimes widely separated from one another. If the editors, therefore, did their work ill, it was partly no doubt from incompetency, but partly from its inherent difficulty, and from the fact that being so near to Pascal they could hardly appreciate the feelings of the modern critic as to the sacredness of his style, and of all that came from his pen.
The edition of 1669 continued to be reprinted with little alteration for a century. Various additional fragments were brought to light, especially the famous conversation between De Saci and Pascal regarding Epictetus and Montaigne; but the form of the fragments remained unchanged. It was not till the edition of Condorcet in 1776 that they can be said to have undergone any new _rédaction_. Unhappily Pascal suffered in the hands of the Encyclopedists, as he had previously suffered in the hands of the Jansenists and the Sorbonne. The first editors had expunged whatever might seem at variance with orthodoxy. Condorcet suppressed or modified whatever partook of a too lofty enthusiasm or a too fervent piety. It became a current idea among the Encyclopedists that the accident at Neuilly had affected Pascal’s brain. We have already seen how Voltaire spoke of this; and he directed an early attack (1734) upon the doctrine of human nature contained in the ‘Pensées.’ Now, in his old age, he hailed Condorcet’s edition, and reissued it two years later, with an Introduction and Notes by himself.