This was the famous “miracle” of the Holy Thorn. Madame Périer’s daughter, Marguerite Périer—the same to whom we are indebted for interesting memorials of her uncle’s life—had become, with her sister, a pupil at Port Royal. She suffered from an apparently incurable disease of the eye, _fistula lachrymalis_. On a sudden she was reported to be entirely cured, and the cure was attributed to the touch of a relic which had been brought to the abbey by a priest,—a supposed thorn from the crown of Christ. It is remarkable that the Mère Angélique was somewhat slow of belief as to the “miracle,” and that she marvelled the world should make so much of it. But it secured the credence of Pascal, and became a great fact in the history of Port Royal, staying for a time the hand of persecution, and pointing, as its friends believed, to the visible interposition of heaven. How could the accusations against Port Royal be true, seeing what God Himself had done on its behalf? “This place, which men say is the devil’s temple, God makes His house. Men declare that its children must be taken out of it, and God heals them there. They are threatened with all the furies; God loads them with His favours.” This was Pascal’s own language on the subject, { 97} and there can be no doubt that the supposed miracle deeply affected him. He was “sensibly touched,” it is said, “by such a grace, regarding it as virtually done to himself, seeing it was done to one so near to him in kindred, and who was his spiritual daughter in baptism.” He was penetrated by a great joy, and much occupied by the thought of what had happened, and the general subject of miracles. There was in this manner awakened in him “the extreme desire of employing himself on a work in refutation of the principles and false reasonings of the atheists.” “He had studied them,” his sister continues, “with great care, and applied his whole mind to search out the means of convincing them. His last year of work was entirely occupied in collecting divers thoughts on this subject.”
Unhappily, in the course of 1658 Pascal’s old illness returned with redoubled severity, and the last four years of his life became in consequence years of great languor and interruption of his projected work. The practice of continuous composition failed him. Hitherto he had been wont to develop his thoughts completely,—to write them out, as it were, mentally before committing them to paper; but now he began the habit of transferring his ideas rapidly, and sometimes imperfectly, to manuscript, as they arose in his mind. In many cases, if not in all, these first sketches remained as originally made, without any revision or further reconstruction; and from the mass of papers accumulated in this manner during these years the ‘Pensées’ were formed—the story of whose publication will be afterwards told. Strangely, it was in this very year, during a fit of severe toothache, apparently connected with his general illness, that Pascal began his wonderful series of problems on the cycloid, showing how fresh and unimpaired his scientific genius remained under all the changes of his health and of his main intellectual interests.