5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620-1655), who did not fear to indicate his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d'Agrippine he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary, "horrible things against the Gods," notably the phrase, "whom men made, and who did not make men," [567] which, however, generally passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilà l'hostie [= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the Catholic host. [568] At times Cyrano writes like a deist; [569] but in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced materialist, and of a scoffer at that, [570] that he can hardly be taken seriously on the former head. [571] In short, he was one of the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden; the first edition of his Pédant joué was confiscated; during his last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots. [572] His recent literary rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the history of freethought. Between Cyrano and Molière it would appear that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678 that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before. [573] 6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved as Pensées (1670), however originated, [574] developed as part of a planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism, [575] but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference: the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy; Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the physical collapse.