The question arises, What interpretation are we to put on these chaste yet glowing sentences? It seems hardly possible to believe that they were not penned out of some real experience. Pascal was not the man to busy himself in writing an imaginary essay on such a subject. Nothing can be conceived less like the sketch of a mere moral analyst standing outside the passion he describes. There may be a tendency here and there to over-analysis, and to the balancing of antitheses now on one side and now on the other; but there is the breath of true passion all through the piece, and touching, as with fire, many of its many fine utterances. Who was then, conceivably, the object of Pascal’s affections? We have it on the authority of his niece that at this time, when he lived so much as the companion of the Duc de Roannez, he contemplated marrying and settling in the world. {71} This, and the indications of the piece itself, have led to the conjecture that he was in love with the sister of his friend. Charlotte Gouffier de Roannez was then about sixteen years of age, endowed with captivating graces of form and manner, animated by a sweet intelligence and by that charm of spiritual sympathy so likely to prove attractive to a man like Pascal. Occupying rooms in the house of his friend, who, we have seen, could not bear him out of his sight, Pascal and Mademoiselle de Roannez were necessarily much in each other’s society. What so natural as that he should fall in love, and overlooking all disparity of rank, cherish the secret hope of a union with one so gifted and beautiful?—or why may not ambition have mingled with his love, as he himself implies, and carried him for a time into a dreamland from which all shadows fell away?