“I have been asked, thirdly, why I adopted an agreeable, jocose, and entertaining style? I answered, If I had written dogmatically, none but the learned would have read my book; and they had no need of it, knowing how the matter stood, at least as well as I did. I conceived it, therefore, my duty to write, so that my Letters might be read by women, and people in general, that they might know the danger of all those maxims and propositions which were then spread abroad, and admitted with so little hesitation. “Finally, I have been asked, if I had myself read all the books which I quoted? I answered, No. To do this, I had need have passed the greater part of my life in reading very bad books. But I have twice read Escobar throughout; and for the others, I got several of my friends to read them; but _I have never used a single passage without having read it myself in the book quoted_, without having examined the case in which it is brought forward, and without having read the preceding and subsequent context, that I might not run the risk of citing that for an answer which was in fact an objection, which would have been very unjust and blamable.”[63] If this solemn declaration, emitted by one whose heart was a stranger to deceit, and whose shrewdness placed him beyond the risk of delusion, is not accepted as sufficient, we might refer to the mass of evidence collected at the time in the _Factums_ of the curés of Paris and Rouen, to the voluminous notes of Nicole, and to the Apology of Petitdidier, in which the citations made by Pascal are authenticated with a carefulness which not only sets all suspicion at rest, but leaves a large balance of credit in the author’s favor, by showing that, so far from having reported the worst maxims of the Jesuitical school, or placed them in the most odious light of which they were susceptible, he has been extremely tender towards them. But, indeed, the truth was placed beyond all dispute, through the efforts of the celebrated Bossuet, in 1700, when, by a sentence of an assembly of the clergy of France, the morals of the Jesuits, as exhibited in their “monstrous maxims, which had been long the scandal of the Church and of Europe,” were formally condemned, and when it may be said that the Provincial Letters met at once their full vindication and their final triumph.[64]