Philological Quarterly, June 22nd, 1999
Hugo only refers to Pascal by name in the opening chapters of Les Miserables, in the course of his description of Monseigneur Myriel, the Bishop of Digne.(1) Here, Hugo ambivalently calls the seventeenth-century Jansenist both a genius and a madman, a thinker devoted entirely to contemplation of the absolute but so dazed by "la vision terrible de la montagne infinie" that his mind slipped into insanity.(2) Many other paragraphs of Les Miserables, in which Hugo speaks of the distant heavens and the importance of prayer, suggest, however, that he felt an affinity and even an admiration for the a...
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