Diverse Thoughts on the Lightly Enlightened, circa 17th Century France, Part IV
This is the fourth part of an open-ended series exploring currents of not-all-that-serious thought running through the Enlightenment, such as those associated with Saint-Évremond and the Knight of Méré. It is modeled primarily but not exclusively on Pierre Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1683).
7. Évremond and Justice
In our previous Thought, I mentioned that the 17th Century libertine’s exclusion of “harsh and austere” aspects of ethics from their model did not initially strike me as all that interesting. The inclusion of “politeness, gallantry, the voluptuous science” and other bits of normativity not typically viewed as moral seemed, on the other hand, to be uniquely characteristic of the libertine way of thinking (“L’Intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait corrompues” 691). So, we spent some time on the latter and put the former to the side.
Both the exclusion and inclusion used thick moral concepts. Harsh and polite made for a hearty stew relative to the thin gruel of bad and good. This places them in the realm of virtue ethics, for which Aristotle was, and arguably continues to be, the towering figure. Avoiding the “harsh and austere” struck me as avoiding vice masquerading as virtue, a classic Aristotelian move. He was, as we can see in his Nicomachean Ethics, all about the middle ground, with vice being either the excess or paucity of a relevant attribute and virtue being the happy medium.
“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme” (Book 2 Part 6).
Stirring in the thick concepts of temperance and courage:
“So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean” (Book 2 Part 2).
While our Méré Knight, for instance, took issue with the philosophy of Aristotle, the main issue was with how the philosopher profited from and how his works were later used by authority figures.
“This young Conqueror [Alexander] who ran everywhere after glory, had a tutor [Aristotle] who did not look for it any less in his manner; and if the student made himself master of the world, one can also say that the tutor, as much by his skill as by the favour of the Prince, gained the upper hand in the sciences. He had this mind that one must have in order to be clever in that which regards life; but for certain more hidden areas of knowledge; he did not go as far as some who came before him” (28).
As mentioned in Thought 3, libertines could only be libertines as a result of a certain education. They could read Latin, though rarely ancient Greek, and were familiar with ancient and modern belles-lettres. This contributed breadth to their understanding of the world and helped refine their judgment with respect to what was agreeable in a given context. They were also libertines because they rejected the overbearing aspects of that education, choosing liberty over conformity. Jesuit colleges dominated the educational scene at the time and a sacralized version of Aristotle loomed large in the Scholastic curriculum. So, libertines as a rule rejected him for the likes of Socrates (Méré) and Epicurus (Évremond).
This explains why Aristotle was mainly ignored. Harshness and austerity nonetheless appear to be examples of the virtue-destroying excesses and defects to which he was referring. I quoted Méré above because he did not completely ignore Aristotle. Since our lighter normativity Thought followed Lord Évremond and the two diverged a fair bit in this area, we will focus on Évremond’s ideas for the time being.
“I always admired the ethics of Epicurus, and I value nothing in his ethics more than the preference he gives to friendship above all the other virtues. Effectively, justice is only a virtue established to maintain human society; it is the work of men; friendship is the work of Nature: friendship makes all the comfort in our life, while justice with all its rigours has a great deal of difficulty in making us safe. If prudence allows us to avoid some wrongs, it is friendship that eases all of them; if prudence allows us to acquire good things, it is through friendship that we enjoy them. Do you have need of faithful advice, who can give it to you but a friend? To whom confide your secrets, to whom open your heart, to whom bare your soul but to a friend? And what bother would there be to hold everything in, to only have oneself as confidant for one’s affairs, and for one’s pleasures? Pleasures are no longer pleasures, as soon as they are not communicated. Without the confidence of a friend, the felicity of heaven would be tedious. I have observed that the pious the most detached from the world, that the pious the most attached to God, love in God the pious in order to make for themselves visible objects of their attachment [amitié]. One of the great comforts that one finds in loving God is to be able to love those who love him” (“Sur l’amitié, à Mme la Duchesse Mazarin” 725).
Here again I got a sense of déjà vu. Did Aristotle not think highly of friendship and express, excepting the provocative take on piousness, very similar thoughts?
“After what we have said, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow, since it is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? Or how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends?” (Book 8 Part 1).
There is an important difference, however. My astute reader, you likely picked up from the first Aristotle quote that he was an extremist in one respect, “with regard to what is best and right.” The best in his view was not personal, but at the level of the city or nation. His entire ethics, so all virtue, was reliant on this social structure.
“For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term” (Book 1, Part 2).
Évremond’s argument seems awkward, since friendship between people is necessarily a work of those people. It could also be a “work of Nature” insofar as people are naturally social, which was one of the only constants in the libertine notion of human nature. That the two were mutually exclusive is not obvious. Being a good friend requires proper judgment and, as we have seen in previous Thoughts, judgment takes observation, practice, reflection. One does not know how to be an agreeable companion to a friend in mourning by raw natural sociability alone.
The libertine point cannot be one of nature versus nurture. It makes more sense to view it as one of man versus magistrate, which we briefly saw in Thought 3. Both man and magistrate had roots in human nature, both were in part learned. Only, the formal structure that set roles like magistrate erected barriers for friendship. At one limit, friendship between prince and subject was impossible.
“It is certain that one must not see one’s prince as one’s friend. The distance that exists from the empire to the subjection does not allow for the formation of this union of wills that is necessary to really love” (“Sur l’amitié, à Mme la Duchesse Mazarin” 723).
At the other limit, for all the downsides of being poor and not having specific societal standing, Mme Deshoulières pointed out that one could at least enjoy true friendship.
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“La pauvreté fait peur, mais elle a ses plaisirs.
Je sais bien qu’elle éloigne, aussitôt qu’elle arrive, La volupté, l’éclat, et cette foule oisive Dont les jeux, les festins remplissent les désirs. Cependant, quoi qu’elle ait de honteux et de rude Pour ceux qu’à des revers la Fortune a soumis, Au moins dans leurs malheurs ont-ils la certitude De n’avoir que de vrais amis” (IV 1416). |
The position rejected Aristotle’s limited extremism. While formal human society and the role justice played in holding it together were recognized, they were not viewed as primary. In part, this was because “the best and right” was limited to making do with people’s “mix of good and bad parts.” Attaining something “more godlike” was out of the question. The stance was a form of the aphoristic “perfect being the enemy of the good,” putting more of an emphasis on how virtues conflicted and were instrumentalized than on setting up a virtue-vice dichotomy.
“But in order to conserve a thing as precious as friendship, it is not enough to take precautions against vices, it is necessary to guard against even virtues; it is necessary to guard against justice” (“Sur l’amitié, à Mme la Duchesse Mazarin” 726).
Another part of the rejection was a result of man versus magistrate not being a dichotomy per se. The man was always present, whether on stage or behind the curtain. If ethics focused primarily on the city, the psychology of the individual acting in the name of virtue would be lost.
“If justice demands a great punishment (which is sometimes necessary), it is proportional to a great crime; but it is neither severe nor rigorous. Severity and rigour are never a part of it, when it is properly considered; they are part of the humour of those who think that they are practising it. As these types of punishments are of justice without rigour, pardons are also a part of it on certain occasions, rather than being part of clemency. With a fault due to a mistake, pardoning is justice for our defective nature; the indulgence that one has for women who make love is less a grace for their sin, than a justice for their weakness” (“À M. le maréchal de Créqui” 714).
Évremond did not dismiss justice out of hand. As we saw in the last Thought, he even argued that an “austere and harsh” form was appropriate to counter the “violence and affronts” characteristic to a certain level of societal development. “Severity and rigour,” however, were not necessary aspects of the virtue. They were aspects of the temperament of the person who claimed to be putting it into practice.
This is an example of the “more hidden areas of knowledge” our Méré Knight thought Aristotle did not do well. What is key in his assessment is that it touched on both the philosopher and the man. Alexander and Aristotle sought glory; the first as a conqueror, the second as a philosopher. Their personal motivations could not but be reflected in their words and actions. There was nothing categorically wrong with ambition, only how would people who did not aspire–and likely did not have the capacity–to be more godlike fare in a society concocted by someone driven by it?
The problem of the city’s primary virtue not aligning with the citizens’ all-too-human natures was papered over by adding other virtues and vices like “clemency” and “sin.” If justice was justice in any meaningful sense, it would itself take into account humanity’s “defective nature” and “weakness.” Aristotle, as it happens, did neither. Instead, he set up a separate dichotomy, “incontinence” versus “continence,” to cover situations where a man is “like a city which passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them” (Book 7, Part 10).
He was well aware of human weaknesses and spent most of Book 7 working through them. Just because the level at which a good life was achievable was that of the city does not mean he was blind to individual character. I would go as far as to say that it was his ambition that pushed him to be so thorough in this and many other more-or-less philosophical domains. In any case, people’s foibles have always been easily observable.
The “hidden areas of knowledge” were those that resisted explicit categorization and prescription. From a libertine perspective, where Aristotle went wrong was not in arguing that the social group was the most appropriate level for arriving at moral ends, nor that such a group would need a certain amount of formality to function. It was in his lack of modesty–delicateness, to use the libertine term–in the conclusions to which he came regarding what he observed. Instead of virtues taking people as they were naturally or habitually into account with a measure of indulgence, to arrive at a virtuous society their weaknesses needed to be cured.
“Of the forms of incontinence, that of excitable people is more curable than that of those who deliberate but do not abide by their decisions, and those who are incontinent through habituation are more curable than those in whom incontinence is innate; for it is easier to change a habit than to change one’s nature; even habit is hard to change just because it is like nature, as Evenus says:
I say that habit’s but a long practice, friend, And this becomes men’s nature in the end” (Book 7, Part 10).
While Aristotle appreciated friendship, he did not fully grasp that playing the magistrate in order to fix people was the best and right way to be a terrible friend.
In the end, Évremond’s position aligns with a frequent critique of any attempt to frame the ethical as political. A whole host of reactions to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice immediately come to mind as a more recent example. For these Thoughts, what is interesting is how that relates to 17th Century libertines being for the most part fatalists. The godlike was not something to aspire to; it was, in the form of Providence, something to put one’s faith in. “The wisest trusts in Providence, he relies on it for his protection, and on himself for peace of mind” (‘Lettre à M.***” 655). This was not a consequence of excessive piousness, but rather a deep-seated skepticism concerning humanity’s ability to overcome its contradictions. One could imagine this leading them to dismiss the very possibility of justice. Instead, it led to nuance and moderation. Justice could still be impossible, but only if immoderate societal change such as a revolution was required to achieve it.
8. Jesuits vs Jansenists: People all the way down.
Many years ago, I asked a friend and Slavics professor what she thought of the work of Isaac Babel. In lieu of an answer, she sent me a quote:
«Хорошие дела делает хороший человек. Революция – это хорошее дело хороших людей. Но хорошие люди не убивают. Значит, революцию делают злые люди.»
“A good person does good deeds. The revolution is the good cause of good people. But good people do not kill. Therefore it is bad people who do the revolution.”
Babel was an early Soviet writer hailing from Odessa’s Jewish community. The quote came from an article he wrote as a correspondent during the 1918-21 Polish-Soviet War, supposedly uttered by an old Jewish shopkeeper in Poland. It crystalized how his work upheld the Soviet ideal while at the same time undermining it. My friend underlined just how dangerous this sort of thinking was for the order of the day. Babel unsurprisingly did not make it through Stalin’s purges alive.
This, dear reader, was what crossed my mind when reflecting on the ethics of Évremond and other 17th Century French libertines. They were not dangerous in the sense of championing regime change, even if it was almost impossible to avoid being pulled into civil conflicts like the Fronde. They did not meditate on ideal social orders as philosophers tended to do. They for the most part kissed the ring of the prince and priest, as Babel kissed that of the revolution. And then they went about tipping sacred cows as one might politely tip one’s hat.
In our last Thought, the parallel was evident. Justice was indeed good, and it was the cause of good people. But good people are not severe or rigorous. Therefore, insofar as what was allegedly justice was severe and rigorous, it was bad people who acted in the name of justice. Only, for a libertine, “honest” would be a better adjective than “good.”
It is also clear in how Évremond treated the Jansenist versus Jesuit conflict, so maybe now is as good a time as any to broach the topic with which these Thoughts began. For those of you who have been following along, hopefully you will appreciate why it was appropriate to briefly reflect on Aristotle and the burlesque first. Hopefully you will be indulgent to me not (yet?) playing the devil to your Saint Anthony in regard to aeroliths. As Pierre Bayle argued, the presence or absence of the comet bodes neither ill nor well.
Évremond’s skepticism about human knowledge had religious overtones:
“The Author of Nature did not want us to be able to fully understand what we are; and among the all too curious desires to know everything, he reduced us to the necessity of being ignorant of ourselves” (“L’homme qui veut connaître toutes choses ne se connaît pas lui-même. À M.***” 651).
It was God, “the Author of Nature,” behind our epistemic limits. The most pertinent limit was about ourselves. No matter how much we discovered about the world, “never has man been really persuaded by his reason, either that the soul is certainly immortal, or that it effectively ceases to exist when the body does” (652). Consequently, even the wisest of wisemen and the most philosophical of philosophers would need to rely on faith.
“That philosophers, that savants study themselves; they will find not only instability, but contradictions in their impressions. Unless faith secures our reason, we pass our lives believing and not believing; wanting to persuade ourselves, and not being able to convince ourselves” (653).
As we have seen previously, Évremond primarily used this sort of argument to convince people to stop meditating and enjoy life. This did not mean that we should or could ignore the profound questions. Questions about mortality were of interest to us as creatures who suffered and died. Pretending they did not matter would put us in Dassoucy’s “constipated stoic” territory. The questions simply needed to be addressed in a manner compatible with leading an agreeable life.
The usage did not reflect skepticism about God or the value of communing with Him. If humanity was more capable, if our nature was not a mix of sense and intellect, such pursuits would be of the highest merit. We were who we were, alas, so all we tended to accomplish was to trip over ourselves.
“It is beautiful to look for God in spirit and in truth; this First Being, this sovereign Intelligence merits the purest of our speculations; but when we separate our soul from all connection with our senses, are we assured that an abstract understanding does not get lost in vague thoughts, and does not form more extravagances than it discovers truths? From where do you think comes the absurdities of so many sects, but from hollow meditations where the mind at the end of its reverie only meets its own imaginations?” (“Lettre à M. Justel” 730-1).
Since the Jansenists and Jesuits were people, the question for Évremond did not concern the truth of what they were arguing, but the human motivations behind the argument. Blaise Pascal and his collaborators went to great lengths, particularly in Les Provinciales, to explain God’s grace, its relation to salvation and how all that fit into the thought of Church Fathers like Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. They also went through all the pertinent Jesuit texts and, almost line by line, bitingly pointed out their absurdities and contradictions. Putting his words in the mouth of a Jesuit, Évremond swept such details aside.
“‘What madness, what madness,’ he tells me, ‘to believe that we hate each other for not thinking the same thing about Grace! It is neither Grace nor the Five Propositions that created the conflict between us; jealousy over governing consciences did everything. The Jansenists found us in possession of this government and wanted to take it from us. To succeed in their aims they made use of means entirely contrary to ours. We employ gentleness and indulgence; they stick to austerity and rigour. We console souls by the examples of God’s mercy; they scare them by those of His justice. They bring fear while we bring hope; they want to subjugate those that we want to attract. It is not that one or the other does not want to save them; but each wants the credit for saving them; and to speak frankly, the interest of the advisor goes almost always before that of the advised’” (“Conversation du maréchal d’Hoquincourt” 682).
This was spoken at the end of a difficult hunting trip, made more challenging for the Jesuit because of a spirited horse. The rough ride resulted in the priest’s “false glory ced[ing] to real pains.” When, near the end of the trip, Évremond offered him a gentler mount, “he thanked me a thousand times; and was so touched by my courtesy that, forgetting all the considerations of his profession, he spoke to me less as a guarded Jesuit than as a free and sincere man” (681).
The priest could only be honest – in both the libertine and general sense – when speaking as the man and not, following Montaigne’s notion developed in previous Thoughts, the magistrate. In our last Thought, we saw Évremond argue that the major motivation for the pious to be pious was not to be devoted to God as such but to be part of a human community devoted to God. As important as communion with the Author of Nature was, human friendship was the key relationship and, ultimately, virtue. It should come as no surprise then that he would explain the Jesuit versus Jansenist conflict as a struggle within and between human communities. The key vice was interpersonal jealousy. The goal was the social status gained by “the credit for saving” people.
One word likely stuck out for you, my keen reader, “indulgence.” Évremond and our burlesque Dassoucy highlighted its importance for a flawed and inconsistent humanity. They generally used it to oppose the critical, severe and harsh positions of folks who put justice and ancient poetry on pedestals. The reaction to Jansenism followed this line.
“Jansenists wanting to make saints of all men, do not find ten in a realm to make Christians of the type they want. Christianity is divine, but it is men who receive it; and whatever one does, it is necessary to accommodate it to humanity” (“Conversation de M. d’Aubigny avec M. de Saint-Évremond” 684).
However, just as it would be a mistake to picture libidinous orgies when imagining the pleasures libertines like Évremond and Méré extolled, indulgence did not entail complete permissiveness. Not that libidinous orgies were necessarily out of the question, you understand, they were simply far more trouble than they were worth in the vast majority of times and places. The trick, as previously noted, was to have good, which is to say delicate, judgment regarding what was agreeable in a given context.
“I want a just and delicate discernment to make them understand the veritable difference between things; that they distinguish the effect of a passion and the execution of a plan; that they distinguish vice from crime, pleasures from vice; that they excuse our weaknesses and condemn our disorders; that they do not confound light appetites, simple and natural, with cruel and perverse inclination. I want, in a word, a Christian moral, neither austere nor lax” (684-5).
In our last Thought, the focus was on how Aristotle’s ambitions coloured what he saw as just. He aspired for something more godlike for humanity. Despite recognizing the importance of informal connections, he favoured the city and the magistrate over the man. Instead of adapting his model to human weakness, he sought to “fix” that weakness. In the religious domain, Jansenists had the same tendency.
The Jesuits as Évremond painted them were no less ambitious. Only, rather than pushing humanity to be better than it was and likely could be, they exploited that weakness for their own ends. They were the populists of the period, even if the relevant population was limited to princes and the pope. This was the forest people like Pascal, who had “great enlightenment, a fair amount of good faith, often too much fire, and sometimes a bit of animosity,” missed for the polemical trees. (“Conversation de M. d’Aubigny avec M. de Saint-Évremond” 683) And just think of all the trees cut down to print off Pascal and company’s 450-odd pages of rejoinders versus Évremond’s nine.
Let us not make a molehill out of Pascal’s mountain of paper or set up yet another dichotomy. Conveniently, Les Provinciales included an anonymous reaction to the first letter (out of seventeen) in its very pages written by none other than Évremond’s exemplar of honesty, Mlle. de Scudéry. Despite the overabundance of theological minutiae, the work was to a certain extent light and profound in the sense we have come to understand the expression in these Thoughts.
“I am more in debt to you than you can imagine for the letter you sent me; it is absolutely ingenious and absolutely well written. It narrates without narrating; it sheds light on the most confused affairs of the world; it finely mocks; it informs even those who do not know these sorts of things well, it increases the pleasure of those who do understand them. It is still an excellent apology and, if one likes, a delicate and innocent condemnation. And finally there is so much art, so much intelligence and so much judgment in this letter, that I would very much like to know who wrote it, etc.” (606).
Relative to our last Thought and Pascal’s theological focus, the main takeaway is how political Évremond’s take was. As we might recall, he did “not find that sciences touch honest people in particular, excepting morality, politics and an understanding of belles-lettres” (“Jugement sur les sciences, où peut s’appliquer un honnête homme” 663). Politics was a core competency for libertines and, unlike how Aristotle saw the world, different from though overlapping with morality. Justice was “a virtue established to maintain human society,” so both political and moral, while friendship was a “work of Nature,” so purely moral (“Sur l’amitié, à Mme. la Duchesse Mazarin” 725).
Human flourishing was aided by the sort of societal development that allowed people to perfect their “just and delicate discernment.” Libertines did not tend to dream of an anarchic friend-in in the midst of an idyllic state of nature. Nature was the starting point, but needed refinement through reflection, experience, education and so on. It was also the end point, insofar as we are on the whole incapable of moving beyond our condition; becoming saints or godlike. That was why the natural inclination toward a pleasant sort of pleasure remained the goal regardless of how complex society might become and, frankly, regardless of how much that society actually helped to refine our judgment. So, it only made good sense to view the Society of Jesus as a (human) society, jealousies and all.
Where does that leave us? A good person does good deeds. Christianity is the good cause of good people. But good people are not severe, nor do they exploit the weakness of others. Therefore the priests who instigated and perpetuated the Jansenist versus Jesuit conflict in the name of Christianity were bad (read: less-than-honest) people. A simplistic summation of the libertine position, to be sure, but sufficiently representative for our purposes. Everything Pascal and others wrote about textual inaccuracies may have been true. In the end, men of the cloth were men under that cloth, and the cloth, for all the grace of God, was but a symbol of all-too-human status.
The dangers of the position for the establishment may not jump out, so let us end with an example. Évremond argued that, because of people’s intellectual weakness, they were more inclined to form religious extravagences and absurdities than they were to discover truths. As a result, they would likely worship false idols instead of the true God. Pierre Bayle, while upholding his Christian faith, took the next logical step and was (for this and other reasons) stuck in exile from France. If, not because Christianity was wrong but because humanity was flawed, we risked the unpardonable of honouring the devil, we would be better off to not practice at all.
“And on that note permit me to tell you a thought that comes to mind. It is that apparently the devil finds better what suits him in idolatry than in atheism; from which it must follow that he employs his artifices rather for pushing men into idolatry than for throwing them into atheism. The reason for this conduct is, in my opinion, the following; it is that atheists do not give the devil his due, neither directly nor indirectly, and even deny his existence, while he has his part from adorations given to false gods, that the Holy Book declares in various places, that sacrifices offered to false gods are offered to devils” (942).
To be continued? Now we have caught a glimpse of the honest Mlle. de Scudéry, it would be a shame to leave things there.
I would like to thank Olga Mladenova, whose insights have allowed me to add Babel to my babbling and Sigi (Krzhizhanovsky) to my scribbling.
All translations from French by the author.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross, 1925.
Babel, Isaac. “Guédali.” Œuvres complètes. Trans. Sophie Benech, Ed. Sophie Benech and Igor Soukhikh, Le Bruit du Temps, 2011.
Bayle, Pierre. Pensées diverses sur la comète. Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Deshoulières, Antoinette. Réflexions Diverses. Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Gombaud, Antoine, Chevalier de Méré. Seconde Conversation. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Charles-H. Boudhors, Fernand Roche, 1930.
Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Charles, Lord of Saint-Évremond. “À M. le maréchal de Créqui.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Conversation du maréchal d’Hoquincourt.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Conversation de M. d’Aubigny avec M. de Saint-Évremond.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Jugement sur les sciences, où peut s’appliquer un honnête homme.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Lettre à M. Justel.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Lettre à M.***.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “L’Intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait corrompues.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “L’homme qui veut connaître toutes choses ne se connaît pas lui-même. À M.***.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Sur l’amitié, à Mme. la Duchesse Mazarin.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Pascal, Blaise, and Michel Le Guern. Les Provinciales. Œuvres Complètes. V. 1, Gallimard, 1998.