Les Provinciales (review)

Despite the appearance of Michel Le Guern’s excellent paperback edition of 1987 (see French Studies, 42 (1988), 470–71), and in the continued absence of the long-promised volume by Jean Mesnard in his projected complete works of Pascal, Louis Cognet’s 1983 text of the Lettres provinciales remains the most comprehensive presentation of the petites lettres available. It is therefore a welcome initiative by Classiques Garnier to invite Gérard Ferreyrolles to bring the critical apparatus up to date, in the light of the considerable amount of work that has appeared in the interim, not least that occasioned by the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary colloquia in 2006–07, and their associated publications. Ferreyrolles’s discreet and judicious amendments consist principally of the addition of more recent scholarly material to both footnotes and bibliography, and of the necessary adaptation of the original prefatory exposition to reflect these as appropriate. The text used is that of the 1659 edition, the last to appear in Pascal’s lifetime, to which earlier variants have been repositioned so as to be placed at the foot of the pages to which they refer (rather than being grouped in an appendix). The additional contemporary texts included by Cognet (the Lettre d’un avocat au Parlement; the Factum pour les curés de Paris; the second, fifth, and sixth Écrits des curés; the Projet de mandement; and the Avertissement sur les dix-huit lettres, attributed to Nicole) all remain unchanged. What is thereby afforded is a useful single-volume polemic-centred alternative to the (in other respects equally attractive) Pochothèque volume, in which the Provinciales figure alongside the Pensées and many of the most important of Pascal’s other writings, edited by the same scholar in collaboration with Philippe Sellier.