The Other Pascals: The Philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer

The Other Pascals

JOHN J. CONLEY, S.J.

The Other Pascals

The Philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal,

Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Conley, John J., author.

Title: The other Pascals : the philosophy of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Pâerier, and Marguerite Pâerier / John J. Conley, S.J.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019002211 (print) | LCCN 2019008438 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105150 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105167 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105136 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105138 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Pascal, Jacqueline, 1625–1661. | Perier, Madame (Gilberte), 1620–1685 or 1687. | Pâerier, Marguerite, 1646–1733. | Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354–430—Influence. | Philosophy, French—17th century. | Philosophy, French—18th century.

Classification: LCC BX4735.P3 (ebook) | LCC BX4735.P3 C66 2019 (print) | DDC 230/.20922—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002211

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

Dedicated to Stephen J. Smith, Pascalian friend

CONTENTS

Preface

Abbreviations

ONE Introduction: A Familial Philosophy

TWO Jacqueline Pascal: Virtue and Conscience

THREE Gilberte Pascal Périer: Philosophical Portraiture

FOUR Marguerite Périer: Creed and Resistance

FIVE Conclusion: Canon and Gender

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Letters by Jacqueline Pascal

Appendix B: Life of Jacqueline Pascal by Gilberte Pascal Périer

Appendix C: Profession of Faith by Marguerite Périer

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Whenever I return to Paris for a period of research, I make a pilgrimage to the city’s necklace of Jansenist churches. These are Left-Bank parishes that sympathized with the Jansenist movement at its birth in the seventeenth century. Still active, the parishes retain traces of Jansenism and of one of the movement’s most prominent families, the Pascals. Austere in its simplicity, the neoclassical Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas nestles on the commercial Rue Saint-Jacques between the old convent of Port-Royal (now Hôpital Cochin) to the south and the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, the world’s preeminent collection of Jansenist books and manuscripts, to its north. The prominence of the pulpit, the transparency of the sanctuary, and the sobriety of the decoration sum up the Jansenist ideal of public worship. Abutting a bustling market street, Saint-Médard contains one of the world’s most infamous cemeteries. It was here in the early eighteenth century that riots broke out as Jansenist convulsionnaires claimed miraculous healings as they leapt into ecstatic dances. Marguerite Périer, the niece of Blaise Pascal, became an ardent advocate of the graveyard’s controversial enthusiasts. The Gothic parish church of the Latin Quarter Saint-Séverin has long served as the center for liturgical experimentation for French Catholicism. With their plea for greater use of the vernacular and greater lay participation in the liturgy, the ancient Jansenist members of the parish would feel at home. Adjacent to the Sorbonne, the flamboyant Gothic church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont stands as a shrine for disciples of Pascal. Blaise Pascal died in the territory of the parish; his sister Gilberte and her children worshiped here. I occasionally celebrate Mass at the Lady Chapel in the back of the church. Blaise Pascal, his sister Gilberte, and his nephew Blaise are buried here, next to the pillars of the chapel.

In writing this monograph, I have incurred many debts. I thank the staffs of the libraries where I conducted much of this research: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, and the Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins University. I thank Loyola University Maryland for the research support offered through the Henry J. Knott Chair of Philosophy and Theology, which I currently occupy, and for the sabbatical in Paris I enjoyed in 2015–16. I also thank the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland. Several professional societies have permitted me to present papers on this topic and receive valuable criticism: Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, the Renaissance Society of America, and the American Catholic Historical Association. I am indebted to the criticism offered by fellow scholars on earlier drafts of the book’s chapters: Catharine Randall of Dartmouth College; Rev. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., of Fordham University; and Sharon Nell of Saint Edward’s University.

I also owe a special debt to scholars who have preceded me in editing and promoting the works of the women in the Pascal family. Victor Cousin’s Jacqueline Pascal (1845) introduced nineteenth-century readers to the remarkable life and texts of Blaise’s sister in the convent of Port-Royal. This work on Jacqueline was only one of many volumes where the president of the Sorbonne, a prominent philosopher himself, celebrated the writings of philosophical seventeenth-century women authors. M. P. Faugère provided us with the first edition (1845) of the works of three women in the Pascal family: Jacqueline, her sister Gilberte, and her niece Marguerite. The Faugère archives at the Bibliothèque Mazarine helped to clarify some of his editorial choices. His edition, Letters, Opuscula, and Memoirs of Madame Périer and of Jacqueline Pascal, Sisters of Pascal, and of Marguerite Périer, His Niece, is now happily available online at the Gallica section of the Bibliothèque nationale de France website. Jean Mesnard’s multivolume edition of the writings of the Pascal family (1964–92) provides us with definitive critical editions of the major writings of the three Pascal/Périer women.

The years of research on this book have involved more than translation, historical research, and critical analysis. They have constituted a spiritual odyssey. They have permitted me to glimpse a Catholicism where questions of grace, salvation, damnation, predestination, and election are taken with the utmost seriousness—quite different from the bland moralism that has become the lot of much of Catholicism in the contemporary United States. The struggle of these women against abuses of authority by church and state has underscored the heart of intellectual freedom—the power to assent or dissent from claims of truth being forced upon us. Their writings have also manifested a properly theological side to the struggle to respect the dignity of women. This involves the right to elect one’s superiors, to construct one’s rule of life, to study the scriptures and patristic texts, and to say yea or nay in the religious controversies of the day.

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A Familial Philosophy

A recent Internet search indicates the problem. The OCLC World Catalogue cites 8,470 entries for Blaise Pascal, but only 148 for his sister Jacqueline Pascal, 35 for his sister Gilberte Pascal Périer, and 5 for his niece Marguerite Périer. A similar imbalance appears in the MLA Bibliography: 1,445 entries for Blaise, 9 for Jacqueline, 6 for Gilberte, and none for Marguerite. The gap in philosophical commentaries is even more striking. In the Philosopher’s Index, Blaise receives 179 citations; Jacqueline, 4; Gilberte and Marguerite, none. Although there is renewed scholarly interest in the lives of Gilberte and Jacqueline Pascal, a truly philosophical study of their works has yet to be written.

Many studies of Blaise Pascal have noted the complex influence of Jacqueline and Gilberte Pascal on their mercurial brother, Blaise.¹ But this influence is usually seen as more emotive and religious than intellectual in nature. In this close-knit familial trio, Jacqueline and Gilberte often emerge as the caregivers, nurses, secretaries, disciples, memorialists, and sparring partners of Blaise. Inevitably, Gilberte’s biography of Blaise is included in any edition of Blaise’s collected works. Jacqueline is repeatedly cited as a witness to Blaise’s transformative night of fire on November 23, 1654, and to his oscillations in religious fervor. The distinctive thought of each woman, however, is usually neglected. The sisters and niece of Blaise have survived in the history of philosophy as adjuncts to a philosophical genius, but they are rarely accorded the status of philosophers themselves.

The thesis of this book is a simple one: Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer each developed a distinctive variant of the neo-Augustinian philosophy that functioned as their family’s intellectual creed. This familial Augustinian culture already existed in the person of Étienne Pascal, their father. After the family’s encounter with Jansenist emissaries in 1646, it turned into the militant Augustinianism, preoccupied with the question of grace, which characterized the Jansenist circle. The family’s women authors developed sensibly different versions of this Augustinian heritage. Jacqueline’s mystical theology, with its acute apophatic sense of God’s alterity, contrasts with Gilberte’s sober, pragmatic approach. Gilberte’s Augustinianism, which downplays the conflicts within and without the Port-Royal circle, contrasts with her daughter Marguerite’s accounts of the Pascal family, which highlights the conflicts as opportunities for the exercise of heroic virtue on behalf of the Augustinian theory of grace. Each has philosophical concerns independent of the thought of their brother. Both Jacqueline and Gilberte sketch their own Augustinian philosophy of education. Marguerite’s ecclesiology, with its insistence on ecclesiastical fallibility even in matters of faith and morals, reflects the preoccupations of a later Jansenist generation. All three express gendered concerns about the rights of women to receive a serious theological education in the Augustinian mode and to make conscientious judgments in the ecclesiastical and political disputes of the age.

In drawing forth the unique philosophical voice of each of these women of the Pascal family, it would be tempting to construct a metaphysical version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Blaise would be pushed firmly into the background, while Jacqueline, Gilberte, and Marguerite would be thrust forward to the stage apron. But the simple fact is that the writings of these women have made an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of Blaise’s life, to the development of his theories, and to the genesis of his key scientific and philosophical texts. In the case of Gilberte and Marguerite Périer, their portraits of Blaise probably remain their principal philosophical achievement. Nonetheless, their reflections on the family genius, Blaise, are not their sole philosophical contribution, and even in their adoring narratives of Blaise, their divergent philosophical temperaments and convictions appear. Devoted students of the neo-Augustinian canon, Jacqueline, Gilberte, and Marguerite make their own original contribution to the perennial Augustinian enigmas of freedom and determinism, grace and merit, authority and conscience. And they attack these conundrums precisely as women who refuse to accept deference and obedience as their lot.

FAMILIAL PHILOSOPHY

As the following chapters will argue, each of the Pascal children developed a personal Augustinian philosophy shaped by the concerns and convictions of the Jansenist movement, centered at the convent of Port-Royal. But the first and enduring philosophical influence on the children emanated from their father, Étienne Pascal (1588–1651).² In particular, his decision to homeschool his three children provided them with a scientific and philosophical orientation that would durably mark their later writings.

Born in Clermont on May 2, 1588, Étienne Pascal was the son of Martin Pascal, the treasurer of France, and Marguerite Pascal de Mons. A member of the noblesse de robe, an affluent social class of lawyers, he would occupy a series of prominent political offices and remain closely involved in the affairs of the French court, as his ancestors had done. In 1610 he completed his law degree from the University of Paris and returned to his native Auvergne, where he purchased the office of counselor for Bas-Auvergne. (Such outright purchase of political offices was not unusual in France at that time.) From an early age, he combined his legal and political activities with a passion for scientific and mathematical research. This passion he pursued in the informal scientific academies of Clermont and Paris.

In 1616, Étienne Pascal married Antoinette Begon. Three of their children survived into adulthood: Gilberte (b. 1620), Blaise (b. 1623), and Jacqueline (b. 1625). In 1625 he became the president of the Cour des Aides, a tax court located in Clermont. After the death of his wife in 1626, Étienne made the unusual decision to educate personally all three of his children. For a man of his wealth and social status, the obvious choice would have been to send the children to boarding schools run by the appropriate religious orders or to hire tutors to teach the children at home. Some commentators have ascribed this pedagogical decision to concern for Blaise’s sickly condition. A more plausible explanation is Étienne’s desire to cultivate personally the genius he already recognized in all three of this precocious children and the desire to remain physically close to the children, who, like their father, were plunged into mourning after the untimely death of a beloved mother.

Even when it is intellectually rigorous, homeschooling often results in the social isolation of the pupils concerned. Such was not the case in the Pascal household. After Étienne moved to Paris in 1631, he introduced his son to the scientific circle of Père Mersenne. Astonished by Blaise’s mathematic genius, the fellowship members encouraged him on the research that led to the publication of his first major work, Essay on Conical Sections, in 1640. The family’s court connections introduced daughter Jacqueline to Queen Anne of Austria and her entourage, leading to the publication of her book of poems in 1637. During the period of residence at Rouen (1640–50), where Étienne acted as the chief superintendent of taxation in Normandy, she participated in the family salon, visited by many of the province’s eminent literary and scientific figures. The dramatist Pierre Corneille personally encouraged her poetic development.

The curriculum of this home education reflected the interests of Étienne: classical languages, poetry, and above all science and mathematics. His participation in Mersenne’s academy earned the respect of its most distinguished members. In 1635 Mersenne dedicated his Treatise on Organs to Étienne Pascal in order to witness to posterity the esteem I have for your great erudition in every branch of mathematics.³ Gilles de Roberval supported his position in the salon debate over the nature of gravity. In 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote his Solution of a Problem Proposed by Monsieur Pascal. Étienne Pascal is still celebrated in the history of mathematics for his discovery of a geometrical curve popularly known as the Limaçon of Pascal.

Étienne Pascal gained broad public recognition as a scientist in 1634 in a dispute with Jean-Baptiste Morin, who had proposed a solution to the vexed question of how to determine longitudes. Since the question had clear political and economic consequences, inasmuch as the determination of longitudes helped to establish national and imperial borders, the French government took a particular interest in the issue. It offered a substantial financial prize for a convincing solution. Prime Minister Cardinal Richelieu established a five-man commission to evaluate Morin’s proposed solution. A commission member, Pascal vehemently criticized Morin’s methodology: Monsieur Morin commits a vicious circle. He wants to correct the [longitudinal] tables by the methods he proposes but he had previously founded these very methods on the truth of these tables.⁴ The controversy between Pascal and an enraged Morin lingered until 1647.

As Blaise matured, Étienne become his son’s advocate in Blaise’s youthful scientific controversies. He defended his son’s position in the controversy over the existence of the vacuum. While Blaise insisted that vacuums could and did exist, neo-Aristotelian philosophers argued that it was an impossibility since nature abhors a vacuum. When the Jesuit Père Noël attacked Blaise’s theory in 1648, Étienne denounced the polemical rhetoric used by Noël: You have used a style of writing so obviously unjust that it is not only your enemies who disapprove of it. They want to wean you away bit by bit from a style that is offensive on every count. It will cause countless problems for you.⁵

The philosophical loyalties of Étienne Pascal also appear during these years of homeschooling. Against Descartes’s criticisms, he praised Fermat’s work De maximis et minimis. During salon debates he criticized Descartes’s Discourse on Method as containing a series of unconvincing proofs.

Certain Augustinian traits also appear in his beliefs. He criticized the efforts of Cartesians and Thomists to provide philosophical proofs for God’s existence, God’s attributes, and the immortality of the soul. The affirmation of basic Christian truths concerning God and the soul’s destiny, he averred, can only be grasped through faith and submission to God’s revelation. In his memoirs, Père Beurrier recalls Blaise Pascal’s impressions of the split between faith and reason in his father’s philosophy: He [Étienne Pascal] gave him [Blaise Pascal] the maxim that everything which is an object of faith should not be submitted to the judgment of natural reason because it was far above it.⁶ This fideist suspicion of rationalist theology would durably mark the philosophy of religion embraced by his children.

A certain Augustinianism also appears in Étienne’s instinctive animus toward the Society of Jesus. He persistently opposed the construction of a Jesuit college in Clermont. The fundamental project of Jesuit humanism, the construction of a Catholic theology on the certitudes of neo-Aristotelian philosophy—which in turn reflects a world in which grace builds on a weakened but not totally corrupt nature—contradicted Pascal’s vision of science and religion as two radically separate spheres of human knowledge. This strict separation between faith and empirical science would go on to influence his children’s epistemology, but in the later stages of Jansenist fervor, Blaise and Gilberte ultimately dismissed scientific research as only another expression of human vanity.

Étienne’s tutelage of his children did not end with the passage of their childhood. After his fall on the ice in Rouen in 1646, he acquired the services of the Deschamps brothers, lay doctors who were disciples of Saint-Cyran, the propagator of Jansenist doctrine in France. Quickly adopting the Jansenist creed, Étienne introduced Blaise and Jacqueline to this radical version of Augustinianism, with its emphasis on human depravity, denial of natural virtue, predestination, and the omnipotent efficacy of God’s grace. Gilberte and her new husband, Florin, joined the Jansenist circle shortly thereafter. The original outburst of spiritual enthusiasm was soon followed by careful study of Augustinian works: Augustine himself (especially Confessions and City of God), Bernard of Clairvaux, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, Saint-Cyran, and Jansen himself. This apprenticeship into radical Augustinian philosophy and theology was complemented by personal acquaintance and correspondence with leading thinkers of the Jansenist movement, notably Arnauld and Nicole. In the subsequent writings of the children and grandchildren, these authors regularly reappear as part of the Augustinian culture Étienne Pascal provided to his descendants. The exacting efforts of Gilberte to provide a strictly Jansenist education for her children indicate the depth of the Augustinian convictions she had developed during her years with her father.

Each descendant appropriated this Augustinian culture in different ways. Gilberte, Blaise, and Jacqueline supported each other in the defense of Augustinian theology and in the pursuit of Jansenist asceticism, but the support was not uncritical. During the crisis of the dowry, Blaise and Gilberte opposed Jacqueline’s entry into the Port-Royal convent, especially her plan to use the entirety of her inheritance as a dowry for the convent. Gilberte is clearly irritated by the moral criticisms her siblings made of her worldly interest in social position; her celibate brother and sister could not understand the duties of the state of life of a provincial aristocrat who is the mother of six and expected to assume a number of voluntary charitable offices.

It is customary—although this is strongly contested by contemporary psychologists—to argue that birth order helps determine the role of each member of the family.⁷ According to this schema, the eldest child is the high achiever, more conservative, and more dutiful in preserving the parent’s beliefs and traditions. The middle child becomes the mediator between the older and the younger. Somewhat crushed by the older child’s temporal advantage, the middle child is freer to construct a less conventional identity. Often doted on because there are no further infants to attract the family’s attention, the youngest child is the family charmer, gifted in verbal skills but rarely fond of hard work. Such a schema has limited applicability to the Pascal trio. Gilberte is very much devoted to preserving the family’s memory and reputation. Her work as the family chronicler and archivist represents a stereotypical work by an eldest child. She managed to pass on this familial task to Marguerite, not her eldest child but by far the longest-surviving of her children. Jacqueline did manage to charm Cardinal Richelieu in her teen years, but there was little charm in the militant defense of her vocational freedom and in her adamant opposition to compromise in the controversies over Jansenism. No one would claim that prickly Blaise was a mediator; diplomacy was foreign to him.

From a philosophical perspective, the important differences involve the distinct versions of Augustinian thought developed by each descendant of Étienne. For Jacqueline, Augustinianism involves a mysticism focused on the cross and divine unknowability. It welcomes violent conflict in the defense of religious truth and personal freedom. For Gilberte, Augustinianism is simply a perfectly orthodox Catholic movement. Her pragmatic account diminishes any trace of conflict within the movement itself or with the broader Church. Differing from her mother, Marguerite emphasizes such conflicts and places them in an apocalyptic framework, where miracles and omens are an everyday occurrence. The play of neo-Augustinian ideas is sensibly different in the works and perspectives of the three Pascal women.

One feature of my approach might surprise the reader. I have not followed a strict chronology in the ordering of the chapters. The youngest daughter, Jacqueline (chapter 2), is presented before the eldest, Gilberte (chapter 3). This choice was due to the literary history of each author. Gilberte, who died in 1687, only began to compose her major works in 1662, after the deaths of her siblings. By the time she died in 1661, Jacqueline had written a substantial corpus of works. It was the date of the works of the author, rather than the age of the author, that has determined the chapter order.

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CLASS

The writings of Jacqueline Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, and Marguerite Périer reflect the particular social class to which they belonged. The noblesse de robe in seventeenth-century France was a class of lawyers, often prominent as judges, parliamentarians, and high civil servants in French administration. Although some members of this class belonged to ancient aristocratic families, others, like Étienne Pascal, issued from more bourgeois backgrounds. The borders of this class were porous. Political offices could be bought or sold, as Étienne did several times during his lifetime. In the rank-conscious society of the time, members of the class carefully evaluated the particular degree of nobility and types of privileges a new office and title might confer. When Gilberte and her husband, Florin Périer, acquired new aristocratic titles when they purchased the chateau and estate of Bien-Assis at Clermont, Gilberte cherished the new privilege of being addressed as Dame.

The noblesse de robe privileged a particular type of culture. The lawyers received a thorough training in the humanities, in which instruction in Latin held pride of place, as a prelude to more technical legal education. The mastery of rhetoric in both written documents and public addresses was prized. The Pascal-Périer women show numerous traits of this legal culture in their writings. Conscientious lawyers, they carefully conserve documents that can buttress the case they wish to make. Their arguments often involve refutations of the claims made by the adversaries of Jansenism. When Gilberte attempted to refute the charge that her brother had abandoned Jansenism on his deathbed, she calls witnesses to her defense. When Jacqueline explained her objections to signing the controversial formulary concerning Jansen, she analyzes the contradictions and dangerous implications of the opposing argument that the document should be signed without reservation. When Marguerite defends her refusal to submit to the terms of the anti-Jansenist papal document Unigenitus, she carefully cites canonical precedents in support of her conscientious refusal. There texts are suffused with the clamor of prosecution and defense trying to win a case.

In his celebrated study of Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, Lucien Goldmann argued that the bleakness and determinism of Jansenist theology springs from the declining fortunes of the social class, the noblesse de robe, to which so many prominent Jansenist families belonged.⁸ According to this theory, the lawyers of France had seen their ancient freedoms and privileges reduced by the growing absolutism of the French monarchy. When they constructed their theology and metaphysics, this disoriented group naturally tended to find that God was hidden, that the pursuit of virtue did not guarantee happiness, and that human freedom seemed to have little control over a hostile world governed by an inscrutable providence. This neo-Marxist thesis is unconvincing. Goldmann’s critics quickly countered that there was no evidence that the noblesse de robe was declining either in wealth or influence as a social class; on the contrary, the parliamentarian wing of this class seemed to grow in power with the passage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critics also pointed out that the Society of Jesus, staunch opponent of the Jansenists and herald of a more optimistic gospel, also recruited disproportionately from the noblesse de robe. It is hardly surprising that a religious order and a religious movement ardently devoted to the apostolate of education would draw members from one of the nation’s most highly educated social classes. Nonetheless, Goldman’s overstated thesis does suggest how the concerns of a particular class permeate the arguments of Jansenist authors, including the three women who are my subject herein. The famous pessimism of Jansenist philosophy may well derive from the fact that Jacqueline, Gilberte, and Marguerite, like their other coreligionists, were well aware that their carefully constructed case on behalf of neo-Augustinian doctrine was losing in the court of political and ecclesiastical opinion. Their best efforts could not make it succeed.

AUGUSTINIAN PHILOSOPHY

An obvious question arises when studying the thought of these authors: Why treat them as philosophers at all? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to treat them as religious thinkers or even theologians? None of them received a formal philosophical education. None attended a university or a seminary; none even had a tutor recognized for philosophical competence.

On several grounds these authors can be considered properly philosophical. First, they are conversant with a particular philosophical canon: the Augustinian in its distinctive Jansenist version. All three have studied works by St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Jansen, Saint-Cyran, Arnauld, Nicole, and, of course, their brother or uncle, Blaise Pascal. This canon is more than a library to be perused. Their familial contacts gave them a living Augustinian culture of unusual quality. Their conversations with Blaise, the sermons and conferences heard at Port-Royal, and the correspondence with Arnauld and Nicole plunged the three women into the world of Jansenist thought.

Second, the Pascal-Périer women are not simply astute readers and listeners of Augustinian argument; they develop their own thought on typical philosophical topics. Jacqueline has long been acclaimed for her educational philosophy, embodied primarily in her Rule for Children. Gilberte raises similar educational concerns in a series of letters. Jacqueline devotes